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Nekochan: The new quest is broken. I can’t get the key to work on the thing.
No Moshing: Oh, okay. I can check on that. Do you mind re-playing the quest again, or do you want me to skip you ahead to where you don’t need the key anymore?
Nekochan: Is it okay to skip ahead?
No Moshing: It’s 11PM on Christmas Eve. What could possibly go wrong with the one little room?
Version December_3:
List of Changes:
-“Harem” Menu option re-enabled, but is probably buggy somehow. You have been warned.
-Westcastle Outer District has been re-designed to be less total shit and have a bunch of semi-interesting stuff to see.
-There is a new Adventurer’s Guild quest guest starring Gargan in Westcastle. Go check it out.
-Once you reach 15 Fame, you will now be invited to become a Journeyman of the Adventurer’s Guild! You even get another little party and everything!
-There have been some small bug fixes, but not nearly as much as I’d like there to be.
-Merry Christmas and happy fapping from me and the entire Harem Collector team!
Edit: Fixed the most pressing bugs and uploaded a new version. The opening, the Christmas present code, and new quest should all work properly now. Also, I only uploaded it to Zippyshare because I don’t have enough time to upload it three times.
Okay, time to catch up on giving you behind-the-scenes information and what inspired the various characters and elements in Harem Collector. Check out Part I over here.
Oh, and beware of spoilers!
Chimei: I knew from the get-go that I wanted some kind of druid or shaman or other nature-magic-user in the game, and knew I wanted a semi-optional character available to purchase in the slave market. Putting the two together was easy enough but the character lacked any personality or gimmick. I forget when I decided to have everything she says in Japanese, but I like the joke and it gave me something to focus on and build her personality around.
By the way, I am not even remotely fluent in Japanese. Her dialogue is mostly courtesy of TV Tropes’ Stock Japanese Phrases and Google.
Felix: He began life as a band-aid. Free magic healing because too many people were complaining about the game’s difficulty. However, once I made him the idea of having a Sancho Panza-style foil for the main character, being a straight man to the hero’s frequent bizarre behaviour, just seemed to work. There was a niche that needed filling in the game and Felix just happened to fall into place there. I think that’s why he’s become such an unexpectedly popular character.
Florine: Florine is based largely off of Ran from Edelweiss. Plus, I though the idea of a gold-digging slave who willingly accepts the collar in exchange for a life of relative luxury was a funny concept, and went with it. I would like to say more, but I don’t want to spoil things that aren’t actually in the game yet, but let’s just say that Flroine plays a bigger role in the game than I think most people expect. Her name is a slightly more feminine sounding version of florin, the gold coinage used by the city of Florence, Italy in the medieval era.
Gargan and Raina: When I created the Adventurer’s Guild, I wanted it to feel important to the hero and his story and not just a place where you grabbed the occasional quest. Raina and her family, I think, does that. Raina is a fairly basic girl next door type, lorded over by a father who disapproves of the hero. Raina dates a bunch of other guys, but in her heart of hearts she would prefer to be with the hero. While Xaven (Raina’s dad) simply disapproved of the hero’s selfishness and womanizing, Gargan’s rivalry with the hero is a little more personal. Initially it seemed kinda empty and lacked emotional resonance, but then I made the extended introduction and had Gargan steal all the hero’s stuff. That seemed to do the trick.
By the way, in this month’s update Gargan joins the party as a temporary member for one quest, and his fighting style was inspired by the freeflow combat in the Batman: Arkham whatever series.
Ino: Like Chimei and Raina, Ino was initially created because I had a function in the game that need filling- that of an enchantress to apply magic upgrades to weapons. I had it in my head for awhile to have the hero “adopt” a girl in the hopes of making her fall in love with him by the time she’s 18, and I also wanted to show some of Felix’s classmates who did not have his talent for magic or adventurous spirit. From this tangle of separate ideas, Ino was born.
Her recruitment quest was initially going to be a homage to Lilka’s introduction in Wild Arms 2, where Ino would be sent to a magical maze as part of her exam, and cheat by teleporting the hero in with her. They would then explore the dungeon together, with the hero being the only competent character and Ino being level 1, having only Magic Missile and starting with half her Mana gone. Because I was lazy, though, I made the current version of her recruitment quest- which I think ultimately works better and offers a different sort of experience. I might bring back the Ino dungeon crawl dealie for her Love quest, though.
