Discussing a potential game

[RedQueen]

My apologies to the mods if I've put this in the wrong place or if it's just plain not suitable.

Going on the assumption neither of those are true...

There's a game I've been toying with writing for a few weeks now that maybe, potentially, some of you would be interested in. The problem is that a lot of it isn't really crystallised in my head - I know broad themes but when I try to nail down specific mechanics I get myself lost. I was hoping that someone or someones would be willing to discuss it with me and help me hammer out details in exchange for credits and a frankly unavoidable input in to the finished product.

Assuming that's the case (it's a very presumptuous post, I know).

The core concept is that you (the player) is an incu/succu-bus sent to the great kingdom of "Generic fake medieval fantasy DnD-land" to corrupt a specific institution - an inn, a monastery, a wizard's guild, whatever. The player would choose which one in the initial set up screen (picture two drop down boxes: I am a <succubus/incubus> and I have been sent to a <monastery/watchtower/tavern/etc>

The game itself would take place on a map of the building (think of Nightgames for those who have played it). You would move from room/area to room/area and there would be procedurally generated NPCs also moving around, type dependant on the setting. So the tavern would have an innkeeper, a busty tavern wench, a muscly bouncer, etc etc etc. They would have random likes and dislikes, sexualities, "sluttiness", etc.

Your goal would be to corrupt the building (possibly something like "get the corruption-o-meter to 100%") by interacting with these NPCs. So one possible chain I came up with would be "muscly bouncer is attracted to busy tavern wench. Working with busty tavern wench can persuade her to engage in prostitution, raising her sluttiness until she seduces muscly bouncer". And here's where it gets a little vaguer - I then want to say "things like that" but every time I do I realise how woefully under-specified that phrase is.

My thinking was also that the character had some sort of "magic power" stat. Maintaining a disguise (i.e. not looking like a demon) is a constant drain on that and it is replenished through sex acts with NPCs. It could also be spent on other effects - look like the tavern owners wife to agree to a threesome with the maid, raising both of their sluttiness, for example.

But all of this is not overly nailed down and it would be useful to me to talk through the concept. Any interested/willing?

 

[muttdoggy]

I think that would be perfect for a corruption-focused game. Many incubi or succubi could end up being forced out of hell to improve their abilities so they can return to take over a portion of of the planet to serve as a mirror to hell. What if the pc is one of those and upon arriving in town, they have 2,3, or even 6 choices of where to start? Then each building has a "corruption" ladder. Each quest is a step on the ladder and completing all steps leads to a building becoming so tainted with your corruption that you end up corrupting both the building and the owner.
I would add that with each successful corruption, the pc gets rewarded with a small increase to a stat. Extra magic capacity, another spell, stronger focus magics for corruption, etc. That stuff makes sense to me because if you are an incubus or succubus, your ultimate goal is to improve your own power.
And if we corrupt a building, we gain the owner as a accomplice to assist with the next choice? Let's say you successfully corrupt a bar. You now gain the owner as a possible accomplice. You need someone drunk? Call the owner and he'll send a gift card for a free drink and the person shows up and gets intoxicated!! The whorehouse is running low on beer? Call your buddy for a few barrels! Need to increase a stubborn person's corruption?? Send that damn nun to protest the bar and get slowly corrupted by proxy!

 

[RedQueen]

Oh sure, there's almost an in-built campaign mode hiding in the concept, but let's not run before we can even move our legs, let alone walk!

 

[The Silver Bard]

So here's probably the first and most important question for you: how much do you want procedural character generation and behavior?

A majority of your description sounds like an adventure game. The setting and premise lend themselves to the sort of scripted interactions and puzzles found in classic adventure games. But those sorts of scripted require you to hand-make your characters. Otherwise you run into situations where you need the muscly bouncer seduced, but your character generation didn't give you a busty tavern wench.

If the procedural systems are essential to your core design, then you're going to be making more of a simulation than an adventure game. That's a lot more work, but still probably doable. Interactions will need to be much more mechanically complex. You're going to want to look at the sorts of encounters you want to see happen and try to abstract out the key elements. What about the bouncer makes him vulnerable to being seduced by the tavern wench? Is she set as his interest during character generation? Is he tagged as "interested in busty" and she's tagged as "busty"? Does she have a general Seduction stat that is greater than his defensive stat? There are a lot of ways you could implement the same interaction, and they will each have different consequences.

 

[RedQueen]

Thanks, Silver Bard. Even little bits like that are helping me formalise.

My first idea was that each location comes with a pre-gen list of characters. The tavern will always have a bouncer, a busty tavern wench etc. The specifics of those though are procedurally generated (I don't want this to be a puzzle game per se - once you've corrupted the tavern you shouldbe able to play the tavern again and not know the series of moves to take).

