Progress log-ish thing?

Weird progress log here. Development has been all over the place since the last progress log, and just like development itself, this post is going to be all over the place as well.

Let's start with early October. After releasing v1.5 for Hana Exposure, I started working on a small update, which was going to be v1.6. There were two reasons for me developing that update, one was that there was some small Steam functionality that I wanted to add in v1.5. I even had added in v1.5 some stuff that would make use of that functionality, but the implementation of that Steam functionality didn't make it in time, and I released v1.5 without it, but with the idea of instead adding it in a small patch later on, which would be v1.6. The second reason was that there were a couple of small event lines that I had worked a bit on and wanted to add, but that didn't make it in time for v1.5 either. The idea was simple, to make a small surprise update that could be wrapped up within a month.

Here is where things got a bit less simple, the Steam functionality that I was thinking of adding turned to be a bit messier and problematic to implement than I was hoping for, and some of it was straight up not going to be possible. On the other side of things was the content. I took those two event line ideas and worked on them. Overall, two small event lines, which were about 13 events total that I was expecting to result in about 400 or so interactions worth of content. Fairly small and simple. I wrote the first event, and it came out at 80 interactions. No thank you. Those small events were clearly going to turn out to be 3 times or so bigger than what I had in mind, which is what had happened with the old man changing NPC event line in v1.5. Seeing as the commitment was going to be considerably bigger than what I prepared myself for, I immediately put it down and got out of there.

Unfortunately, the small surprise update is no more. I did spend time developing it, and that time spent will not materialize into an update, but it's not all bad. The good thing is that there is now a blueprint for a potential update with a layout and content foundation there. As unlikely as this may be, if I do at any point decide to work on another Blooming Flower update, I would not be starting from zero.

Purple Dream: 

Now let's go to mid-October. After dropping the v1.6 update, I went back to work on Purple Dream, and was really excited to do so. For context, the development done on Purple Dream during the development of v1.5 was very non-direct. Everything I worked on were things that weren't in-engine, such as writing events, some of the story segments (think the level up events from Hana Exposure), a bit of learning and experimenting with some new tools that I will be using during development, etc.

The first thing I did when resuming development, wasn't to continue where I was, but to take a step back when it comes to the models for both, Aika(Teacher) and Shizumi(Student). There were some improvements I wanted to make. Some to the actual shape of their models, and some that would affect how things were done in-engine with some gameplay related things. The problem is that these changes completely destroy all rigging, UVs, textures, the few animations done, etc. It was a step back, but it had to be done.

After doing those improvements though, rather than fixing and redoing the things that broke, I instead decided to work on other areas of PD. The models and all of the 3D character related things have taken a good chunk of the dev time in PD, and I wanted to work on something else, as I prefer to not spend too long on one single area, because otherwise I start feeling as if I am stuck and progress is not being made, which does not help. So, I moved over to the coding area.

Late October. I started developing the actual proper system for various things in PD. I had some prototypes, but now was time for the real thing. The first thing on my list was the CG system, which was its own can of worms. To give some context, there really isn't a script or logic written for the CG system itself in Hana Exposure. It was all very direct due to the nature of the events, which were all 100% linear and without anything that could change for that same event. Here in PD on the other hand, the event system is being built in a way that it support displaying various kinds of optional things, some of which are cosmetic, and some of which will affect the event content.

Making a CG system that is capable of displaying the customization of Aika and Shizumi, with the system being able to handle the CG and progression of the event being non-linear, with directions and progressions on the event and CG that can be added and removed based on factors outside of the event, and in some instances all of this being tracked and done in multiple CGs at once in those events that have multiple angles at once. This is all something I absolutely have never worked with before, and really complex in comparison to the almost non-existent CG system in Blooming Flower.

Late October-Early September-Now. One of things that I needed to start working on when working on the CG system was the ability to make stat changes based on the interactions in the event, which brought me to move on to the stat system. Like the CG system, this one is also tricky. If you think about Blooming Flower, there really aren't any stats there. Really there was only one stat, and that was Hana's level. That's it. Here in PD on the other hand, there is a lot more going on in the stat area. They are mostly stats that will be used for mini-game/event related things, and the others will be mostly used to keep track of the condition of Aika/Shizumi. The big thing here is that these stats aren't just a number, and that is where the complexity comes in. The stats in PD will be affected by a wide variety of external factors that will manipulate how the stats work, and because of it, as I was working on the stat system, it became clear that I needed to start working on these external factors at the same time as well, which brings me to the next point. Traits and status conditions.

Those external factors that affect stats are mostly based around what I am calling traits and status conditions. Let's start with traits. It's a whole system. Traits are a set of various things that are individually levelled, and have their own progression. Traits range from parts of the body, which can be something like a "breasts" trait, which as you can guess, would serve as a level of the progression of the character's breasts, to then traits that are based on actions, such as a hand-job trait, to then traits based on interests, such as an exposure trait. Both Aika and Shizumi have their own set of traits, some of which can be found on both characters, and then some traits that are exclusive to either one of them.

