A lot of changes going down

Okay, so before I even continue with this, let me stress this enough; these are IDEAS we're throwing around,  not permanently locked stuff. We're even still changing stuff at the time I write this message.

Now, that said, we've basically realized there is a lot about this game people DO like, but just as much people DON'T like about it, ourselves included. Also, ignore the picture above until you get later down in the document; I'll explain that later.

The primary problems seem to be;

- The game feels like a grind from point A to point B, with no real breaking up of the gameplay flow in between, aka monotonous

- Enemies have almost no incentive to be killed or interacted with outside of H-scenes

- The health regen system promotes sitting around, slower gameplay, yet Talia's abilities and the general abilities of the enemies promote faster, more action-based gameplay; these are clashing ideals

- There is no "reward" for completing a map or area, or a level, besides just general progression of the game 

So, we took this stuff to the drawing board, made a list of our favorite games, came up with a shitton of gameplay ideas, and whittled it down to what is still a quite large list.

I'm not going to be specific with these changes, because WE aren't even down to specifics yet, which is why I'm asking you to bear with us, and this isn't a locked-in choice, again; we'll put out a demo of gameplay with all these changes once we get the C++ conversion done, and then if people absolutely hate it, we'll revert to what we have now, but otherwise, we do feel this fixes all four problems above and makes the game positive as a whole.

So, without further ado, this is what we're THINKING of doing, and please read all of this before responding/making an opinion, because a lot of these changes mesh together, so you'll need the full picture, etc.

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The biggest change of all is that we'd be restructuring the game's levels into "hubs" as it were; if you've ever played Mario 64, or Crash Bandicoot 3, it's the same concept, altered to fit our game.

So for example, you'd start off in a large room, in this case, the Fire Level "hub". This room would have things to explore in it and do in it, and then there would be around 4 or 5 doors you could go into, from this hub.

Each of the doors would lead to a small "path" of rooms, say, 3-7 rooms per "path". The path would still be MOSTLY linear, but there would be "split off" rooms that you could find by exploring each room (more on this later).

Each of these paths would be somewhat "thematic" or have a gimmick within a gimmick, so to speak.

For example, one path in the Fire Level might be focused on lava and the ways you can interact with it; we could make a room with Berserkers that chase you around the map until you lead them into lava to die, and another room on that path would have a continual supply of enemies that drop down from the sky into lava which you'd have to jump through, and the last room could be something like a switch puzzle where you'll have to setup the correct usage of vents to navigate over a large lava pit. These are again temporary ideas, we'd come up with better stuff for the actual game.

One of the main things we're debating right now is whether it would be good to have;

1) Lots of rooms per path, but have them be smaller and more focused, or

2) Fewer rooms per path, but have them be larger and more "exploratory-based" with more to do in each room 

The new focal objective of a level would be finding the five "important" databanks, signified by a special color (like red or gold or etc. we haven't decided on the color yet).

Each of these databanks would have one piece of the "code" or "puzzle" needed to access the boss, but to get this piece, you'd have to do something with the databank; one of these databanks might have a simple, Wario-ware esque-game you'd have to beat (for example, you might set off an alarm accessing it; if you don't shut down the alarm in 20 seconds, guards come and fuck Talia and kick her out of the room, you'll have to try again etc.), or there might be a "security camera" say, observing Faye trying to crack the lock herself; she's figured out the second letter of the code, so if you zoom the camera in properly using the security camera during the cutscene, you can figure out the second letter of the code, and so on.

Not every "path" will have an "important databank", and some paths might even have two "important databanks".  This leads me to the next part; if you're worried about backtracking, don't be.

The save pads will now double as teleportation pads, where the player can jump on one of them and teleport to any pad they've already accessed in that level, allowing them to quickly jump to the end of any path they've already been in, making exploring the level once you've unlocked all the pads a breeze.

Going back to the databanks though, there will now be three types of databanks;

- The important databanks would be the ones I'd mentioned earlier, of course.

- Then there would be silver databanks, which would be important pieces of storyline, but not required to grasp the storyline at a basic level; these also might consist of not only text logs, but audio logs, or even security camera recordings, or even cutscenes built around these databanks (they could be traps, etc.) A few of these would be Patreon databanks, but not all of them.

- Finally, there would be green databanks, databanks that are only about universe building (most of the Patreon databanks would go in here, would be shaping the universe of the game, etc.) 

This of course doesn't even take into account the additions we already had planned, like storyline branching cutscenes; now, those cutscenes will REALLY branch out, where the following could happen;

- Talia goes down path #1, rescues someone from an enemy about to kill them; Talia gets medicine from the grateful person.

- Talia then goes down path #3, sees an injured grunt, gives them the medicine to save their life, the grunt thanks them and clears the next area of enemies for them by scrambling their security orders.

- Way off in the Electricity level, you get caught by robots, but you remember that Fire Grunt? Well, turns out his brother is in charge of security for the Electricity level, so he waves off the robots and gives you a tip about the level in exchange for saving his brother's life.

Now, conversely, if you do this sequence differently...

- Talia now goes down path #3 first, but without medicine, the soldier dies. However, in dying, Talia can rummage through his stuff and find a keycard.

- In the Ice Level, this keycard can be passed off to two aliens to allow you access to a databank; Talia thinks it'll be important information... but instead, we see that shows a video recording of the aliens having their way with Faye, much to Talia's disgust, but to our enjoyment.

So that's the kind of branching storyline choices we'll be able to integrate with this new system, etc. 

