Backer crunch

(Hey, this is like from a week ago, I wanted to promoted the daily streams but Conash works hard so I held onto it, and now you get to read it because I forgot to do a blog yesterday. Yay!)

Hey everyone, it’s the last Wednesday of the month so we’ve just got to finish a few things with the backer release and we’ll get it out to you guys when we can! The past few days have been pretty hectic for NoMoshing and I as more things keep popping up just as soon as we think we can see the end, but we’re both pretty happy with what we’ve got done. I’d also like to take a moment to thank our volunteers for all the testing that they did, it really helped us out a lot to be able to get such in-depth feedback so quickly to help make the game work so smoothly so thanks both of you for all your hard work! Now, since NoMoshing’s been getting in a massive amount of dailogue (including several sex scenes) in these past few days, I thought that I’d take a moment to talk about the various things I’ve been up to since my last post from a week ago.

First off, I managed to get in a couple of the stuff that I talked about awhile back. The Furniture system will now have the green/red squares show numbers on them so that you know what ‘room’ you’re looking at, while it’s certainly not perfect I’d rather give you guys tools that help you a bit with it than not at all. On top of that I’ve managed to extensively fix it so that furniture like the Holy Diver will no longer cause bugs, you can view them in the menu and remove them safely now, but keep in mind that if it was bugged before the person who was bugged with it won’t be displayed in the menu as loving/liking/hating the furniture as appropriate even though they do, the display refused to cooperate on that front but if you remove it and put it back it will work as intended! I’ve also managed to add it so that putting carpets into your various houses will now give a small happiness bonus to everyone in that house (party members always choose the house with the highest ‘house’ bonus) so between that and another house bonus that we’ve added to the game I hope that the happiness system will be a bit easier to approach for the characters who only have a few pieces of furniture they like. I also managed to fix the bug that came about in the 0.35 release that stopped the autosave feature from working, I’m hoping this fix sticks but I thought the last one was going to as well so we’ll see…

Next up is something that has been on the docket, but long since forgotten about, since before I was on the staff. See with the addition of the Southport house we realized that we needed to put in horses for Southport and into other places to get to Southport, which would have been a lot of busy work… So now we’ve managed to get it so that there is a singular horse per house that will be able to handle all the fast travel needs as it was honestly less busy work than the alternative thanks to the magic of me not being limited to RPG Maker’s eventing system. We might be making a few changes to the horse stuff down the line, but with this change it’ll be far easier to accomplish universally so look forward to us taking advantage of having a more streamlined fast travel process! On a similar note, I’m sure that a few of you have probably noticed that several quests still teleport players to the old Northmarket manor, well a big reason that those teleports haven’t been fixed is because that running the proper checks for teleports, finding the right block of teleports to copy, and all of that just takes awhile so I decided to also make a more streamline (on our end at least) version of the entire thing for teleporting to the houses that handles all of that busy work, so while for now it’ll probably just be for the Southport quests since they need to be changed anyways, look forward to having a lot of those wrong teleports get dealt with in future releases!

That’s about all that I’ve actually gotten done so far so I think I’ll leave it at that. I’ve still got several things to finish up before I can handle over the game to NoMoshing to add in his final touches but yeah, hope you’re all looking forward to the new quests and functionality!

Getting stuff done

Hello everyone! Right now we’re working on finishing up the tester’s release, so I thought that since I’ve been rather productive the past few days I’d share some information on what I’ve been working on these past few days while NoMoshing is working on finishing up the various events that he’s got to work on.

So first up, let’s talk about Orange Kid’s love quest, or more specifically the reward from it. The original idea was to have the main thing be Hero becoming immune to any effects that had a chance of causing death like from headshot, however the problem with that is that while those moves can pose a problem they’re pretty infrequent and making them common or having high chances just leads to annoying gameplay for people who don’t have that effect on at least half your party (at least if you don’t have some sort of auto-revive ability in the game). We’re still going to keep in that effect though because it’s not bad, but we’re going to expand it some, just yesterday I finished testing out and getting ready a new little feature that will allow Hero to once per battle survive an otherwise lethal attack with 1 HP. This will still trigger even if Hero is already at 1 HP, as while I understand why other games with similar systems don’t trigger it then, since this ability is limited to only once per battle I felt that in the unlikely situation that players naturally fell to 1 HP they should still get to trigger this. Now, this won’t always save you as if the story calls for an instant loss (meaning the enemy isn’t trying to kill Hero) or if they have some other way to remove him from the fight besides death (like in the Yamamaya fight) this ability will not trigger against those attacks/effects directly.

Next I also put together a little splash screen set to display the new logo that we’ve got everytime you start up the game, there’s a few little odds and ends about it that may need some tweeking but the core part of it is working. Beyond that, I got the enemies for OK’s love quest done pretty quickly and even got a brand new superboss put together very quickly. It’s still missing a bit of window dressing, but I’m very happy with how it plays out, especially the part where several of it’s stats will change to match some of your stats meaning that even if you come in at level 99 you’ll have to understand the trick if you want to win… Hey it’s a superboss, I’m allowed to pull out that sort of stuff.

And yeah, that’s really it. I do also have plans to fix a lot of the bugs that have been hanging out for awhile, setting up the Southport manor for furniture and rugs, and maybe hopefully getting in that update to the furniture system I talked about in my last post, but most of the stuff mentioned above took priority. Still, I’ve been getting a lot of things done easier since finishing up a project I had been working on for awhile, and now it just feels great to not be busy being busy.

Future plans and feedback

It’s Wednesday so it’s time for another blog post! The past couple of posts that I’ve made were more general design stuff so I thought it’d be good to talk a bit more specific coding stuff for a bit. For the most part I haven’t been up to anything big with coding for HC lately, fixing some bugs here and there but my time has typically been being drawn to some other parts of my life or to other parts of the game. So all that I’ve really got are plans that have been on the back-burner for awhile that I’d be interested in getting feedback on.

The first change that I’m planning on making when I can is going to be a slight change to the furniture system. People have talked about how it’s difficult to tell where the various ‘rooms’ are when putting down furniture. That said, the visual interface gives me limitations in this regard, I can’t draw a grid over the map and have a face of every character who cares about a room (and to what extent) on top of each grid, nor can I exactly easily place them in a ‘room’ only during the course of the furniture system without creating a ton of confusion and bugs. The solution that I came up with was to change it so that the red/green squares that show up will either be what you already see in the game or have a number 1-5 on them depending on if they’re in area 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 of that map (so far no one map has more than five ‘areas’ to it). While this won’t exactly give you all a full sense of ‘who’ cares about this room, it would help more clearly define ‘what’ room you’re looking at at any given time and in turn you could maybe figure out who cares about a room through some thinking or just by putting down furniture and see who cares. It’s not quite what people were asking for, but given the tools at my disposal I think that it’ll give at least a major aspect of what people are asking for.

