Dev Log #6 - Gameplay Mechanics & Asset Loading

Hello hello everyone! Take a look at the great outfits Zen has created for the girls. You can find the naked versions here: https://twitter.com/Queens_Brothel These outfits will be rewards for the Orc boss battle. Or will they? 

Today, we need to talk about how to update Queen's Brothel's gameplay mechanics. There's something I haven't been able to answer since I started creating the game. "What is fun about this game?" Truth is, people compliment me for all aspects of the game. Combat is cool, the girls are cool, the quests are cool, Suki is hot, I hear it all! I've spent my entire weekend breaking down a million ideas for the game and here's what I've came up with:

Contextual Sex is the Player's Reward

As much as I'd love to create a game with deep rich gameplay, I have to embrace that we're here to create hot girls, hot outfits, and hot quests. The player is playing because they want to see the girl's get railed X Y Z ways. The reward isn't just sex, because watching Queen getting slammed 100 times isn't fun. The reward is watching Queen get herself into a particular situation in which she has sex. Queen having sex with the University Principal might be cool, but having Queen secretly suck off the Principal underneath his desk while he is talking to someone else in the room is much much better. The context for the situation matters, and that's a much better reward than "just sex". 

Gameplay

Strip the current gameplay down to its core. What was I trying to accomplish? An RPG game with character leveling, those levels directly determine if the girl has successfully fuck a strong client. I made the gameplay into real-time actions because I wanted cool boss battles and I wanted the player to have to click buttons to have sex with clients and then I slowly realized RPG games rely on more than just leveling. We need way more stats for the girls, we need items you can equip, we need lots of modifiers for the clients. So let's ignore what we currently have and try something new.

I want each major location to be its own separate mini-game. Some sort of management simulation for that location only. All rewards will be specific to that location. This way we can introduce fresh content by simply introducing a new area. I can't answer what I'm going to do just yet. I think this entire weekend writing ideas into notepad, trying to find something that would be worth playing. I'd love ideas if anyone has any, but give me some more time to brainstorm and I'll update you guys in the next devlog.

Asset Loading

We have way too many pictures / assets for Queen's Brothel now. Loading all the animations and character images takes forever! Because of this, I'm re-doing how assets are loaded. We'll have all the assets stored in a .zip file, we'll load that .zip file and then store the location of every asset into a variable. When we need to load an asset, we'll find the location of the asset by its file name, and then load it into the engine. We'll do this for every major part of the game, maps, characters, menus. 

Below is a demo for this. The demo starts off loading that 100mb .zip file, and then extracts the assets into a variable. Then we boot up the main menu, which only loaded the X amount of images needed. Start a save file and the game will only load what is needed to display the map. Click the brothel or the house to access the 'Playground'. Right away, we'll load Queen, BUTwe're only loading Queen's current outfit. Her current outfit has textures for her body, face, clothes. When you change her clothes, the game will load that outfit and then display Queen again. Please try the demo! https://queensbrothel.com/beta/

Login with Discord

We're going to need user authentication for when we let anyone upload their own mods. I chose the "Login with Discord" option because their API is dead simple and I figured most gamers would have a Discord account anyways. We can't do "Login with Patreon" because Patreon's API is not safe to use this way, and they state that in their documentation. 

Logging in will only be used for modders because they will need to be able to delete and upload their mods without having to message me.

Conclusion

I wish I had more to say about the gameplay mechanics, but I just couldn't figure it all out just yet. I feel like I'm getting close to something I like, but then immediately find a caveat. Maybe I will spend some time playing other management games to help me brainstorm more ideas.