The idea of keeping some semblance of tracking of these kinds of stats isn't all that unusual, but generally what you find in other games is a simple number that tracks the amount of times you have engaged in that activity, and more often than not, those numbers do nothing. They are just a number that goes up without having any effect on the content. Every now and then you can find games that can unlock content based on the amount of times you have engaged in an activity, which will generally be along the lines of "You get that blowjob counter to 20, and you will be able to see this one event.". Here in PD on the other hand, traits aren't a simple "repeat x activity a certain number of times to reach the magic number" kind of deal, the traits in PD are based on a levelling system that works around experience, and experience gain isn't a flat number that relies on a simple repetition of an action. Here you can gain a lot of experience and level up traits fast by doing things in a correct and reasonable way, or level them up really slow by pushing Aika/Shizumi way too far and way too fast. Overall, it's a really cool system that has many effects in gameplay, such as by adding positive and negative permanent multipliers to stats based on the level of the trait, as well as adding a lot of progression outside of a standard lewdness level. PD does contain a base lewdness level, but that is only a part of the content unlocking experience, the other part is traits. Trait progression will unlock content in various ways, such as unlocking whole event lines, some interactions/actions in existing events, some small dialogue changes on events, etc. Traits are really important, and that is why their progression is more than just an arbitrary action repetition number. It's a more complex and intricate system, and one of the things that plays a really big part on the progression of traits during gameplay is the other external factor of the stat system, which brings me to the next point.

Status conditions. Status conditions are all over the place, and are obtained in all kinds of ways. There are good ones, and there are bad ones. For example, if you haven't taken good care of Aika, and certain stats that reflect her state are getting low, she gets a certain negative status condition placed on her, and the status condition will only worsen the lower the relevant stats get. This status condition would have various kinds of negative effects on gameplay that would end up making it harder to progress events due to the negative impact it would have on event related stats. But, if you take good care of Aika, she will recover and not have to deal with any of these negative effects. That is an example of a status that is very general. Now let's use an example of one that could happen during an event. Let's say Aika climaxes, she will then get a "sensitive" status condition, which will be a good status condition that will increase the gain of some stats during a set amount of interactions, but if you on the other hand make her endure things that are way past what she is capable of engaging in, on top of the event related stats moving in a negative way, you also run the risk of getting a status condition that would only work against you. This is just the surface of the kinds of status conditions, there are so many different kinds of statuses that work in all kinds of ways, but you get the general idea. Another cool thing is that status conditions will be able to have their effects changed based on certain traits. If there is a situation that gives Aika/Shizumi a status condition, it'll likely be a bad one early on in the game, but what if the relevant trait has been leveled up to a certain point, meaning that Aika/Shizumi has started to enjoy said thing...? The effect of the status will be different, and might even become a good status condition. Overall, there will be some status conditions that will make things harder, some of which can be altered over time into becoming good things, and some good statuses that will become even better. There are simple status conditions that will have very general gameplay effects such as simply alter stat gain and loss, and some other more complex ones that will enable certain interactions and mini-events based on a status condition.

As you can see, development has been a mess. I was working on the v1.6 update for Hana, then changed my mind, then moved on to the models of PD, but didn't want to spend too long in it and went to work on the CG system, but the CG system and general event system required me to start working on the stat system, but while working on the stat system, it was better for me to also start working on the status condition system, because it directly affects how the stat calculations work, but while doing status stuff I needed to get the trait system going as well, because traits have various effects on the effects of status conditions, as well as also giving permanent changes to stat calculations.

To further add to the mess, we go back to how these levels of complexity are something that I have never worked with before. In the process of making these systems, I have had to rewrite them partially and even completely many times, and each time I change one system, I have to fix and tweak the other systems to work with the updated one I had changed, as they are all part of one bigger ecosystem.

There's been a lot of improvements done through the many iterations of these system. Some improvements have been to add functionality that would've been difficult or impossible to do without a restructure of the system, some changes have removed bloat to make them more efficient and compact, some have made them easier for the other systems to work with, or simply make it easier to add additional functionality to them later, etc.

Overall, development has been a mess, but not really in a bad way, just in a complicated way, if that makes sense.

A particular thing I have had in mind as I develop PD is brute-forcing. The development of Hana Exposure could be best described as brute-forced. It was not really intentional, but with the little experience I had at the time, I ended up brute-forcing many of the inner-working of the game, as I would write code, and go with the first thing I wrote, which would later on lead to many problems. Some of these were fixable, but would often lead to a lot of time having to be "wasted" to fix the issue as well as any side effects, and many other problems could simply not be fixed, many of which would cause the process of developing content to be really slow and tedious.

For PD, I am taking my time to do the opposite. I am taking my time to make sure that every system is the best possible version of it that I am capable of making, with every piece of functionality that I need and can think, as well as making them as simple and fast to work with so that the content development phase of the development is as fast as I can make it. It's of course resulting in a slower start, but after my experience with Blooming Flower, I know that the time wasted and headaches I will save myself from during the rest of the development will be well worth it.

Little fun fact, I started writing this post while I was waiting for an updated Unity build from the one I had been using for PD to download, as there was an issue that I tried to solve for many hours, and as it turns out, it was an issue with the engine itself. This is to further add to my point of not brute-forcing development. At least when it comes to Unity, updating the engine is generally a no-no as there is a good chance that it will break various things. Had I been brute-forcing the development and had more of content implemented, this engine change could've been catastrophic, but because I am focusing on first making every single system, and make sure that they are all set and as optimized as possible for the rest of development, I am able to make all of these changes, such as updating the engine, rework these systems that I mention in this post, etc. All without having to worry about not breaking a whole game built on top of a faulty foundation.

Little good news, the engine update worked. It solved the issue I was dealing with, and now the headache the issue was giving me is fading away...

A lot of the things I talked about here were brief and without great detail, such as traits, status conditions, stats, event interactions, customization, etc. Because these are all big parts of the game, and each of them deserve their own big breakdown. Right now my idea was to give a "brief" overview into the state of development.

Anyhow, messy progress log over. This log was late, and the reason for it was me just not being sure of what to write about. Things have been too hectic, and development has been spread too wide to really make a proper progress log that is focused on something, as I generally tend to do.

This progress log went on for so long. My bad. I genuinely wonder how many read all of it.

The next progress log will likely not release at the end of this month, but towards the middle of December.

Thank you for supporting the development of Purple Dream!!!