Something that’s a bit more farther off will be expanding the encyclopedia. Currently it’s only set to show you the stats of equipment, including hidden stats, because a big complaint people had was that they needed to use the wiki or ask someone who was digging through the code what any given piece of equipment did before they could use it and I managed to figure out a way to format it all to fit on one screen (though if we did put in items that had too many ‘extra’ effects it wouldn’t fit on the page running into the same issue again, so this process has a side-effect of limiting what we can do with the equipment). However, the encyclopedia has always been meant to do more than just that. A big thing that we want to add is putting in monster data, the idea that I have is program it into the game so that once you encounter any given monster it’ll add it to the encyclopedia (which will mean that if you’re having trouble with a boss, after a gameover or reload, you can open up your encyclopedia since the Misc_Data file is separate from your save file) though I’m still not fully sure how we’re going to get all the formatting for the things that we want… After talking it out with NoMoshing we also don’t want to just show players the full stats of the enemies so there’s also some busy work that needs to be done in order to give the players an ‘idea’ as to what the monster is strong against or weak against without just handing the Hero a walkthrough to his own world. There were a few other things that we had talked about potentially adding to the encyclopedia, but at this stage I’m not as confident promising that they’re going to stay on the docket so I’ll just leave it at that since we DO want to give players feedback on enemies for sure (largely it’s an issue of how to display it as I’ve already gotten around the issue of showing the enemy battler in the encyclopedia).

Finally, the only thing that crosses my mind right now that’s planned for sure are more achievements. While a lot of achievements are held back either because of limited time for writing or just ideas not coming to us, one achievement that NoMoshing’s wanted me to implement more or less since I redid the achievement system is the ‘Taste the Rainbow’ achieve which you will get if you use each element in one battle (scrolls will count). It’s not incredibly complex on the face of it, but in order to get it working I’ll have to setup 10 switches for each element that gets set to ‘off’ at the start of every battle, then every time you go to use a ‘skill’ (attacks and guarding are skills even if the game displays them differently) the game evaluates if it has one of those elements and if so it turns on the relevant switch, then after battle it looks to see if all 10 are on and if so it awards you the achievement. While setting up 10 switches isn’t that hard for me as I can create my own and am not limited by what NoMoshing has to work with, the idea of interfering with the skill process for those elements and all raises a few concerns, namely in the potential bug department (as well as a few questions about if say Bronwyn’s acid bulb counts for the achievement, or if you have Felix attack with a necronomicon does it count as a necrotic skill/spell). More universally though, I would like to sit down at some point and add in a ‘tracker’ for achievements. Like when you haven’t unlocked an achievement but have a hint for one available it’ll show you your progress towards unlocking it, though that one is going to be a bit more involved since the achievement system doesn’t actually record the ‘goal’ of any given achievement, but rather just has a check for if this variable or switch or whatever meets this condition and if it does give an achievement.

That’s really all that I’ve got planned for now though. A lot of the major coding projects that either NoMoshing or myself wanted have already been added into the game… Granted it seems that the autosave feature has stopped working so that’s going to be getting my full attention at some point before the public 0.36 release, but yeah. If any of you have any questions, comments, or feedback of other nature feel free to share!

Balancing balance

Backers, keep your eye out for the backer release later today, a few aspects are running a bit behind but we’re working on getting it out as soon as we can! That said, I think I’d like to share something that’s crossed my mind a few times that has given me some trouble at times, balancing HC.

Balancing different features can be very difficult, and having quite a bit of experience min-maxing myself I can have a bit of an easy time seeing how much or how little something will shift things in the grand scheme, but that doesn’t necessarily give me a good idea as to how to properly handle things. Sometimes this can be a problem with enemies as it comes to trying to get their numbers to be ‘just’ right, fit their skills in a way that work, avoid easy weaknesses for bosses without leaving players that brought say a stun-based party feeling useless. That said, while I do struggle in certain situations, I feel that for most quests at least I’ve managed to get the balance for most things pretty well, even if not perfect (though a few oversights have gotten by at times). That said who knows how things will look when we re-balance the game, as I plan to be taking a meat cleaver to both the rate that the player levels up as well as the stats the enemy has to help make lower level quests more interesting and higher level quests more approachable.

That said, enemies aren’t the only area of balancing that have given me some pause. Items in particular have been a bit of a sore thumb for me, and not just because of the typical item-hoarding that I’m sure many people are familiar with. See, while there are some very useful items in HC (Essential salts have made some fights go from flat out impossible to just incredibly challenging), some of the items strain the min-maxer in me to see them as anything other than something to collection for completions sake or items to sell for a minimal increase to my sil. The reason for this is because all aspects of an item need to be taken into consideration and contrasted to the players alternatives. For example, 1 item will always cost 1 action to be used (out of a typical pool of 4 actions per turn) and have a ‘cost’ associated (either in sil or not being able to use it at a later time), with that in mind you have to look at what any given item brings to the table. A lo-potion for example gives 33% healing and you’re given quite a few of them (or mid/hi-potions) which isn’t too bad, but it’s big advantage is that you can use some of your characters who may not have anything better to do (like Hero in many cases) and have them ease the healing burden from other characters, as a result it takes an important job and can serve to reduce the action cost by regulating it to Hero allowing say Felix to pull off another chain lightning or avoid someone being killed. Reinvigoration Potions however tend to rarely be worth it in battle, they use up one party member’s action (when you typically have 3 or fewer actions) to bring someone back with 10% HP, this will typically mean that they then proceed to die before you can heal them or they get an action meaning that you just used an item that you could have sold and one of your limited actions to accomplish nothing. The buffing potions tend to also leave a sour taste in my mouth too, as the magic based alternatives offer at least 2-3x the effectiveness if not more and only cost a small amount of MP (which 1 ether can give you several casts worth). Balancing Florine’s store can also be an issue as you’re asking players to invest several forms of resources, one of which is highly limited and can’t be renewed, to get the items… There’s just a lot of stuff to take into consideration. That said, if proper balance isn’t taken into consideration enough, you can end up in situations like how the current HC meta typically values mages over non-mages. While non-mages will still appear in various parties, it’s pretty rare to find players who don’t make at least half their parties mages, with a 3-mage party typically being the most common that I’ve heard about, and this boils down to how easily mages can use their abilities to get a lot of damage with a low action and MP cost to them, which means that when rebalancing things we’ll have to find a way to make it so that magic doesn’t feel quite an easy ‘I-win’ button to help encourage more diverse party make-ups (without making a 3-mage a bad choice except in specific quests).

