Incubus Island Monthly Goal #9 - December 2020 (Pre-Alpha soon!)

[Feel free to skip to the last section you aren't the type for my walls of text. It's fine, I understand; I am not a patient man myself. That's where I talk about the Pre-Alpha.]

Ok so we're almost done this shitshow of a year. Just a few more weeks, hang in there.

More importantly, just one week until Cyberpunk 2077. I'm not sure why everyone else is excited for that game, but I've literally never played a cyberpunk-themed FPS/RPG hybrid that didn't immediately get added to my top 10 list of games. I'm completely fine with there being nothing else I'm legally allowed to do during this Christmas holiday. What are the rest of you doing? 

Anyway, I got more time tweaking this. I picked 4 goals last month with the intent of doing at least 2 of them.

1) Resurrect combat system. I wanted to make combat a launch feature, but I've reconsidered since I made this goal. Reason: It would take a while to make this fun or interesting for 1-on-1 combat (since you can barely get party member in the game as-is). This will be really fun though, I'm looking forward to it.

2) Revise event system. I revised this. Now if you have a quest that takes you to an area, you'll have a relevant link suggesting that you for example "Look for that drug dealer you came here to confront..." which will launch the relevant event. This doesn't sound like that big a deal, but it involved revising a few things. I did a million other changes to how events and locations are worked. It's still kinda annoying to navigate between places for reasons I haven't thought enough about to put into words - something I'll have to work on. 

3) Finish more of the pharmacist story. I wanted to get this to the point where she was recruitable. I almost have it there, and may well implement it before release. Of course, once in your party she'll only be able to chime in on things; later, party members will be able to do more. 

4) Implement Psi Trainer. Haven't worked on it at all. 

Did all of #2, almost all of #3. Goal met, mostly.

Other Stuff I Did

• I messed around with how traits work. I'm on the verge of having traits work from table data instead of manually coding in their effects to certain circumstances individually. Any given trait (eg 'gullible', 'big boobs', 'short', 'married', 'in relationship', 'religious') can impact a character's ratings for looks (will determine their appeal for stuff like prostitution, porn, and how difficult it might be for a low-level character to communicate with them), fertility (how easy it is for the char to get pregnant), seductability (how easy they are to seduce), and soforth. 
• I started working on 'properties'. I intend for the player to be able to buy or rent properties. Obv you'll need a place to live, but you might also need an office (to look professional for certain types of interractions), a photo studio (to take photos or shoot porn scenes), dungeon chambers (I don't need to explain), living quarters (to house whores, once prostitution feature is implemented). This is just the start of something for further down the road.
• I fixed a few issues with pregnancy, and also added a stock pregnancy notification event where, if the pregnant character knows the player, is aware that the player impregnated them and did not impregnate them via rape, the player will receive a call at a certain stage of the pregnancy wherein he will be informed of it. Depending on the woman's traits, there might be variance in the conversation (eg. if she's married, that will be relevant to how she reacts). The player can spurn her, make her promises he may or may not intend to keep, or even try to fool her into thinking that he cannot possibly be the father - and the game will remember these choices. This is a feature that I will revise more with time, to add complexity and have your stats matter more in the outcome. There is a second follow-up to this closer to birthtime that I've only vaguely started. (I'll have to remember to change the pregnancy duration variable up, currently pregnancies are set to last 6 days.)
• I made some uh... how would I call them? Elements that can be reused across every scenario for the same circumstances. For example, when you're about to have sex, a woman might ask you to wear a condom, and when this happens the game will use a widget that has all the possible responses - based on your stats and her traits, of how you can address this (use a spefic type of condom, lie to her about being infertile, etc etc). Another type that I'm still working on is when you come across a locked door; you can lockpick it, unlock it with a specified item, force it open, or use another skill to get around it. I'm not finished this one but it'll look like <<chooseunlock key_frontdoor 3 5 0 >> where key_frontdoor is the item required to unlock it, 3 is the lockpick skill level (there's no lockpick skill per se, it's more of a generic fingerwork skill), 5 is the strength level, and so on.

Some Interesting News

It's not my project, so I can't say much about it until it is officially announced, but someone is working on a game that will use content from IC but recontextualize it into a fantasy universe, new art style etc. It's more than what I'm describing; I'm only describing the part of it that's relevant to my stuff. I've asked the author to keep me in the loop, and I'll post about it here when it's done. 

The author contacted me to confirm I'd be ok with this, so the reason I'm posting about it here is to reconfirm that you can take whatever and do whatever with IC. I said it and I meant it, just credit me and link to me where relevant. 

December - New Goals

I'm putting out a pre-alpha soon. I said I would, and I want to. I could spend a year just adding shit to it and not be satisfied enough to say it's ready, so I'd rather release something people can look at now to give an idea of what to expect from the project. I want to be clear: this is a pre-alpha. As I said in the Discord: "I wouldn't even describe it as a game yet, more of a playground where you can do things, interact with content." (It will also likely be way too large, because I have a stock porn gif folder in it that needs pruning. Don't have time to sort that out at the moment.)

I don't have much free time these days, so I want to spend as much of it as I can over the next week going over the content that's in the game so far and finishing up anything I left in a state, catching any bugs or weird issues that might confuse or irritate, pull out anything that isn't up to snuff or isn't finished, and so on. I've been doing this stuff all along, but I missed a lot of things I'm starting to realize. 

This release is mostly intended for people interested enough in my stuff to visit this site or the Discord. I'm not putting it on F95 or anywhere else yet, though I imagine it'll end up here and there without my doing anything. 

That's all I got. I'll post again around time of release. After that I intend to not sit in a computer chair, just relax until Jan. In Jan I'll probably get to putting out a patch or ten for IC (overdue), then get started on II again.