Penelope: When you’re making games with large casts, you have to sort of expect that you’re not going to knock it out the park every time. In terms of Sengoku Rance, for every Kenshin, Isoroku or <3Senhime<3, you’re going to have a character like Yuzuhara Yuzumi or Okita Nozomi, who are perfectly serviceable characters but aren’t exactly exciting or interesting. Penelope was made with that in mind, with my goal being a likeable-but-ordinary character without making her completely bland.
Serade: Serade has had a fairly interesting development from my perspective. She was always intended to be a MILF-type older character, but initially I intended to have the hero basically kidnap her from her family and enslave her by force. Most people seemed to not like that, so I altered her character so she’s been abandoned by her ex-husband and is having to raise two kids by herself in a mercilessly capitalist society, and is thus open to the idea of being the hero’s fuck toy, but also being financially taken care of for the rest of her life.
One of her boys is into SpinBattlers, an in-universe parody of Beyblade. Originally, that kid was going to introduce the hero to a minigame that would let you challenge people the world over to games of SpinBattlers for cash and items. I couldn’t get the minigame to work, however, and it probably wouldn’t have been very fun anyway.
Dark Seeds: As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’m a fan of Lost Odyssey, and I’m also a fan of Illusion of Gaia. I wanted a collection-type sidequest in Harem Collector, similar to the Seeds from the former game and the Red Jewels from the latter, and mashed the two ideas together to come up with the whole Dark Seed thing. The Dark Seed buyer in the Slums is my take on Gem the Jeweler. By the way, the Dark Seeds in Harem Collector have nothing to do with the Dark Seed PC game from back in the day… or do they?
No Caves Allowed: Have you ever noticed how many RPG Maker hentai games open up with a cave dungeon? Harem, Invasion D, Overwhored… don’t get me wrong, I like all those games, but I don’t see what makes caves so interesting you want to open up with one. So I made it sort of a personal challenge to delay putting caves in Harem Collector as long as possible. I lost that battle back in August, but that’s why the the first quest takes place in the back rooms of a bar.
I also like pushing myself to make every dungeon memorable. I don’t think I’ve repeated myself (correct me if I’m wrong) and I’m going to continue trying to make dungeons unique experiences throughout Harem Collector.
Orcs: The biology of the Orcish race is another mash-up of concepts from different video games, in this case the fungal nature of orks from Warhammer 40k and the Asari race from Mass Effect. I’m a pretty big fan of Mass Effect, actually, as evidenced by one of the bonus satisfaction items. When the hero mocks the orc raiders for their “we were a beautiful people” thing, that’s actually a reference to one of the goofier lines that Batarian multiplayer characters spout in Mass Effect 3 multiplayer.
The Giant’s Path: Speaking of dungeons, The Giant’s Path was inspired by Mt. Kolts from Final Fantasy 3/J6. That was the earliest dungeon in an RPG I can remember that really made an impression on me, especially since previous to that the only RPGs I had ever played were Final Fantasy 1, Final Fantasy 2/J4, and Dragon Warrior, where 90% of the dungeons between those three games are caves. Mt. Kolts had absolutely breathtaking art, and really struck home to me just what a “dungeon” in a game could be.
Well, that’s all for now folks. I have a lot of work to do to get ready for next week’s release, so I’d better get back to it.
There is a really awesome article on the Escapist on why game developers should respect their fans. I really enjoyed it and felt pretty good because it vindicates my own philosophy, so I decided to share it with all you guys. Enjoy.
I’ve repeatedly run into a problem with the RPG Maker engine that is causing me to rethink part of Harem Collector’s design and balance. It might result in me changing the way that buffs work entirely.
RPG Maker uses eight basic parameters that you’re probably all familiar with from HC’s status and equip screens. They are:
Max HP (I’ve renamed to “Health” or “<3”)
Max MP (I’ve renamed to “Mana” or “8)”)
Attack
Defense
Magic Attack (I’ve renamed just “Magic”)
Magic Defense (I’ve renamed to “Resist”)
Agility
Luck
Most of these seem pretty self-explanatory, but in reality they are severely limited in how they function inside the engine. Attack, Defense, Magic and Resist only do anything because I edit the individual damage formulas of the various skills and attacks- they have no function outside those damage calculations. Which is fine, I have total control over what they do and can easily balance them with respect to one another. Max HP and MP are similar- they only count down how long it takes for a character to die or be unable to cast any spells so I have full control over how they’re used.