There are other aspects of the game that can also give me some trouble when it comes to balancing, like trying to make it so that the furniture system doesn’t boil down to a simple easy perfect solution (which at least one player has found and posted about on the wiki I’ll say), trying to ensure that investments can feel useful in the grand-scheme of things, and other areas. I’ve seen some people talk about being able to measure the value of things by boiling it all down into one common point of comparison, but to me that approach to balancing can just as easily backfire as if you want players to be in a position where they have to choose, it means that they can use that same formula, even if they’re just going by some personal experiences, to always figure out what the ‘best’ option is or realize that it doesn’t matter. When it comes to balancing, to me the best balance is being able to look at two things and figure out if you prefer apples or oranges, and then find a way to find a way to get the most out of your apples to the point that it feels incredibly powerful, as I’m sure that a few people who noticed a bug in the ‘Feedback’ magic might have felt (though I’m sorry to say it’s been patched out).

Perhaps I got a bit off-topic here, I’ve got a tendency to do that when I ramble, but the point is that it can be difficult to balance things, especially when you’re continuing to develop the game (and as such creep can easily off-set any sort of balance that you had), which is a big reason why we’re waiting until HC is content-complete before we work to make sure that everything has the exact balance that we want. With that in mind, how about you guys? Any thoughts in particular about what you wish the balance would be like to make it more enjoyable for you?

Gimmicks

I would like to take a moment to talk about gimmicks. I tend to like to make it so that all bosses in HC that I design are unique and have a gimmick to them, even if some aren’t as easy to identify as others, and I recently beat a game where just about every boss has a gimmick and it left me with quite a few thoughts I wanted to rant about for a bit.

A key part of gimmicks I believe is that they should typically require that the player uses resources they have in unique ways to force the player to be constantly adjusting how they play (assuming they don’t have the numbers to just plow through the entire game with no issue), but the player should always have a way to overcome them and shouldn’t be put into a situation where they feel that they can’t win. A gimmick done right should make a boss feel unique and help spice up the game-play experience in new and interesting ways, while always leaving the player able to feel like they can win and without requiring the developer to rewrite the entire rule book every dungeon. To that end, gimmicks should always be carefully considered to make sure that they fit in and don’t disturb this balance in general.

One gimmick for example that has always stood out to me as a risky venture is the idea of bosses who eat people. I’ve seen it come up in various games and I’ve even incorporated it into HC, but whenever you give a boss the ability to ‘eat’ people in the players party you can start to run into some big issues. If it’s used as a means to temporarily remove the character from the party and return them back to the player afterwards (probably from the other characters cutting open it’s stomach afterwards or something off-screen) you can run into big issues where you could potentially be crippling the player based on which character it is, and the more freedom you give to the player to continue what characters they have and what abilities they bring the less sure that you can be that there are any ‘safe’ picks. An alternative to this is to have the boss basically dish out instant deaths but that can be a bit weird to then utilize a revive item/skill on the afflicted party member whenever you think about it. I’ve also seen a few games give out instant game-overs if you allow the boss to eat any party member, and while this can work in some games where you give the player the tools to be able to manipulate the flow of battle to prevent this, I’m still not a huge fan because it ultimately serves to be a hard stop to the gameplay experience. See, if you’re losing to a boss due to numbers the game-over is either gradual and gives you a chance to recover or it’s immediate and you know not to fight the boss, the feedback the game gives you on how well you’re doing is very apparent and accurate to the situation, but whenever you give a boss an ‘instant game-over’ ability it can be a bit jarring because how the immediate feedback the player gets through the damage they give/receive is relatively immaterial to how well they’re actually doing in the battle. This idea isn’t limited just to the idea of having a party member being eaten, instant game-overs that are just that, game-overs (rather than a fight that the story continues with even if you lose), aren’t something that I’m really a huge fan of in general as they’ve always felt more like ‘gotchas!’ instead of obstacles to overcome or work around. Sure, maybe you can control the battle better, sure maybe you need to raise your numbers more, oh maybe there’s an item that you’ve got that turns off that boss feature entirely, but no matter how you cut it I always feel like there are better tools as the developer’s disposal these same strategies room to work with that doesn’t take a player who’s in the middle of an engaging battle that they’re working hard on managing and just instantly hits a reset button on, which is why when I made a boss that eats people I only had it eat other enemies (the reasoning behind this is that with your whole team fighting the boss it just didn’t really get an opportunity to grab anyone from your side). One optional boss in particular from the game I beat stood out to me in particular, and it falls under a similar umbrella where if you didn’t kill it fast enough it would unleash an ultimately attack that party wipes you and you have to reload. The problem was that on top of this, it had by far the best stats of any boss in the game, and no strategy was really too effective against it (I even bought several stat boosting items that upped my stun chance simply to try to stun-lock it without any significant results). It just really left a sour taste in my mouth because ultimately my options were to invest hours into the game to get numbers better than it, or buy 10-20 items to constantly recharge my MP to spam the strongest attacks over and over and over again, neither of which really feels fulfilling just to get that 100% completion.

That said, this viewpoint on gimmicks is probably strongly influenced by my own desire to think, plan, and analyze situations in general. Perhaps I’m putting too much thought into my bosses and should let most of them just end up being basically giant stat blocks that players kill with their even bigger number sticks. I don’t know, feel free to share your thoughts on gimmicks done right or done wrong if you have any!

Iron Waifu Post-Mortem feat. Orifalcon!

So, it’s been a week, and now that the dust has settled after the latest Iron Waifu, Conash and I are here with guest commentator Orifalcon the discuss the contest and what conclusions we can draw from it!

Larelle’s Victory
NoMoshing: I’m a little surprised that Larelle managed to make it this far. If you had asked me a month ago who I thought would have had enough gas in the thank to defeat Brigandine, I would have been hard pressed to pick someone out. I had been cheering on Chimei as she was the best shot (I thought) of taking out Brig ahead of the finals. Yet, here we are.
That said, Larelle absolutely deserves the throne for a year. As one of the earliest characters added to the game, she’s been idling for new content for awhile. Not 100% sure yet what her Love Quest will entail, though I imaginee it will require a return to the Mourning Wood and fighting some undead.
Conash: I’m not surprised by the result, even before the tournament I was predicting that if the bracket allowed we’d see Larelle make it to the finals, and after seeing Brig get weighed down by some prize apathy it makes sense.
Orifalcon: Tsundere + Early Introduction + Outstanding Love Quest = Iron Waifu is a formula that has now withstood three years of testing.
We entered IW18 with a group of seven (Brigandine, Larelle, Kyrie, Bronwyn, Yamamaya, Doll, and Raina) who had only ever lost to past champs or each other, so Tier 1 seemed clear. Three got swept away in the first round and the other four made up the semifinals, which reflects that this was a tournament with a weird start and a standard finish. Larelle strapped on her rhinestone glove and danced her way through a sleepy quarter before holding up under pressure when the matches started getting less predictable. Her prizes were good, her fans were loud, and her wins were convincing. A worthy Iron Waifu indeed.

