No, not Summer in Trigue! I wish 🙂 Simply… Summer in hell. This is how I could describe my Summer in the last two months.

The plan was to begin (or better, resume) doing some preliminary work on Thieves of Dingirra while I was waiting for a bunch of art for TFTU: Lilith to be finished. But I forgot a small detail called global warming… ugh!

Here it’s hot already since several years, but this year everyone agreed that was the worst. It was a mix of uninterrupted hot days (here I had 3-4 days of rain since mid-June! and I’m one of the “lucky ones”) and extremely hot humidity. Basically temperatures ranging from 20° to 32°C, and humidity always higher than 50%, often close to 70-75%. Tropical climate I believe. I don’t like it! lol

I have a “floor cooling system”, but I didn’t want to turn it too high (it’s bad to have a difference of 10°C or more between inside and outside) and at night I was sleeping with open windows anyway.

I had much better luck than people living down in towns, but still I never imagined that, at 7pm at 800m on sea level, you would still have 30-31°C… that’s just insane!

Anyways without rambling too much, this weather completely destroyed all my plans. I managed to work a bit on simpler stuff like the narrative mechanics (I’ll have some interesting new things) and a few screens. I did work on it, so I still made progress, but not in what I was planning to – the main gameplay of the game!

So that’s what happened. But let’s talk about those new features I’m working on.

No forced choices

With this game, I wanted to break out of the idea of being forced to have a certain attitude with someone to successfully complete the romance. Why? Simple: if I know character X requires certain choices, or a specific alignment (Friendly, Joking, Forceful, etc) then the 99% of players are just going to follow the walkthrough to see the romance scenes. It’s obvious. And those who don’t follow a walkthrough, maybe will play regularly but not get the romance, and then be even more pissed!

I asked myself: what’s the point then of having 4 choices ? Why have a specific Romance button (like in Loren or several other RPGs I’ve done)? Players interested in the romance will always pick Romance choice!

So here’s the new idea: you’ll be able to raise your relationship with a character by simply visiting them. On each scene, will increase slightly. Then, the kind of attitude you want to have is your choice (literally). In the story, in EACH SCENE, there’ll be several exclusive lines that play depending on your attitude with THAT character. Yes, because if you want you can be friendly with all, but you can also be friendly with one, and forceful with all the others, and so on!

Then, after several scenes, a new Flirt option will appear which will make the MC explicitly flirt with the love interest, potentially unlocking the romance. This solves also the other major problem, of people wanting to have a friendship with a character but without necessarily romancing them.

Flirting won’t lock you in a romance, there’ll still be a choice later, but it will simply change the relationship from friend-only, to potentially “more than a friend”.

New relationship system!

This required a redesign of the whole relationship system, so I thought: why not have a full relationship system between ALL the characters? Some characters like each other, while others can’t stand a specific one, and so on. The screen below is the result:

Not going to lie, I’m pretty happy with the result! I know it looks dauting at first, but it’s pretty simple to read (it wasn’t that simple to code haha). You move the mouse over and a tooltip at the bottom will explain everything.

From top to bottom: for each potential love interest you see: name, portrait, relationship (text), relationship value (the hearts if flirting started, otherwise stars for friendship only) and the attitude you have. For example in this screen, I’m Joking with Abu, Ghamal, Di’Aab and Halima, and Friendly with Labwa and Yasemin.

Then each character has their own preferences. But wait, there’s more! There’ll be some scenes in the story that will change those values (in better, or worse). This to say that the choices won’t be purely cosmetic but they’ll influence also the gameplay.

Since I decided to have also a RPG part (but not with grinding or tons of battles, a very specific amounts of fights, all connected to the story) an overall “party alchemy” or some similar value that will consider the relationship between the current party members and give different combat bonuses.

News about TFTU: Lilith

Now that’s September, weather seems better and so I hope to make more progress this month, while I wait for the rest of TFTU: Lilith art. BTW, about Lilith, I decided to try again my luck with the Steam Next Fest, so the game release will necessarily be around the end of October! But it will be worth the wait. I’ll make another post about that game next month, with all the details.

For those not following the development: game will have over 25 CGs (with variations), plus another 30 “comic style” CGs, full triad route, pin-ups, five different endings, and much more. The biggest game I’ve ever made at $15 price point!