The odd ones out are Luck and Agility, and it’s these two stats that cause me no end of balance related grief. Agility determines initiative within combat rounds, the likelihood of escape in combat (which I don’t use) and the likelihood of being surprised/having a preemptive attack (which are only calculated in random battles, which I also don’t use). Not exactly the kind of thing battles are won on. Luck is even weaker, only being used to resist debuffs and added states. A high Luck can even be undesirable in this regard- it adds a resistance chance to all states, including Martyrdom, Stealth, the various Rages, Resistance Bonuses, and positive states from items such as Sugar Rush and the elemental weapon bonuses from things like Contact Poison and Alchemist’s Fire.
This leaves me with something of a conundrum. For example, why would you ever cast a Cold spell if you had any other option, elemental weakness notwithstanding, if all the added Agility debuff does is make a given enemy act last in a round?
I’ve tried to address the weakness of Luck by adding a damage bonus equal to the attacker’s luck to all attack damage formulas, but that doesn’t seem quite enough. What I’d like to do is tie some of the game’s ex- and sp- parameters into your Luck and Agility, specifically granting extra critical chance and critical evasion to Luck and extra hit rate and evasion rate to Agility, but I have no idea how to begin doing that. Help in this regard would be appreciated.
Anyway, just wanted to rant about a problem I have with the engine- and something you should be aware of if you’re going to use RPG Maker yourself.
Edit: Even newer version with less annoying!
Well, that was fun- serious business followed by a post from Nekochan! This week I get my amateur history buff on and talk weapon design.
First of all, important updates:
-I’ve been shitty about replying to bug reports and stuff lately because I had some personal stuff to deal with over the last few days. Sorry about that, I’m back as of today, though I might not get around to checked the various fora until this afternoon.
-How did everyone enjoy the Halloween pinups? MagicWhiteLady wanted to make a big splash when she started being social, and worked really hard on those.
-The reason why there was a sudden update with the image archives and all was because there was a game-breaking bug in the game that I wanted to fix because it was almost impossible to avoid unless you knew what you were doing. I agonized over it for a few days before deciding the just say “fuck it” and drop the new update even though it had stuff I wanted to save for November. And, of course, it still has bugs, because fml.
-Tomorrow, I’m going to be participating in N7 Day from 12-5pm GMT. All that time I’ll be playing ME3 multiplayer on my Xbox, doing silver & gold matches and hanging out so if you’re interested in hooking up for a group send me an email at the usual place.
Now for something completely different….
Some of you have noticed and commented on the lack of nonwhite characters in Harem Collector. And, well, you’re absolutely right to, racism is a problem and it can be pretty insidious. It was never my intention to have HC contain exclusively white characters, though, and MagicWhiteLady is working on some new sprites so other skin colours will get represented in game.
The lack of nonwhite characters in video games really saddens and frustrates me, to be honest. Not because I don’t feel like I’m represented, I am white, but I don’t find that heroes or protagonists with different skin tones bug me. In fact, GTA: San Andreas is one of my favourite games of all time regardless of the hero’s skin colour- I’m a sucker for literary remakes and the Count of Monte Cristo is one of my favourite books.
The frustrating part actually comes from my background as a business student. I wouldn’t call myself a capitalist, but I do believe that the market should be and can be fair and equal with respect to ethnicity, sexual preference, skin colour, etc. However, when the population of nonwhites in North America is on such a sharp rise, and the number of North Americans who play video games only increases every year, you would expect there would be a corresponding rise in nonwhite protagonists. After all, people as a whole prefer game protagonists who look like themselves, which is why customizable protagonists are so popular.
I know games have something of a biased outlook because Japanese produced games make up such a large part of the market, and few Japanese companies seem to create content with the non-Japanese in mind. But believe me when I say Japan has it’s own closet skeletons that rarely get addressed.
Lecture aside, there will black people in HC soon, and other skin tones will also be represented in time.