Impact of Rewards

NoMoshing: I’ll be honest: it was a huge relief to me to have it all out there and not having people ask me about who gets what reward. It also kept the speculation down, meaning that the voting wasn’t moved by things like “maybe if Evanie wins, she’ll become a party member” and that sort of thing, which might produce unrealistic expectations….
I think some people are confused over why the Iron Waifu tournament is structured the way it is. It’s not simply supposed to be a popularity contest- if that was my intention, I’d throw up all the characters in the game on a big ol’ list and ask everyone to pick their favourites. The way Iron Waifu is laid out, it gets every player to consider every character in the game, maybe rethinking their opinions based on another player’s opinions. It gets people talking and engaged in the future of Harem Collector. And it provides me with important data about how people feel about the characters in the game!
Conash: Here we saw several interesting developments I think. Some characters who typically get ignored got more of a push than usual, characters who already had love quests in the game got a fairer shake as people had something tangible to latch onto other than pure speculation, and there were less people assuming that if a character won they’d join the harem this fall meaning that less people were setup for disappointment if their waifu did win. That said, I did also find it interesting that despite that, a lot of the round 1 matches seemed to have a few incorrect assumption about a given character’s prize with some round 2 matches indicating to me some surprise when people saw their potential prizes posted in the actual thread. All in all, I feel that it helped level the playing field than just having a prize that people didn’t know what it would be for many of the people.
Orifalcon: The “storyline bump” and “#savetheelves” accounted for several of the tournament’s early surprises but didn’t quite have the momentum to withstand rising vote totals and the more concentrated strength of Round 2 competitors. Still, they helped give us the tournament’s craziest foursome (Meiriona/Florine in Round 2? Said no one ever), and relegated the poor maids to the spot normally kept by non-harem girls without French accents.
The “love quest blues” was seemingly the only unwritten rule that didn’t get a bit banged up this year. The added consideration of updated art didn’t seem to help Meline, Penelope, or Elaiya, and having it may have even booked the normally resistant Yamamaya an early trip to the green room for eliminated waifus. One shouldn’t get too upset about their #1 having received enough special attention that she already has what most girls are fighting for, but we still do because (insert waifu here) is amazing and logic be damned!

Maids Performing Poorly
NoMoshing:The people have spoken, and the maids need work. Well, everything in the game needs work, but the maids really stood out to me as the losers this year- usually at least one maid manages to stand out as performaing really well. So expect more to be done with them in the future- not, perhaps, a unique collection sidequest (as much as I love putting those in the game…) but at least chat dialogue and some character development.
Conash: Seeing all of the maids aside from Nerys knocked out in round 1 was surprising to me. While they’ve never really been heavy-weights, you typically see 2-3 of them making it to round 2 at least. Hopefully a few plans that we have in the works will help put up a bit of a stronger ‘Maid presence’ next year.
Orifalcon: Speaking of the green room for eliminated waifus, I hear it was especially bumping this year since all the maids arrived early and organized one heck of a party. I’m honestly not too surprised here, as they’ve never been powerhouses. Prior to this year they had a not terrible record of 7-9, but those wins include victims like Lola the Axe, the Genie, Queen Regal, and apathy!Meline. This year their matchups allowed the rise of the storyline bump to coincide with the fall of the maids.
A big issue facing them is inherent in the topic; voters with a tendency to think of them as “the maids” rather than unique personalities. This also explains why Renfeld and Nerys have been the better performers, as it’s easy to forget they’re maids at all. Hopefully more voters will explore Randi the masochist and the interesting dichotomy of Violet/Lilac (I’ll always do my best for you/my current owner, respectively) and give them a bit of a closer look next year.

Quinta’s Comeback
NoMoshing: I was very gratified to see Quinta do much better this year. I love princesses, especially when I get to H them, so I’m excited by the eventuality of adding in Quinta. I’m also happy to see so many people get engaged with the storyline and are looking forward to see the next steps unfold in the Kellos invasion quest. Other than that, there isn’t much else to say.
I don’t mind the River Nymph taking over as poorest performer, although she is a good candidate for getting a redo soon.
Conash: This was VERY encouraging to see, both for how it expressed people’s growing interest in the story-quests (which sometimes even surpassed their desire for a love quest) but also given how back in 2016 she scored a lot worse than I feel she should have due to an unlucky round 1 match. She still has a lot of room to grow in people’s hearts, but I’m glad to see that people are still generally interested in her, especially after a lot of people were disapointed that she didn’t make an appearance in 2017.
Orifalcon: A 1550% vote increase is rather impressive, even more so considering that Quinta only received one additional in-game scene in the two years since her 2016 face plant. The comments seemed split between “Kellos Invasion” and “Princess Fetish” as far as causes go, but it was certainly an exciting kickoff.
Unfortunately, Quinta’s awesome comeback story dovetailed right into the least awesome story of the tournament: f-ing cheater(s). With the benefit of hindsight, Quinta has the strongest (though by no means an ironclad) case to be made about being tagged with a dirty L, and it would have been nice to see how far she could go on her merits.
With Quinta redeemed, the River Nymph takes over as most embarrassing performer, as Larelle only surrendered 5 votes to her in their 2016 match. So stay tuned for the Nymph Reclamation Campaign in IW19.

Chopping Block
NoMoshing: Nothing is set in stone about next year, but we’re planning to have at least one new candidate who might get added in the mix, plus Hanelore, who was introduced in the latest backer update. So, we have a guaranteed replacement for Larelle, and another new girl coming up, for which I could comfortably axe either Shally, Doralice or Evanie.
Maybe the situation will change in a year’s time, but we’re almost at a locked, all-harem roster for Iron Waifu.
Conash: I’ve got a few names that I’ve got my eyes on in particular, but I imagine that NoMoshing is already thinking them too. Knowing who to cut for 2019 will be pretty hard as we continue to sure up the weak ends of Iron Waifu every year. That said, my general philosophy is that of the lower end of characters we should chop the characters who we, as the developers, don’t have as good of a prize to offer to. The June poll of the month seems to starkly agree that continuing to offer a prize, in some form at least, is preferred and so I want to make it so that if your preferred girl wins that we give you the best possibility of feeling satisfied with the prize, though popular girls who already have their love quests won’t be looking at the chopping block because their ability to do well despite prize apathy speaks highly of them.
Orifalcon: I suppose it depends on how many characters you need added next year. If it’s three newbies, like this year, then I’d probably bench Shally and Evanie. They’ve had three shots, we’ve seen them get a win, but their ceilings probably lie under the “surprise quarterfinalist if she draws the right foursome” level (the Dora-line, if you will). With an eventual harem count of 35, 2019 is also unique in that it could feature only current or future haremettes, if they’ve all been introduced by then, which would be an easy way to go. If you need to add a lot, then maybe it’s time for legitimate consideration about retiring the fully complete characters: Nerys, Yamamaya, and Clementine, if your homes are up to date on pitchfork insurance.

