October Devlog (Dialogue Plans)

Hello, welcome to the October devlog! 

I've been pretty busy with commissions this month, so I haven't had much time to focus on game development. So, while I don't have much to show off this month, I wanted to share some work and plans that I have for my various projects. I'll also be including a cute game build to show off some of my development tests if that's something you'd like to try out. 

• The Blind Date Game

The Blind Date Game is still my main project at the moment. If you remember from the roadmap, after the first beta comes the date system OR h-scene system. Currently, I intend to work on the date system, but I'll go into both systems here in this post.

Date System:

The Blind Date Game's date system will be strongly inspired by the Sakura Wars LIPS system. There will be a few differences, but the gist of it is this:

- After loading into a date with a girl, the dialogue system will start.
- The game will choose random events to play. Some of the planned events include Question & Answer Events, Quick Time Events, Minigames, and Point & Click Events.
- Individual events will use generated personality traits and the perversion level to determine the contents of the events and the difficulty (higher perversion is easier).
- If the player can succeed in a good percentage of events, they will pass the date. Pass a number of dates to win!

H-scene System:

I'm often bothered by the lack of communication in game sex systems. For this game, that will be a strong focus.  Here's a simple explanation:

- Scenes will be from player POV
- The current intended scene pacing is (foreplay - sex - climax - afterglow)
- The majority of interaction in H-scenes will be through a radial menu. This menu will contain action commands and dialogue commands.
- Examples of action commands would be things like changing position, kissing, or choosing a place to grope. This would also include the ever important cum option.
- Dialogue commands would include things like "How does that feel?", "Want to try something else?", "I'm getting close", as well as letting the player confess their love for their girl.
- Thrusting will be done through a simple single button input. Press and hold to push in, release to pull out. The game will calculate a pace from repeated button presses. There will also be a cruise control to let the game move for you.
- Another main goal of this system will be one handed play, so I hope to make it easy whether you're using a mouse, keyboard, or controller.

One of the main challenges I'm facing for the project at the moment is how to set up the dialogue. I've been messing around with a powerful scripting tool in Godot, but I suspect it won't work particularly will for game dialogue, so I'll be spending the majority of the upcoming month focused on setting up the dialogue and events systems for dates. 

I hope to get to the H-scenes as soon as possible but the main focus of the dating game is the dating for now.  Hopefully the next update will be available before the end of the year!

• Date a Mink 3D

While The Blind Date Game is my main focus at the moment, I've also been tooling some code for the upcoming Date a Mink project. Most of that so far has been focused on a tool called Dialogic (check it out here). Using this tool, I've been able to create some fairly impressive visual novel style scenes really easily. One of my first tests was to even recreate the original Date a Mink demo (in all it's sloppy glory)! 

Although Dialogic might not work well for randomness in something like The Blind Date Game, the scripting system is powerful enough to work well for the full 3D project. Along with the Date a Mink demo recreation, I've also included a save/load and 3D animation test as an attachment to this post.

Keep in mind that the Date a Mink project will be a whole new story! I'll be working on this alongside the Blind Date Game for now, so it should ideally be ready sooner rather than later (assuming I can get all the game features working). When I get closer to having something to show, expect a devlog focused on this project.

• Collab Project

This is just a small update (this project is still on a bit of a hiatus) but I've been porting this project from ren.py over to Godot using Dialogic. I've gotten some impressive results so far, so I'm hoping I can reveal more about this project soon! 

Final thoughts: 

There's a lot coming your way soon! I'm honestly fairly excited to get some of these smaller projects out of the way. I've mentioned it before, but one of my main hopes is to build up the skill to create my game Catgirl Care. With the progress I've made so far, that project is no longer feeling impossible for me. This project has been on my mind for a long time, so I can't wait to be in the position to create it. 

For now, remember to check out the latest beta and the new modding docs!