Incubus Update #13 - September

I regret to inform you that I did not post an update for August. Had/have a lot of other stuff going on, and circumstances kept me away from working on these projects (travel, extreme heat). I could have still found the time to post an update, but since I used this computer so seldom during that time it sort of skipped my mind, sorry about that. 

I still have some travelling to do, and it's still hot, but the latter issue seems to be waning. I hope to be able to work on it this month. 

Incubus City v1.11.7 

Before I go any further I will tell you about v1.11.7 of Incubus City. I posted about it on the Discord, the update isn't really significant enough to warrant its own post; no bugs were fixed, just a pointless feature added. Lemme quote myself: 

This isn't a real update, I just finished a silly feature I'd started work on a while ago. If you don't fuck any of the Smiths, you can dose their food with potions in your possession. Once you finish the game, you can read about what happened as a result of these dosings. 

https://mega.nz/file/aN8FVYyb#nwsyLLJ5AZsGWdOfFN8iW56U4dWIGbqv_zePUIs66aw 

This feature was just an experiment to see if I could come up with an efficient way of having dynamic endings generated from multiple conditions. I spent more time on it than I should have and learned that I could not in fact come up with such a way. 

If you want to play with this feature to see all the possibilities without having to end the game for each one, you're in luck: For the first time ever, the Watican has exhumed an ancient relic and approved its use in this matter. Use the code 'Corneacopia' to acquire this item. To return the relic to Watican, where it will be returned to its solid lead coffin, submerged in holy water and re-sealed with a barrage of blessings and prayers before being returned to the bottom of a deep shaft in the Italian alps, use the code 'Blindness'. 

To skip to the dosing part in question, use the code 'Dosimeter'. 

Previous and Future Goals

As I've mentioned, I haven't been able to work on II. Broadly, my goals with it were to finish the scenarios I'd made and fix it up enough to release what I have. I could release it now as-is, because there's more there than there was, but I feel bad about how wonky it is, and every time I look at it I see places it needs to be fixed up, bits of content that are missing because of changes I made later that sort of block them off (in particular I re-used the same 'page numbers' in places so that certain choices will lead you nonsensically elsewhere in the story). I don't know how long this will take but my aim is to release something in October that addresses some of this - though I wish I could say all of it. We'll see. 

The most important thing is to resume and continue work on it. It's good to leave projects for a bit and come at them from a fresh angle, but you leave things for too long and you forget how it works, and maybe lose initiative or otherwise become indifferent. I don't really want that to happen. 

Other Things That I Have Worked On

While travelling I sometimes tinker with new ideas to test their validity and to amuse myself during boring flights or whatever. These are nominally G-rated endeavors meant to test programming/game design ideas to see if they are feasible for Twine and/or my ability. (I've probably previously mentioned a fairy breeding sim I worked on; that was one such experiment.) 

Anyway I made a 'board game' system. Basically you move units around a board (which is generated randomly from a selection of 16 terrain types), and then the opposite side does the same with their pieces. How they move is based on what type of piece the unit is - I based a few on chess piece movements but others have circular/diamond movement ranges similar to Fire Emblem (though I had Advance Wars in mind when I was making it, so that I could eventually have villages that function like factories in that game where you could breed new units). 

Of course this system could also be used to have a dungeon crawler type game where you can see enemies on the map as you move accross it and evade or attack as you see fit. 

I like this idea. Not sure how to turn it into a fun game but it's fun to work on. The enemy AI - if you can even call it that - would be my next area of focus. 

This doesn't detract from II or IC development because I don't bring pervy projects on the road with me. Yet, should something come of it, I would make a porn game of this, likely a sci-fi or fantasy thing involving strategic-ish battles and force breeding an army of creatures to conquer the land (or galaxy).