Other Surprises
NoMoshing: I was happy to see Doralice do so well. And I’m always happy to see people get so engaged with the story, since that’s my main contribution to the game at this point. I was also pretty pleased to see Kyrie get so far, despite having been a controversial character in the game so far.
In unpleasant surprises, I was dismayed to see Chimei get crushed by Brig right at the beginning of the game. I like Chimei a lot, and as I’ve said elsewhere, I’m very excited to doing more with her when I get the opportunity.
Conash: There were two big surprises that stood out to me that might not have stood out to many others. The first being Florine’s growth in popularity, while Orifalcon had pointed out that Florine has actually done pretty well, Florine does carry her share of anti-voters and a few parts of her personality can rub people the wrong way, but her winning pretty thoroughly over both Doll and the elf Orgy had left me pretty confused and wondering if she might make it to the finals… Only for Kyrie to overcome her once again bucking my expectations. The other big surprise for me was how Yamamaya has seemed to earn a bit more apathy this year. Originally I had thought that her loss to Meiriona was elf orgy hype, but the round 2 results for Meiriona and Nerys seem to suggest that hype wasn’t too big to begin with, what really drove it home though was Yamamaya coming in 3rd in the tie-breaker she was in. In past years Yama’s been a pretty strong competitor despite already having her love quest for all three tournaments, which has shown a pretty strong following behind her beyond just Zera, but losing in a tie-breaker where prizes are off the table tells a very different tale for this year…
Orifalcon: It’s surprising to see that no competitor is carrying a record of 0-2, as all four girls who were at risk won their opening matchup. Natya and Bell join 8 past competitors at 0-1, and Serade and Gargan are the unlucky duo at 0-3.
I’m surprised, for the second year, with Raina’s downward trajectory in Iron Waifu. Not from a trends standpoint, as she had to face Bronwyn, but more regarding Raina herself. She ticks off 2 of the boxes on the winning formula and has the same “need to be conquered” factor that dominated this year’s semifinals. She faces no prize apathy, and yet her descent is even steeper than Yamamaya’s. Maybe she isn’t quite tsundere enough, but I’d expect her to have a bigger following, particularly amongst the lurkers. Perhaps Nekochan was right, and there’s an anti-cinnamon roll agenda in play.

Predictions for 2019
NoMoshing: I’m hesitant to outright saw who I think will win Iron Waifu, but I will predict this: I think, because the body of work leading up to IW 2019 will be digging through Larelle and Therese’s immense backlogs of H, that people will be hungry for someone truly unique and different getting the crown. This will affect the polling by having even more upsets and surprises, with a strong showing by girls like Florine and Jonagold.
Conash: While I’m sure that Brigandine is the expected winner, and I imagine we’ll see her making it to at least the semi-finals once more, honestly I don’t see her winning 2019 if her prizes are the same as they were this year. Perhaps she could get to the finals and give her opponent a good run for their money but prize based voting tends to play a big part in these things, and the closer you approach the 31st the more it does as fence sitters start seeing less of, “Which girl do I like more?” and more “What do I want added to the game first?” As such, I’m certainly going to make an effort to try to get us to the point where we might be able to promise a bit more for her prize but only time will tell if that will happen or even if that’s even needed.
Orifalcon: Just like this year, IW19 will be partly ruled by the dueling Brigandine questions. Is there anyone left who can beat Brig? Can Brig win “the big one” when facing the most popular, long established girl with a love quest on offer? A year is a good amount of time for more in-game characterization and memorable moments to help win over a few more lurkers, which is all she would have needed this year, so I see no reason not to remove her #1 overall seed label now.
Unless she rolls a top-6 competitor, I’d predict Serade gets her first win next year. She gave eventual-finalist Kyrie a good match, and could receive a push for sympathy votes as she’s 0-3. Unfortunately, Gargan’s niche kink is still probably too heavy, so I’d predict my personal #4 drops to 0-4.
If the winning formula holds up again, I predict a Bronwyn victory, followed by a concerted push to ban all tsunderes from future Iron Waifus.

Carpets and Dungeons

Hello everyone, Iron Waifu’s still going strong but since we’re still in the middle of Round 2 we thought it was best to take this week to talk about game progress and I haven’t talked about what I’ve been working on for the past bit so figured now was as good a time as any!

First, I’d like to take a brief moment to talk some about the dungeon girls. It’s been brought to our attention that with the new happiness system it takes a lot longer to get these girls out of the dungeon, not to mention in Yeon’s case she already took a lot of time just to get her into the dungeon at first further frustrating the issue. After some talk about it, we’ve agreed on a solution that should help, the ‘torture’ and the ‘gift’ options will be separated. This not only means firstly that you will be able to torture AND gift these three girls once a day, but the results of the torture will be moved into the ‘Personal Happiness’ section. For those who might not be aware, this basically means that instead of being capped at +2 affection per day for these girls, you will now be able to get +2 from gifts and +2 from torture independently, which will make it so that getting them out of the dungeons is faster than how it used to be if you take full advantage of the system. That said, once they are out of the dungeons the impact from torturing will no longer boost their affection per day so don’t expect to get them to Love faster than the characters who didn’t go into the dungeons in the first place. Still, we’re hoping that this will help make the dungeon stuff easier on players as well as help make it more likely for players to experiment with the torture scenes.

The other matter that’s been taking more thought and planning for though is the new carpet items that we’ll be adding to the game. Some players already tried buying these items from the in-game shop for it and ran into some issues due to it’s lack of implementation. A big part of this is that while it could relatively easily just be made into little 3×3 patches of carpet that players could place anywhere via the furniture system, that just seem so…. Tedious and ugly if you ask me. If you’re going to buy some carpet you should be filling out entire rooms with one purchase I say, not having to buy 10 just to make your master bedroom not have a wood floor. To accomplish this though it’s going to have to get it’s own little system though as I can’t realistically make the preview shown in the furniture menu adjust to fit the entire size of a room on the fly, so a lot of thought in how exactly it works needed to be done. Ultimately what we decided on is that after purchasing the item from it’s store, you then go to the area that you want it put down, open up your menu and use it. If it’s a valid location the item will be consumed and the corresponding carpet color will be placed for the section of the map that you’re standing on. Players will also be given a non-consumable ‘invisible’ carpet or something like that with their first purchase that they can use to remove any carpet (and get it back into their inventory). This will all be entirely optional but it should go a long way to help make your estates be a lot more personalized, without being too tedious hopefully.