So bouncers would have (this is an example, not a statement) a randomly generated stat of "likes_bustiness_above" while busty tavern wenches would have randomly generated "bustiness" stat. If bustiness>likes_bustiness_above, the bouncer is more likely to pursue that pairing. If bustiness<=likes_bustiness_above then he is less likely (he needs a higher sluttiness score to pursue it).

I've written the word "bustiness" so often it's lost all meaning.

 

[Crow]

I don't write here all too often, but as someone who's at this exact moment working on a similar concept, though more in the "Princess Maker" vein of game play, and with a tiny bit of "I know how it is as someone freshly starting out" knowledge gained: It really helped me to get the systems fleshed out early, because that's what I "rig" everything else around.

For example:
How will you handle "bustiliciousness" (just to get a fresh term in there) when certain cloth is worn? Does it get a bonus for a push-up, does the bonus get lost when the bra is removed, can you inflate it to fake it? Does it account for different breast shapes? Is there a "perception" stat that lets others see through fake boobies, does a bust above a certain size inhibit movement/agility/perception, will you treat natural boobs and surgery-enhanced differently - and so on. Hell, can an agile fighter use huge boobs to get the boobs' owner off balance? What will your "stats" be anyhow? How fast do they grow, do they grow at all?

Then: I love the idea of different arenas. But if they're just flair, that's a lot of effort for little reward. My first thought was to view them akin to traditional deathmatch levels: They usually have a specific feel to them, a flow in how players move and act. Maybe this could be a first foothold for you: What game play mechanics would help make every area unique? The convent, for example, could nullify passive resource regeneration (I'm just assuming that for the benefit of this example, your game will have this), so you would have to actively hunt for your "resource replenisher". A brothel arena on the other hand could have increased resource generation, but at the same time diminished effectiveness of certain attacks (because showing your boobs in a brothel hasn't quite the same impact as shaking your ass in a cloister does). A watchtower could afford your sincubus the ability to "hop" tiles by being able to fly out of windows and thus skipping entire floors. A monastery could have tiles that bestow boni and mali to certain characters.

On the topic of resource generation: How do you want your game to handle? Maybe you want a fast "battle-to-battle" system - in that case, passive regeneration would be counter-intuitive, and a "everybody starts a fight with 100% resources" would be more typical. Or do you want more of a tactical approach, where you have to manage your combat resources throughout the entire night?

Another thing that helped me get an initial grip on my game concept was to get to know my creation tools ( Twine with sugarcube and notepad++). It was quite enlightening to get to understand some limits for my imagination - how some things work, how they don't , and so on.

All in all, I would generally go top-to-bottom as far as concepts go: Formulate what kind of game play you want, and why you want it. Then try to fit some of your ideas to that game play. Do they work? Yes, no, so-so? How can you make them work? Do you have to adjust your ideas to fit the game play better, or can you instead maybe even change game play around a bit to fit your idea better?



Aside: A few thoughts about stats and game play from my own work - I'll just jot them down here in case you find them useful:
The game's about a lowly imp trying to corrupt an acolyte in a cloister;
One core stat that has to be managed is "suspicion", since the PC is a small, practically invisible and intangible imp (think "devil on your shoulder") that can influence the "corruptee's" actions and thoughts in limited ways; If those actions differ too much from what the NPC would do on their own accord, their suspicion about them being corrupted by some demonic entity rises - accumulate too much, and she'll run to the next priest for an exorcism (i.e. game over). Suspicion decays fast as long it's kept low, and the higher it gets, the slower it decays. Likewise, corruption isn't a simple "stat increase"; In order to corrupt your charge, you have to hit a minimum corruption score each game day; If you hit it, corruption rises - if you don't, your control over the girl doesn't advance.

Here's how I arrived at the mechanic: I wanted to make a game about corruption, but the standard RenPy fare of "do action X Y times to advance" irritated me. I wanted a game that shows more granularity in how your actions change your subject. I wanted it to feel more like an actual psychological process. The game play that fits this is a long-term strategic approach, but only long-term planning and then just "press Y to continue" felt too uninvolved for me. So I arrived at the stage of every day being a distinct "cycle" of actions that may play out slightly differently every game day through controlled randomization, so the player still has to think "short term" for every decision: Long term, you want your suspicion to stay low, but short-term, you need to hit your corruption cap or you won't progress it.

A last comment on "controlled randomization": This I put in so that there's always a potential of surprise for the player on any given day - but nothing sucks harder than being unable to progress because of RNG. So there's some mechanics in place that allow players in limited fashion to combat bad RNG: If you strike out on viable corruption opportunities on one day, you can boost your daily score by corrupting her dreams. This comes with a penalty on the next day, but I aim to make that penalty one that's worth the trade-off in many situations.

 

[RedQueen]

Some nice crunchy questions there, loving it. Thank you.

