Liora's Price of Dignity Devlog 5 0.1.0-prerelease-1

MEGA-DELUXE

The prototype development continues! I have continued working down the list of technical fundamentals in order to establish a strong foundation. I generally did a lot of refactoring at the beginning of the week to get a lot of the super-prototype implementation from the first two weeks under control and then went on do deal with logical expansions of the framework.

The way that Edgar's proposals work is that they aren't completely random; there is a database with default constructed proposals both for him to Liora and what he would like to have in return. This way nonsensical proposals are avoided and the choices are mostly interesting.

I implemented a simple generator that then takes the proposals and makes various sensible variations - for example before the costume clause only existed for the defeat condition for Liora, not it will generate proposals for when Rean gets defeated, Liora gets defeated or if an Area is cleared. This gives a decently big state space while keeping the options sensible. (For complex clauses on Liora's side you would approach Edgar at home and then you can freely make your own proposal.)

Of course all of this requires quite a bit of technical background work to keep everything clean. Clauses with the same trigger condition are now merged together, "conflicts" are removed (For example if an old clause states that Edgar should use Skill X under condition Y and the new clause says he should use Skill Z, then Z replaces Y). The AI for Edgar will also only make proposal it deems to increase the value, again in order to filter out a lot of dumb mechnically possible choices.

I also expanded the negotiation system with another variable: Restrictions. You can apply them both to Edgar's clauses or your own at the cost of reducing the VALUE by 50%. This way you can for example make Edgar focus on using protective skills on day X, focus on just guarding to avoid kill-stealing on day Y, and have him chip in by attacking enemies on day Z. Of course making so many deals will also mean Edgar gets a lot of clauses himself as well!

In order to build up the erotic scene system and figure out how to best implement dynmic clause interference, I have expanded Edgar's arsenal. He can now expand Liora's masturbation duration and have thoughts about him appear in her mind.

Finally, I expanded the negotiation system with the option to simply trade a clause for gold. This basically is the SKA default case.

Speaking of the erotic system, besides the foundation building on the core contract & negotiation, another big system I have been working on this week is the Pleasure System. To talk about that, let's first of all welcome back a good friend I have ported over from SKA:

The Sexual Stat screen! Expanded with a lot more stats as this time around we will have a dynamic pleasure & climax system. In SKA, reaching climax was mostly a pre-scripted decision. There were some cases where based on passives, the number of orgasms could differ, but generally speaking, this was narratively fixed. Here, Pleasure will be simulated through various variables. In order to reach an orgasm, the Orgasm Threshold needs to be passed (Currently set to a default of 50).

If passed with sufficient pleasure (currently 20) it will then increase the Treshold, making it more and more difficult to reach Orgasm with a partner that is less satisying.

On the top we have the usual friends, our sensitivities. On the left side, we have the partner preferences. The plan is that as Liora does lewd actions with Edgar, her preferences will subconciously increase / her body will adapt - it kind of models both. The default Penis Size preference stat represents 12cm by the way, it's not yet formatted to units and just the raw value. :'D

The way it works is that by default each story tick a "Generate Pleasure" event is generated and using all these stats, a pleasure increase is computed. For example if the penis size is below preferences, it will decrease generated pleasure. What also decreased pleasure for Edgar but increases for Rean, is the relationship variables which have also made their return.

Having to rely on Edgar to help Rean, triggering the "Think About Edgar" clause I showed earlier, all increase Liora's relationship with him. But in the beginning, the negative -100 starting value will cause pleasure to take quite a hit.

I hope that ultimately the system will allow for a lot of different ways for Liora to fall. Be it through pleasure from high sensitivity while still hating Edgar, or from pumping up his relationship with Liora.

I also already added a stub "Date and then sex with Rean" event which can be used to recover damages to their relationship (currently the silly "Giggle at Rean" clause can deal slight damage to their relationship). Of course, the default stats are chosen as such that sex with Rean will just fall a bit short of allowing Liora to reach, Orgasm. Instead she will gain "Sexual Frustration".