I’ve also been working on a few other bugs and odds and ends, but for the most part between other responsibilities and Iron Waifu I don’t have the most exciting additions coming this release. Hope some of you are looking forward to at least one of those changes though!

Iron Waifu- End of Round One

Conveniently enough, today is the final match of Round One of Iron Waifu 2018, so, we figured for today we’d look forward to round two, and post some insights about the previous round. Okay? Okay!

May 17th- Princess Quinta vs Yeon Ewona
NoMoshing: For most of the previous Iron Waifus, there have been a few truisms that emerged- Characters with completed love quests tended to perform poorly, characters who represented a niche taste did even worse, and most especially, unless your name started with “A” or ended in “Gandine”, harem girl trumped non-harem girls and party members trumped non-party harem girls. But this year isn’t like those previous years, and whoever is represented by these new voting blocs, all previous wisdom is rapidly getting chucked out the window.
Case in point, Princess Quinta, who lost so badly in her first appearance that we passed over her for IW 2017 in favour of her mother, managing a stunning turnaround on Violet. Now, Quinta will eventually make it to the harem, but she isn’t there yet, and that is usually a negative mark.
Will she be able to keep it up against a full-on party member though? While Evanie tends to perform well, Yeon winning out against her isn’t an upset, and I know Yeon has her haters. But the potential rewards might also weigh in Yeon’s favour- Quinta is only getting a single sex scene out of the crown, while Yeon is getting quite a bit more. It’s going to be a tossup for me, but an interestingly asymmetrical tossup.
Conash: Quinta’s match was a REAL head-turner to start off the tournament for me. I expected Quinta to do better since “Circle of Strife” and “Dude where’s my Sword” left people hungry for more storyline quests, but I was blown away not just by how Quinta won but how she won by a pretty healthy lead (7 votes). Violet hasn’t exactly given us incredible preformances in the past, but she hasn’t exactly been a push-over so this match took me by surprise and had me making a brand new bracket even because storyline quests might be able to even take on party members with this… And then Yeon managed to win out over Evanie who also offered progression on the Kellos storyline in one way or another as did Quinta. The matches that lead to this defied my expectations, new and old.
Nekochan: Hmmm legit princess vs wannabe princess…I’ve been a bit surprised by the Yeon-dislike given the fanbase around her fellow dungeon-mates, and it seems like players tend to be happy for a chance to coerce the girls to accept the hero. I was happy to see her win since that may indicate the tide is turning for her (or are people just tired of be teased with Evanie?). If Quinta wins, I suppose it’s not so much that she has her fans but the Yeon-dislike remains stronger than the first round indicated.

May 18th- Ser Brigandine De Mont-Fleur vs Eulania
NoMoshing: Brigadine’s popularity has always been a sore tooth with me. I mean, I’m glad that people love a character from my game so much, but look at it from my perspective- a skill trainer whose design I had no hand in routinely turns out to be more popular than characters I created and actively tried to make attractive, and has only lost to the event Iron Waifu herself the previous two years. On top of that, this year she won out over Chimei, whose redesign and love quest I’m actually really looking forward to. But this contest isn’t about what I want, it’s about what you all want, and I’m willing to roll with it no matter the outcome. Interestingly enough, she is not the top-voted non-harem girl this year… a possible crack in her support base?
I am pleased with Eulania making it to the second round, though. As a character routinely underserved with regard to content, I’m glad she’s managed to wrangle a few fans who want to see more of her. Will it be enough to stop the freight train that is Brigandine? Maybe there’s a slim chance. We’ll see what everyone thinks in a couple days.
Conash: Brigandine is my waifu, I’ve made this clear even back in 2016 before I was on the team. While I do feel sorry for NoMoshing that it might be a bit of a sore thumb for him, I’m sorry but just how some of the minor dailogues that come up with her paint a character that’s pretty open to what Hero’s doing and seems so unphased by it and then seems to look to have an implied, “Take me, if you can” feeling to her just lights a fire in me. Eulania’s win is nice to see as well, while I’m not exactly her biggest fan (call me a heretic if you must but I don’t particularly care for glasses >.>) it’s very nice to see people wanting to see more of her because hey, I want to see more of her and learn about her! Though with the few scenes that she’ll be getting added to the game with the 0.34 release hopefully people who votes for her will get a nice taste of her soon! Still rooting for Brig personally but I’ll make sure to keep my write-up on point.
Nekochan: Why do ghosts need glasses? Yes that is seriously all I have to say about this matchup. The outcome has already been decided.

May 19th- Kyrie the Burning Blizzard vs Jonagold Apple (Apple Kid)
NoMoshing: I really like writing for Kyrie. She’s smart, she’s flirty, she has more adventuring experience than the Hero, and she likes getting under his skin sometimes. I understand why she has her haters, though. It was something of a disappointment to see Serade get the boot so early, but I feel she had a strong showing and the improvements to her characterization are winning her a few fans. No regrets from this match in round one.
Even though I like Renfeld (And she’s one of the few characters who I have a pretty good idea of what I want for her LQ), it’s really nice to see Apple Kid get a victory. I think it’s pretty well deserved after washing out the previous two contests. It’ll be interesting to see what happens- Kyrie may be controversial, but she got to the semifinals last year, but this year Jonagold has the power of ShadowCluster’s lobbying behind her… I’m interested to see what happens here.
Conash: While I enjoy Kyrie myself, was sad to see Serade lose especially after all that Awiiabu stuff as it makes her the first competitor to ever go 0 and 3 in Iron Waifu. Maybe next year she’ll manage to break out against someone but yeah. As for Kyrie, I never really got all the hate she tends to get, I mean sure she played a part in our capture but I’ve always figured that she didn’t exactly have room to refuse, the Queen isn’t going to just use the carrot and stick method on the Hero, EVERYONE is under her thumb, something that Shally even confirms, so if Kyrie threw her life away for some guy she mildly flirted with to rot in a dungeon the Queen would have just found some other pretty woman to flirt with us, but hey never nice to feel betrayed I just don’t think Kyrie had a lot of room to not betray us personally. Apple Kid’s win was a bit of a shock for me, Renfeld tends to do the best ouf of all of the maids as she’s never lost a round 1 before, even making a turn-around and defeating Meline in 2017 after losing to her in 2016, but this was Apple Kid’s first time ever making it past round 1. I’m not Renfeld’s biggest fan but I get some of the appeal, still I like that Apple Kid scored her first win.
Nekochan: It’ll be okay Apple Kid. Your rival is just hotter. Just be a good sport about it ok?

