Funkelregen
Major devlog 1
First of all, thank you all for playing the game and for coming here for this dev-diary/feedback session. And second, this here will contain spoilers for version 0.2… you’ve been warned…
Second, I will read everything, you post here in this thread and I will most certainly respond to it if there are questions in your post or if it otherwise needs clarification.
I want to begin with a few things, I’d like to change in version 0.3:
Cabin rework
First, a little rework of the mini-map – or rather a rework of the whole cabin system:
By now it incredibly annoys even me, that all 10 cabins still just show my placeholder graphic since last Christmas when I mostly had no idea, how the cabins would look from the inside. But as of version 0.2, we’ve seen the cabins of Lintar, Rachel, Sabrina, Numquam and of course, the MC's from the inside, and 3 other cabins will follow in version 0.3.
In version 0.2, the girl’s cabins on the minimap are basically only there to show, that the girls are sleeping or otherwise not available for interaction. Furthermore, none of the cabin tiles in the mini-map are clickable, which I also want to change, so the map can send you directly to the cabin or girls.
Speaking of sending you to the cabins… If one tries to visit a girl’s cabin via the menu in the bordering hallway, you’ll basically just get a one-liner telling you to fuck off. The only exceptions are Sabrina, Rachel, and Numquam, which have at least a couple of lines. So another change would be, that every try to enter a girl’s cabin gets elevated to at least this level, where there are a couple of lines.
Furthermore, there will be three events in version 0.3, that can be started by knocking on a girl’s door. Additionally, from version 0.3 onward, there will be opportunities for you to gain permanent access to a girl’s cabin, allowing you to enter the cabin whenever you like, regardless of whether the girl is in there or not.
But as of now, I’m not even sure what to do with that… At the moment, entering a girl’s cabin will mostly just provide an anchor point for future events, so just another dialog menu with only a “Back.”-option for now… If you have an idea or a suggestion, for what to do inside a girl’s cabin, please tell me. I could imagine an option at night to cuddle with them for the night or something like that…
Shower rework
The second bigger change I have planned for version 0.3 is a rework of the showers. As of now, when you enter the showers, the girl randomly waiting for you in there will just throw you out. Although, there is one exception… Just out of curiosity, who has seen this ester egg?
Furthermore, it is already a missed opportunity to not update the showers in version 0.2. For example, after the events of version 0.2, Sabrina and Lin should have a reaction like “Come on, it’s nothing you haven’t seen already...” when spying on them. Additionally, I fully trust Pirlia to trap you between her thighs for a few minutes as “punishment” for spying on her...
Generally in an AVN, I want sex scenes to feel somewhat earned. Therefore I kinda dislike it, when free roam/sandbox AVNs have low effort repeatable sex scenes, where you are just walking up to a girl and press the let’s-have-sex-button, to see a looping gif with five lines of generic dirty talk.
Therefore I will focus in this game mainly on longer scenes, that are somewhat connected to the story and the development of the relationship with the respective girl and are therefore not repeatable.
But the showers are sort of an antithesis to that. But to prevent the showers from becoming a collection of let’s-have-sex-buttons, I want the showers to be ruled by RNG-Jesus/Tzeentch, which are also influenced by the affection stats of the girls as well as certain quest progressions.
For example, there is still just a 1:9 change to which girl you encounter when entering the showers. If you catch Pirlia, there is a (50 + Pirlia’s affection)% chance, to find her masturbating in the showers.
If she’s not masturbating, you will just see the scene, you already know, where she just sends you away, except when you’ve already seen the cunnilingus scene within the “All the Way Down” quest line. Then there’s a (40 + Pirlia’s affection)% chance, that she will force you into a short cunnilingus scene.
But if you find her masturbating, there’s a 30% chance she’ll just carry on and bring herself to orgasm on her own. But when she spots you, there’s a (50 + Pirlia’s affection)% chance she will enjoy your tongue as mentioned before.
This system could either become interesting and refreshing or could become a frustrating grind hell, where you just seem to never get, what you intend to get. There are no in-between I’m afraid… And that’s exactly why I really need your opinion on that.
I also have the feeling, I will have to rework all the probabilities and decision trees, every time a new update rolls around, but I know I deserve that…
In the rest of this post, I want to address a few common criticisms of the game:
Sex scenes
First, there is the low density of sex scenes at the moment. As probably everyone can guess, this is a problem that will disappear with time. At the start of an AVN, you first need to get to know the girls and build a relationship, and so on…
But I can tell you, that there are four animated scenes planned for version 0.3. Together with the already mentioned shower rework, I’m quite sure to silence this complaint. And if somebody is asking, why the next update is taking so long, just remember I’m about to double the game’s animation count in the next update...