Finally, one of the last adjustments we'd be adding here would be a camera zoom system; for very large maps, we might zoom the camera out, so you can explore more, but if you're having a hentai scene going on, we'll give you the option to zoom in.

Now, for the picture example above, now that I've explained everything;

- The pink circle would be Talia's starting position in that "path"

-The blue circle is the end of the path, and the "teleportation" pad 

- The red circles would be locations of the "important databanks"

- The green rooms would be the "off the beaten path" rooms, where you might find "powerups" or cutscenes or anything else in between (more on those later) 

We feel these changes will lead to fixing point #1, the grind system; this breaks the level into manageable segments, makes backtracking extremely easy if you miss anything, and ties somewhat into point #4 about the reward system, but we're not even close to done with this post, heh.

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Now, let's cover how we're going to manage point #2 & 3;

Enemies currently have almost no incentive to be fucked with, besides, well, fucking them, and the health/regen system is just bad as it is, as it promotes going idle frequently and just running through enemies while invincible.

 We haven't settled on a system yet, but we're throwing around a few ideas, including;

1) a combo system that the more enemies you kill in a short period of time, the more health you get, and then you can even "overheal", entering basically whoop ass mode temporarily

2) a system where you directly take health from damaging enemies, and if you "overkill" them (do way more damage than what was needed to kill them) you get a special, temporary boost to damage, or mobility, or etc. depending on the enemy you "overkilled" among others, etc. 

3) only certain enemies will give you health, sort of like some games where there's special, mostly weak enemies that you can get large portions of life from

We're still coming up with many ideas, but the core of it is that  we'd basically be aiming towards creating a health system that REWARDED aggression, but didn't penalize bad players, if that makes sense.

We're also debating adding extra utility for Talia from the get-go as a result of these changes, like a roll, or dash, or even a double jump.

Also, we'll be lessening Talia's invincibility period big time, and making enemies "solid" so she can't just walk through them while being invincible anymore. To compensate about the extra enemy threat, not only will we have one of those systems in order, we'll have a few extra things, which I'll get into in a later point. 

Oh, and we might have something secret planned if you choose to be a complete asshole during the game to enemies (no, this doesn't mean JUST killing enemies, we're not going Undertale Genocide mode :P)

And of course, killing certain enemies might trigger certain cutscenes to play or not to play, too.

We feel these changes will lead to fixing point #2 & 3; making enemies more engaging and fun to deal with, and giving real rewards and incentives for killing them.

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Now, let's cover how we're going to manage point #4; rewards for completing or exploring areas.

First of all, as I'm sure you already know from this post and prior ones, we're planning extensive cutscenes, minigames on databanks, sex scenes, etc. all rewarding you for exploring areas of the game.

We're also planning special animations, in high detail, for special achievements like collecting all the databanks in a level or other possible variables.

However, one extra thing we're considering doing (I'm REALLY for the idea, Triangulate is semi for it, and Cheshire just signed off as we came up with this idea unfortunately

so he hasn't seen it yet.) is a "powerup" system for Talia that you can get by accessing rooms and discovering the powerups.

Now hold on, I know a lot of you suggested this and I rejected it outright, but let me explain myself and what we want to do with this.

First off, all the powerups would be mild stat boosts, you could only have three at a time, and they would not stack; meaning you couldn't get three of the "fire faster" powerup and just blow up the game, so to speak.

The powerups would be gathered in a number of places; some databanks might eject them if you beat a small minigame, others might have a security camera you can observe that shows a secret part of a room with one, another might actually be a quick time event when a databank is about to explode as a trap, and you have to grab the powerup before it's caught on fire. Again, we're throwing around ideas and grinding stuff down, etc.

As far as the powerups themselves, they would again be mild stat boosts; stuff like increased firing rate, increased damage, increased running speed, increased defense, that sort of thing.

What we're especially debating right now though is;

- Whether the powerups would be temporary or not

- If temporary, would they initiate the minute Talia picks them up or would the player be able to choose when to activate them

- If permanent, would the player be able to drop powerups to pick up new ones, or would it simply a be a "newest powerup replaces the old one" system like Castlevania

and so on, but we feel that this will offer us a wide variety of rewards for exploring the game's maps;

- Cutscenes (storyline & sex scenes)

 - Powerups

- Databanks (storyline & cutscenes & level progression)

- Fun gimmicks to try out

Again, all of this is basically just up in the air right now, but I wanted to put that out there to see what you thought of it all so far.

This of course isn't even counting the stuff we already had planned, which includes;

- Dynamic music that changes drastically as you get near enemies,  get low on life, get a boss on low life, etc.

- Dynamic lighting (lighting with depth )and parallax backgrounds

- Extra abilities gained from bosses per level (a new elemental charge shot and a new elemental utility ability per boss)

- Multiple (over ten) cutscenes per level, all voiced, with branching storyline paths based on what cutscenes/databanks you do/don't interact with, and choices you make during the game

- Multiple endings also based on the above choices

- A gallery system

And for anyone worried this is going to delay the game more, we're specifically choosing to do this right now because we're going to have a 2 month hiatus on demos and adding new levels to the game to begin with due to the C++ conversion and Cutscene Editor creation; during this time period, Triangulate is still doing art, but this break allows us to have a solid gameplay restructuring on all counts ready to go once the C++ conversion is done.

Finally, all of these changes we've listed should require only a few programming changes/additions which can be seamlessly put into the game during the C++ conversion, only a few extra pieces of art from Triangulate, etc. Most of the work will be on my end crafting cutscenes and new maps, which I'm happy to do, of course.

Let us know through PMs and the comments what you think of these changes and how many you'd be hype for and not hype for, etc.!