For example:
How will you handle "bustiliciousness" (just to get a fresh term in there) when certain cloth is worn? Does it get a bonus for a push-up, does the bonus get lost when the bra is removed, can you inflate it to fake it? Does it account for different breast shapes? Is there a "perception" stat that lets others see through fake boobies, does a bust above a certain size inhibit movement/agility/perception, will you treat natural boobs and surgery-enhanced differently - and so on. Hell, can an agile fighter use huge boobs to get the boobs' owner off balance? What will your "stats" be anyhow? How fast do they grow, do they grow at all?

I actually had a play at putting some numbers down recently and this is the current set up. I'm a Java programmer by trade so the game would be in Java, I mention that as its relevant to parts of the crunch discussion.

A character has a body. That body is composed of body parts. There are different types of body part, which can have unique stats attached to them ("cup size" makes no sense when applied to right arms, for example). This has the advantage of making future expansion easier as well, the system can easily handle five armed, two headed, no legged freaks (my apologies to anyone on the forum with five arms, 2 heads and no legs but, lets be honest now, you are kind of a freak).

Each of those stats could then, and I'm thinking aloud here a little, have two forms. "Actual stat" and "Displayed stat". Then clothing effects are a simple matter - the wonderbra doesn't affect actual breast perkiness, but does affect displayed perkiness.

Given the setting "surgery enhanced" doesn't make a whole load of sense but "magically enhanced" might and is a rather hair-splitting difference. I hadn't thought of it until you brought it up and...hmmmm. My gut feeling is "no" - regardless of how someone gets their 18" penis, it's still an 18"penis.

Stats...I dunno. I need a "sluttiness" stat as a catch all for what they're prepared to do. I'm actually thinking of flipping that and making it an "inhibitions" stat. 0-100, say, with higher being more prudish. I'm not sure I need a stat for perception. There'll also be a "knowledge" stat, which I'll talk about a little more below. A sexuality stat - a gay male will require lower inhibitions to sleep with a female than a straight one would. And then a bunch of attraction stats - the "likes_bustiness_above" I mentioned earlier.

At this stage, there'll be no combat mechanism so I can bypass all of that discussion.

Then: I love the idea of different arenas. But if they're just flair, that's a lot of effort for little reward. My first thought was to view them akin to traditional deathmatch levels: They usually have a specific feel to them, a flow in how players move and act. Maybe this could be a first foothold for you: What game play mechanics would help make every area unique? The convent, for example, could nullify passive resource regeneration (I'm just assuming that for the benefit of this example, your game will have this), so you would have to actively hunt for your "resource replenisher". A brothel arena on the other hand could have increased resource generation, but at the same time diminished effectiveness of certain attacks (because showing your boobs in a brothel hasn't quite the same impact as shaking your ass in a cloister does). A watchtower could afford your sincubus the ability to "hop" tiles by being able to fly out of windows and thus skipping entire floors. A monastery could have tiles that bestow boni and mali to certain characters.

Yeah, this is very similar to how I'd planned it. Some unique terrain effects but the majority of the difference being in the characters present. As I said above, a tavern has a set list of inhabitants, as does a monastery. However, your baseline busty tavern wench has lower inhibitions than a monk so some maps would be easier than others. Further, this is where the "knowledge" stat comes in. If the Abbot notices that many of his monks are becoming man-whores he's likely to suspect a succubus, the uneducated bouncer though won't suspect demons if two of his customers are doing it. That may be a very difficult mechanic to implement though but the advatage of different maps is that I can introduce new mechanics at a controlled pace. Starting work on the easiest (for the player) map allows me to get the core mechanics sorted and implemented without worrying about how paladins work because there are none in the tavern.

On the topic of resource generation: How do you want your game to handle? Maybe you want a fast "battle-to-battle" system - in that case, passive regeneration would be counter-intuitive, and a "everybody starts a fight with 100% resources" would be more typical. Or do you want more of a tactical approach, where you have to manage your combat resources throughout the entire night?

My thinking here was no natural resource regeneraton, in fact quite the opposite. For the majority of the time you'd need to be expending energy to keep up the illusion of humanity meaning it was a constant loss. That forces a sort of "forward motion" on the player - you need to get that handsome stablelad bedded NOW because you'll starve if you don't feed soon rather than a "sit and wait for the perfect opportunity" style of gameplay.

I do like your brothel suggestion though and it raises another future possibility of dormitaries. When the monks are pretty uncorrupt you need to be super careful doing anything in the dorms at all as they're a high traffic area. When they're lower, hanging around in the dorms with your boobs out becomes a good payoff in terms of feeding. But that's down the line.

Another thing that helped me get an initial grip on my game concept was to get to know my creation tools ( Twine with sugarcube and notepad++). It was quite enlightening to get to understand some limits for my imagination - how some things work, how they don't , and so on.