Free roam/Sandbox vs. linear
Recently I got several comments complaining about Funkelregen being a free roam/sandbox. First of all, both linear and free-roam AVNs have their advantages and disadvantages and I like both approaches, but can understand the criticisms of each camp. But I think, free roam AVNs have the advantage, that they create a higher level of player interaction and agency as well as (at least the illusion of) freedom. Therefore Funkelregen is a free-roam AVN and at this point, it’s too late to change it anyway…
But of course free roam AVNs have disadvantages as well. Their biggest danger is, that they devolve into grinding. I guess I’m scarred for life after I built the bar way too late in my first play-through of Harem Hotel and inevitably hard-stuck by not owning Silvia, so I had to do nothing other than grinding money for several in-game weeks…
To avoid such a situation, there are no farmable stats in Funkelregen like money. (Positive) affection and similar stats are only earned via non-repeatable events. Furthermore, there are only a handful of repeatable events anyway… Usually just short placeholders like, when you run out of breakfast events.
You certainly have noticed, that this game just has a day-cycle and no week-cycle. Week-cycles can have the effect, that you need to skip through several days because a quest demands you to do something specifically on Sunday morning. Day-cycles on the other hand, are more compact and avoid this problem. Personally, I’d like to keep the day-cycle with the girls occasionally leaving their normal pattern, when their presence at another place is needed for an upcoming event.
But a week-cycle would have some advantages: For example, it could better illustrate Sarlé’s shortened biological clock, by making her sleeping times increasingly more asynchronous with the normal day-night-cycle as the week progresses. Furthermore, I would have enough time slots, so the girls could have fixed slots in the showers, instead of being randomly teleported into the showers as soon as you enter them.
But the biggest problem for switching to week-cycles would be that I at the moment have no real idea as to how to fill all the additional slots… prepare for a dozen or so placeholder dialogs with just a “back”-option… So as of now, I see no real need/benefit for switching to week-cycles, but maybe you see it differently…
But I can’t rule that a switch to week-cycles in the future will be necessary – for example, when the ship gets new rooms (ETA 0.5; 0.6) or new crew members will join the ship (ETA 0.5; 0.7; 0.8; 0.10; 0.12).
Furthermore, during each update, I try to give each girl equal attention i.e. an equal amount of lines, which I managed quite well for version 0.3 with the exception of Annica of course…
But on the other side, this approach leads to most quests only advancing 1 or 2 steps per update and in general to many rather short events. This also causes at times quite ridiculous dependencies.
An alternative to this at times rather confusing approach would be to focus more on specialized updates, that focus more on a certain girl or her quest line. For example, we could travel to New Kassiopeia and follow Sabrina around, as she crawls through the slums of Cyberpunk 2451.
Lore (dump)
To be honest, I quite expected to be criticized very often for my extensive lore dumps and way too complicated lore. But I was delighted to get almost unanimously praise for that – with the exception of one review.
Of course, the lore dumps will become fewer as the game progresses and I ran out of things to talk about. But still, I’d like to know your view on that topic.
UI
Most of the main menus are still plain Renpy standard. Personally, I don’t see such a big problem with that (probably mainly because I suck at UI graphic design). Of course, I know I’ll have to give all the menus a Funkelregel-touch sooner or later, but for now, I’d like to ask you how important you think of a UI rework. I’ve also heard, that the quest log is seen as a bit underwhelming, so that might also be an opportunity for a small visual rework.
Progress report
Some of you probably have seen the text distribution post on Patreon, so you know that the texts and scripts of version 0.3 are already written and mostly done. So the main task until the next release is making all the pictures and animations.
At the moment, I have a lot of work to do other than this game, and version 0.3 is going to be 40% larger than the update to 0.2. Additionally, 0.3 will feature a lot of new animations and other new character models I will have to make. So in other words: I won’t be able to make another “miracle run” and pump out an update in 2 months. Expect the next update to come around in December/January.
In terms of graphics/animations the first larger event, which takes place directly after the last game over sequence and contains one of the four mentioned sex scenes, is already done.
Furthermore, every suggestion you make and every promise I make, will certainly only turn into reality in version 0.4 or later.