May 20th- Elaiya the Relentless vs Lady Doralice
NoMoshing: Elaiya has has the disadvantage of being up against fan favourite characters like Raina and Larelle her previous two matches, and that combined with an already-completed love quest, I was not expecting Elaiya to go far this year. But for her to claim the narrowest victory from Gargan shows that she does have her fans, and it certainly was a deserved victory for the game’s second implemented harem girl.
Meanwhile, Doralice beating Randi gives me some hope that people are actually really engaged with the story this year and are interested in seeing where everything goes. Although, Randi has a bad habit of unlucky matchups against big time characters, so it was actually pretty hard to gauge fan interest in her, so I guess this isn’t 100% just yet. Elaiya vs Doralice is really going to be a test of story progress vs waifu-ism, and I’m looking forward to seeing it!
Conash: I’m personally more of a fan of Gargan than Elaiya, but it’s good to see both of them getting support and all! Elaiya’s win gives her first win of Iron Waifu, but it also marks Gargan as the only other person to go 0 and 3 which is sad to see. I was really torn up about Elaiya vs Gargan as I wanted them both to get to round 2. Doralice’s victory seemed pretty clear to me by the time we got there, the maids had been doing uncharacteristically bad the tournament, while story quests were doing pretty well. While we haven’t exactly gotten a super thrilling edition to the Harem Drama arc, it’s generally speaking been a fan favorite most of the time, the fact that it gives us Therese in the first quest (and only quest for many years) probably helped solidify it as offering one of the nicest rewards. I’m really looking forward to seeing how well Doralice does, as she could easily become an unexpected powerhouse here.
Nekochan: I consider Elaiya to be one of my cinnamon rolls. I have a lot but they all need love and hugs and to be told it’ll be ok. She’s the only one I have left in the competition since my other cinnamon rolls have already been eliminated *sniffle*

May 21st- Bronwyn vs Nerys Rainbreeze
NoMoshing: Holy cow, is the pro-elf voting bloc ever out in force this year! But this specific matchup is pretty exciting to me for two reasons- one, Nerys had a really strong debut last year, being one of the few non-party girls who have beaten out a fully-fledged party member (The only other girls who can claim that achievement are Alina, Ino and Renfeld) and Nerys managed it literally on the first try! However, this year, Nerys is the one character who I had to reach to come up with something for- which is why none of her rewards for being crowned the victor have anything to do with her. Bronwyn has a lot more to personally gain, but people seem to really want that elf orgy that was alluded to at the end of “Elf Half-Empty”. Look forward to this match, because with the pro-elf bloc split, it’s going to be a dramatic one.
Conash: Here we’re truly going to be putting the elf orgy to the test in probably one of the most fair shakes it will get. With all the talk of #savetheelves I imagine that the elves might be benefitting a bit from a more general positive attitude that they’re cultivating around the idea of being elves, though maybe I’m just overthinking things. Either way we’ve got a strong elf party member with a lot of personal rewards to offer, and a fair amount of support behind her (heck, I personally dislike Bronwyn currently as she is, but I tend to vote for her as I know that I won’t dislike her by the end) against Nerys who’s prize package is far from lacking if you ask me. This match will be deciding a lot of my round 3 and up predictions.
Nekochan: Bronwyn you bitch! Give me back my other cinnamon roll! Her hair is nice and swirly like one and all she wants is her fairy tale romance but the hero is a butt. #fucktheelves #yesImawareofthedoubleentendre #vengenceforRaina

May 22nd- Shally vs Clementine D’Orange (Orange Kid)
NoMoshing: It’s nice to see Shally get a victory in- I know a lot of players really like her, and are looking forward to her sex scene getting art soon. Up until this time she’s been a pretty consistent round one punching bag, but she finally managed to earn a win for herself and I think that’s pretty great. But she’s up against Orange Kid, a solid mid-tier waifu who is no stranger to the second round. That said Orange Kid is up next in terms of getting art redone, so her listed rewards are almost like a second entry for Apple Kid.
I don’t think either of these characters are getting to the finals based on their rewards alone, but this year has been nothing if not chock full of upsets and odd victories. I have great expectations for whoever wins this match!
Conash: Funny story, Shally scooted into victory at the absolute last minute. I had confirmed with NoMoshing how our tie-breaker was going to vote in advance and we were watching the clock very closely. If I recall the final vote that pushed Shally from losing a tie to winning her match came in the last 5 minutes. I had to redo both of my bracket images as I had assumed it would end in a tie as a result. Orange Kid’s wide margin for victory did surprise me a bit as I figured there would have been a bit more prize apathy holding her back against Ino, but I understand her winning as it’s not ALL about prizes afterall. I know who I think will win, but my gut tells me to not count this match over quite so soon so I’ll be watching this match for another potential upset.
Nekochan: Shally is grumpy and nevers like anything I do. Or laughs at me. Give me back my new cinnamon roll! I want sassy revenge orange. #vengenceforNatya

May 23rd- Meiriona vs Florine
NoMoshing: Talk about an explosive debut! In a powerful victory that *nobody* saw coming, newcomer elven MILF Meiriona scores the biggest wins of the year against perennial fan favourite Yamamaya! For everyone’s favourite berserker catgirl to go from semi- and quarterfinal finishes to lose to an absolute newb is probably the biggest upset of the year. While a lot of people are saying “ELF ORGY! ELF ORGY!” I’m honestly thinking that character fatigue might have more to do with Yamamaya’s loss. We’ve been doing Yamamaya’s art redesign for a long time now, people are just kind of tired of the catgirl. We’ll see if I’m right next year, I suppose, because if I am Yama should bounce back.
As for Florine, her victory is a bit of a surprise as Doll made it all the way to the semifinals last year, but I’m happy to see Florine end up doing so well. I’m looking forward to doing more content for her, so I hope she goes far! Will she be able to beat the pro-elf bloc, though? I wonder….
Conash: Meiriona, the girl who would turn fans into a parliament of owls, won over Yamamaya who’s been the exception to the typical prize apathy rules (making it to the semi-finals in 2016 and into round 3 in 2017). After that powerful of a victory round 1, I’d say that the elf orgy itself has a good chance of taking this entire contest. Florine winning against Doll was a bit surprising, though after the great commentary we got by orifalcon where it was pointed out that Florine has never lost a match by more than 1 vote in the past two years, I certainly wasn’t willing to count her out. Doll’s popularity however has become even more difficult to grasp though as last year she made it to the semi-finals… I will certainly say though, these two girls completely ruined my predictions of Q3 as a whole, I had Doll pegged as making it to the Semi-finals with Yamamaya being her biggest competition, turns out both my #1 and #2 pick for this quarter lost in the first round.
Nekochan: Florine takes away everything I love. Like cinnamon rolls. #savetheelves #yesIknowImcontradictingmyselfshutup #vengenceforDoll