All in all, I would generally go top-to-bottom as far as concepts go: Formulate what kind of game play you want, and why you want it. Then try to fit some of your ideas to that game play. Do they work? Yes, no, so-so? How can you make them work? Do you have to adjust your ideas to fit the game play better, or can you instead maybe even change game play around a bit to fit your idea better?

As I say, programmer by trade so I know my tools fairly well. I also have done quite a bit of work in Twine under my IRL name which, for obvious reasons, I'm not particularly going to link to from here. But I do like the sound of your game and if there's anything I can do then do let me know.

A last comment on "controlled randomization": This I put in so that there's always a potential of surprise for the player on any given day - but nothing sucks harder than being unable to progress because of RNG. So there's some mechanics in place that allow players in limited fashion to combat bad RNG: If you strike out on viable corruption opportunities on one day, you can boost your daily score by corrupting her dreams. This comes with a penalty on the next day, but I aim to make that penalty one that's worth the trade-off in many situations.

Ah, now this is an interesting point. The games I play a lot are ADOM, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and Dwarf Fortress. I'm totally down with unfair randomness and being screwed by the RNG to the extent I simply hadn't thought about that as an issue to consider. I will do so now.

 

[Tinman]

It almost sounds like you're going for a power fantasy variation on Trap Quest, maybe with a little Nightgames sexual combat thrown in? My biggest questions with this are how are you going to handle spells, and how are you going to handle corruption? Spells and skills work in Nightgames because everyone is trying to have sex with everyone else. For this game you're trying to influence people into doing something they normally wouldn't. So something as simple as stripping would probably scare someone away more than arouse them early on. Conversely, late game just being nude could provide you with ample magical energy (you mention being topless in monk dormitories as an example of this) with no real effort. But if you do that how do you balance corruption? Do you have to force them to do something new in order to further corruption, or does building it turn into a slow grind of repeating actions for a steady increase? Also, will corruption be map based or character based? For example, if I'm corrupting a Tavern do I need to worry about corrupting several new patrons each night to get the owner's corruption up slowly, or will all generated occupants of the Tavern appear with a minimum sluttiness based on how corrupt the building is with the owner as a kind of final boss unlocked at a certain point (or at least more likely to appear if it's truly based on RNG)?

 

[RedQueen]

Good questions Tinman, and thanks for asking them. Did some more pen and paper work today on the train and what I'm currently thinking is:

Every NPC has an inhibitions stat, ranging from 0-100. Your goal is to get the average inhibition of the place down to some map-dependant level. Each action has a minimum inhibitions cutoff: Kiss with preferred gender might require 80 or less, say. This will then be modified by:
1 - the interplay between their likes and the recipient's appearance (bustiness and likes_bustiness_above)
2 - The current average inhibitions of the map (if their inhibitions are higher than average, this number will be lowered - it's harder to remain a prude in an orgy. Or so I'm told. *ahem*)
3 - A random minus or positive. Some people just plain don't like giving oral sex.
4 - Your skills, spells and actions if with you
5 - The other person's inhibitions(in essence, whether the act would be consensual or not)

These numbers are also lower for doing the act with you vs. doing it with another NPC - your crazy demonic pheromones at play here.

Doing the act with you lowers their inhibitions to the level required to do it with an NPC for a temporary amount of time. So, kissing a male requires inhibition<=80, say. The nun has inhibitions 90. Your presence lowers that by 10, she's willing to kiss you. Her inhibitions temporarily lower to 80. While they are down there she's willing to kiss other men. Acts with an NPC provide a permanent reduction to inhibitions based on some scaling factor of the difference between their stat and the requirement - someone with inhibitions 1 will receive no bonus from a chaste kiss.

What does this mean? Stripping in the dorm (your actions plus your presence) might be enough to provoke a gay orgy but only if their inhibitions are low enough already.

Refusing an advance raises their inhibitions (permanently) based on the difference between their current and the required. This raise takes place even if the act is consumated. So a monk who got raped would have his inhibitions raised.

At this stage at least there will be no new characters ariving - while I'm not going to rule that out, its not something I want to concern myself with initially. The people in the tavern at the beginning of the game are the people there at the end.

As to spells: You have a pool of mana/lust energy/whatever. Maintaining a disguise, appearing human, depletes that and seeing a demon has a very low inhibitions requirement so you'll need to for most of the game. Sexual acts including you raise that. You may also have spells you can cast (probably will in fact) that use some of that - I think above I gave the example of appearing like an NPC for a while. Maybe also leaving a lingering trace of your pheromones in the dorm to affect everyone who passes through it in the next couple of hours. Whatever. I need to come up with a solid list of skills (thougts appreciated) but I quite like those two as a start.

Game loss would be average inhibitions being higher than some map dependant limit.