Which brings me to the third block of game mechanics: Character focused mechanics. Generally speaking, each of the three characters has one character mechanic:

• Liora: Perversion

• Rean: Disease

• Edgar: Prestige

Sexual Frustrtation and the "Arousal" stat you see in the screenshot are part of Liora's personal character mechanic. Arousal essentially replaces SKA's Corruption stat and works in a similar way to all those passives that said "on day start you lose X willpower". Instead of losing willpower it gives starting Pleasure during a h-scenes. I also gave the lewd outfit an Arousal bonus so it now has a gameplay effect.

ideally I would like to have a flow like:

• Lewd actions will Liora raise her partner expectations and increase her orgasm threshold

• Failing to reach orgasm when having sex with Rean gives Sexual Frustration

• In the end, this triggers behavior from Liora to seek out Edgar outside of the triggered situations from contract clauses

Of course, we are still a long way from the end side of this loop. There are still a lot of things to consider, in particular putting limits on Liora's lewd stats so that they grow with Edgar, but not with Rean, but that's for another iteration.

Okay, so I ended up going back to talk about Liora's personal mechanic when I actually wanted to talk about Edgar getting his own and Rean also having gotten an expansion of his mechanic.

As for Rean, while I decided to go with a mostly average starting value for penis size (representing the erect state), I'm afraid his Disease might not let him reach a full erection forever.

His increasing Decay now has a passive that interacts with the erotic system and reinforcing the above mentioned loop. Furthermore, you can now see important variables for Edgar and Rean in the Status Menu.

As for Edgar's mechanic, Prestige, it works as follows:

• Starting Prestige is 100

• Whenever an Area is cleared, Prestige is increased by 10

• Edgar makes an amount of money each day equivalent to his Prestige, so increasing his Prestige is ultimately good for the party since it means they can ask him for Gold in contract trades

• If after 7 days no Area has been cleared, his Prestige will start to decline as people will start to think he's incompetent

• This will motivate Edgar to participate more in battle even without a contract clause forcing him to, making battles significantly easier

In the future I would like him to also passively buy bombs and start using them at some point.

Speaking about making fights easier, you can now learn skills again. The skill training system in Liora will be quite different from SKA. In SKA, skills that were difficult to master required a "Promise" and then took a full day or maybe even multiple. This didn't really fit the format, so decided to try something different: In Liora you will be investing HP/MP towards learning a skill.

Each training session both costs a day end and some money, so you will want to keep them as short as possible. This gives a bit of a dilemma of using resources in dungeons versus saving them for learning skills. (If you want to stop dying in the technical prototype, I recommend learning Defensive Stance I on Liora :'D)

If you want Rean to learn a skill, you can also talk to him. He can only learn Martials but even then Protect and Defensive Stance can be quite useful and with his increased HP pool, they aren't as difficult to learn for him. However, trainers can only train one character a day, so you will need to decide between Rean and Liora.

In the future I hope Edgar will also autonmously learn skills that benefit him.

The last change is that I ported over the Clear Room. Instead of using the Clear Gem, interact with Liora's Diary in her room in the inn. It's funny that a technical prototype has New Game+ and New Game- but they were "free" and I didn't see any reason to remove them. I adjusted the score values somewhat (although they are still way to expensive) since Liora uses a diffent scoring system than SKA.

Here, the number of bosses killed won't matter. Only the number of area clears will be important whereas killing the final boss will always give you the max number of area clears. (Lewdness is still subtracted from the Victory Score). This also means that in contrast to SKA where doing mental changes would automatically exclude a playthrough from max score, here interacting with the contract system and still getting full core remains possible - just have to pick the right clauses / avoid triggering ones that raise Lewdness.

In the south I also setup the recollection room again, although here I still need to think about a couple of details. Since scenes are more dynamic in Liora we will have to see how useful a static recollection room is and what kind of options/settings might be necessary in order to properly see older scenes with low corruption values in an advanced corruption state and vice versa.

The post got quite long again. :'D There is still quite a some more I would like to talk about but it's getting late over here. If you are downloading the technical demo and the Compendium is looking messed up in a couple places, we are aware of that. I have been pushing it to the limits for implementing the Liora mechanics. Trihan did a cleanup of technical debt end of last month but there is still quite a lot remaining...

The core issue here was that aaaaall the way back then when we did the UI overhaul for SKA I had to hire an extra freelancer to help out and while his work initially seemed to look good, it has been the cause of a lot of technical debt over the years. And the actual root cause has yet to be removed, but Trihan is on it.

Next week, I will be slowly moving away from system development and stub out some more content bits for the real 0.1.0-prerelease-1. I originally wanted to release it a bit earlier to start with the artist seach but I will probably take the full week. I didn't expect I would be getting this far in this development so I want to ride the momentum a bit more. We will be doing the artist search in the week after that. It will steal some time from SKA but I think getting Liora up and running ASAP is worth it.

Then, until next week!