May 24th- Diadira vs Larelle/Penelope
NoMoshing: I was going to do a writeup for both Larelle and Penelope, but at this point Larelle is leading by 21 votes, so I’m just going to go ahead and talk about it like Larelle has already won. Though that may change and this will look hilarious in hindsight. This is actually going to be a pretty exciting matchup from my perspective. These two characters represent the only girls getting into round two where a) they don’t have their LQ yet and b) I have a very strong idea fo what I want to do for them. Literally every other character I know what I want their LQ to be- Chimei, Gargan, Renfeld, Doll- are all gone. I’m really surprised that Meline and Penelope are both eliminated so decisively, though. Meline is a longtime fan favourite and Penelope did quite well for herself in Iron Waifu 2016. But so it goes, I guess. Either way, looking forward to this matchup, I have no complaints if either of these girls make it to the crown.
Conash: Before the tournament, I fully expected the finals of Iron Waifu to come down to Brigandine vs Larelle, given that Penelope also has her first love quest done I fully expected this match to be the biggest landslide of round 1, though Nerys vs Bell definately set a high bar so who knows if that prediction would come true. I certainly have my criticisms about Larelle but I recognize that she’s got her audience and I’m glad you all enjoy her. Diadira’s victory over Meline makes sense to me as well. While Meline is one of my personal favorites prize apathy tends to hit girls other than Yama pretty hard, meanwhile some of the reasons people have trouble getting invested in Diadira would be solved if she wins, which helps undercut some of the potential anti-voters out there.
Nekochan: Larelle is the harem girl I get the most requests to draw so I have a soft spot for her since I find drawing a character gives me more of a sense of the character (you wouldn’t believe how much I think about what kind of underwear each girl wears and what that says about them…). Rescue Me is also catchy. Good matchup and I won’t be bitter. #liesyesIwill

Iron Waifu and Yamamaya bug

Hey everyone! We’re nearing the end of April so I’m sure that many of you know what that means! Time for another Iron Waifu Grand Tourney! I’d also like to spend part of this blog post talking about a bug many players have found in one of Yamamaya’s scenes and how to fix it, so stay tuned for that!

For those of you who don’t know, this is a tournament that we run every year for the duration of May to pick the best ‘Waifu’ in Harem Collector. The winner of the tournament will be the central focus to an update in autumn of this year, though what content they get exactly varies as we try to keep it to content that we already planned to add into the game. This year we decided to post what each prize the participants could win also in the same thread up above so I suggest checking that out to see what sort of goodies your Waifu could win, or if maybe you’d rather try to void in your second favorite Waifu instead because you prefer her prizes! Ultimately though, as with previous years you’ll need an account on the forum and we’ll be having these one-off matches everyday between the girls. Hope to see you all there!

Now, many players have reported that one of Yamamaya’s optional scenes currently crashes the game. This was caused by when moving from the old 3D images of the scene to 2D images NoMoshing rewrote the scene to fit better, but for some reason his changes didn’t save. This became a problem since there were originally 6 3D scenes but only 5 2D scenes, which means that if the game tries to load the sixth scene it WILL crash the game (unless you have 3D images turned off since the game still thinks they’re 3D scenes). While this bug has been fixed for the 0.34 release and onward, I wanted to take a moment to help share a fix that moonblack pointed out to me on the forums. See if when in the Harem Collector folder you head into the ‘Graphics’ folder, then create a new ‘Pictures’ folder than add in any image and title it ‘Yamamaya2-6’ it from then on load that image and you can play the scene without any crashes. To that end, we’ve decided to include a copy of the final image of the scene properly named so that players can use it for the scene to help ensure that they get a relatively seamless experience with the scene. Hope you all have fun!


 

Decisions and bugs

Hey everyone, Conash again, wanted to talk about some important bugs/coding stuff that I’ve been working on the past few days. Though I would first like to mention that patreon backers should keep their eyes out since we’re planning to release version 0.33 today!

Next on the table, in regards to last weeks blog post I thank everyone very much for your opinions you shared. Between both the majority opinion and my own agreeing that the praising system would feel more at home with the ‘personal happiness’ it will find itself moved there starting with the 0.33 release. Players will be advised they may need to give a new gift to girls they had praised to get them back up to full gift happiness if they are transferring over their save files. That said, we did get a few suggestions as to ways that we could add further nuance to the praising system, but I’m sorry, with how the code is designed there just wasn’t exactly room to go to really go with either idea… Though I will say that I did make sure to lay a bit of ground-work to add further complexities to the system for when more praising events get added, nothing out of left-field just keeping in line with what the game has already promised (because trust me, without the new additions thanks to the happiness system we WOULD have had to flat out cut out some of the elements mentioned in the praising tutorial)!

Anyways, onto the main reason that I wanted to post two blog posts in a row, thanks to dedication from our tester GameAdam some very critical bugs in the furniture system were made apparent to me. Some of you may have noticed some difficulties getting girls to ‘love’ furniture, this was actually an issue that many people reported that I had put down to them not understanding it, but it turns out that there was actually a bug that made it so that most of the ‘love’ locations would flat out ignore those girls. You could still get them to ‘like’ items if they were set to like those, but that was due to another bug entirely that didn’t properly check if a girl loves/liked a location when determining if they liked/hated an item where it was, this was especially humorous in that it lead Penelope to hating several items placed in the Eastfort Condo. Both of these bugs have been fixed and many of the items that were already in the game have also gotten a once over and had their ‘love’ lists expanded quite a bit. With all of these changes, along with a new girl (and maybe even the ground-work for a few other future girls) in the mix, players will be advised to remove and put back all their furniture if they wish to get the best happiness values out of them, this however is only a suggestion and not actually a requirement and failure to do so will NOT resort in problems with the game.

See, given that I already knew we were going to add in more future girls into the game when I made this system, and how it was precisely designed, I made sure that when you placed furniture down it would store a copy of whatever effects it did (even to girls whom you hadn’t acquired yet), and removing the items will apply the inverse effect ONLY to whatever is stored there rather than figuring out what it ‘should’ do from scratch. A fair amount of aspects of the furniture system were designed with a similar philosophy as to prevent accidentally getting a permanent -2 happiness on a character just because of a coding oversight. It also comes with the added benefit of preventing exploits that would gain you permanent +2 happiness as well, but enough of me continuing to grow the list of betrayals I’ve committed against my fellow min-maxers. Point is, in the 0.33 release there will be a lot of fixes and changes to the furniture system so it would be a good idea to pick everything back up and put it back down, but if you’re happy with the current bonuses you’re receiving you can keep things how they are.

I am also working on adding a bit of an expansion to the furniture system so that new items that you buy from stores (like the Bearskin rug or the Light and Mercy Banner) will be bit more…. Interesting, but right now that whole thing needs a lot of bug testing before I’m ready to promise it’s inclusion.

That should be just about everything. Sorry for all the rambling about more boring code stuff, but I hope some of you found it interesting!