Keywords
If you’ve made it through this wall of text, you’ve probably already forgotten the first half of it. So here are the keywords/main talking points again:
- What to do with girls in their cabins except a “Let’s fuck”-button
- Thoughts of the RNG-based shower system
- Day-cycles ↔ Week-cycle
- Equal Attention updates ↔ More focused updates
- Lore dumps are fine ↔ banish lore dumps to the wiki
- UI rework: ASAP ↔ later
Comments
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1. Cabin: For now while the main story is still presumably in the early stages, a simple wholesome activity like "watch tv" or "play games" to pass a time slot should be enough, alongside of course actions like "talk" where you can add more new sentences and lore with each update. Maybe later in the game different affection levels can produce different dialogue responses to the same questions? This is not that significant but just a little cool addition.
2. Showers: I can't remember if there was a limit or not to the number of times you can visit the showers before a time slot passes. I just remember spamming the showers once I discovered it, and then every now and then spamming again just to check new scenes. I would suggest, to avoid this, that you limit it such that after entering the shower once or twice, time slots move to the next. This encourages players to be less spammy and the showers will be more of something you check in every now and then when doing quests. I think the RNG is good. Since this isn't a one-time event you can't really get locked out of anything (other than the low-affection content like getting finisher'd by Lintar). And new scenes encourage people to use the showers every now and then, alongside the aforementioned limit.
3. Day cycles: Honestly I didn't even notice when playing. Though yes I fully agree it can be a bit tedious if for example an event required being somewhere on a "Thursday afternoon" and when I finally go one full week later thursday afternoon happens to launch another event automatically. Then again, the week cycle benefits you mention definitely are pretty good to have too. So I think as long as you minimise or ideally avoid making "go here on thursday afternoon" type of conditions, the change would be barely noticeable, and with the added benefits.
4. Update type: I agree with @dragonbackmike's comment. Both are useful to have. For chapters with big and exciting story content, say for example if Sabrina's visit to New Kassiopeia evolved into a dramatic fight to escape, then yes I think focused content to finish the 'arc' and develop the relationship with the LI(s) is good. However if its just a 'chill' content update like a quick visit with some lore and relationship developments, it'd be fair to spread out the attention a bit more so anyone seemingly lacking content (or if people want more content on a certain character) has the chance to catch up.
5. Lore dumps: I think its fine as it is, it wasn't too extensive (it gets wordy if you dive into the wiki but dialogue-wise it was alright). I mean, part of the whole experience is world building, that's why we have lore in the first place. What is in the game now is a lot of info, but that's kind of necessary at the start, I imagine its just a slow addition as we go for yet-to-be added lore. Dump the basic info about the world, and add more as the MC learns more (which is what you're already doing). The wiki is already quite well organised, just as long as its kept up to date with the new info I think its fine.
6. UI: I think it could look better, yes. But its not really the biggest issue. I'd say you can make small improvements across a few updates if you don't have the spare time to do it all in one. If I were to criticise the UI specifically, I would say it looks 'simple'. So it's not like unplayable or anything, but definitely could use some surgery.
Sorry for the very late reply, but your wall of text deserves an equal reply.
1) Besides main story events, I'll probably put some simple/short wholesome events in the cabins.
2) As of version 0.2, the only interaction on the showers, that will advance the time is when the MC showers himself. In the following events, there will be additional events in the showers, which advance the time of the day. These events will be intercourse events and not thrown out events so there's no feeling you're getting punished with time advances for bad RNG.
5) I apologize for the wiki being wordy. There I'm not writing characters/emotions so I (evidently) fall back into my scientific lab-report style including my Cicero/Ceasar-Malady.
1. Girls cabins - I would suggest having three main choices here with the ability to gain or lose affection. The main choices I would do is Talk, Hang out, and after enough affection is gained sexually oriented choices. Each of these choices would of course have sub categories. Talk I would have about her, her home world, and her species or other species(this is a good area to drop lore) can add affection points for this. Hang out is a good place to add or subtract affection points depending on choice, I would do sub categories such as read a book, watch a movie, play games, and listen to music, picking the right sub category and right type in the sub category gains affection as to the wrong choice could subtract affection. Now the last is sexually oriented which needs to be affection point based I would start with cuddling and work from there.
2. Showers I would Designate certain persons at certain times and according to affection points have it go from get the fuck out, help each other shower, and so on. Can also have this as an area while showering together to talk(another place for lore drops).
3. If day cycles work for now then keep it nut will probably have to switch to day/week cycles.
4. Equal attention/more focused- This one I say is up to you and each update. You may find one update needs equal attention as to where another may need to focus on one or more person(s). So this is more driven by the story itself.
5. Keep lore dumps as you see I mention places they can be added.
6. UI rework- I say when you can but if that is later so be it
Sorry for the very late reply, but you deserve some sort of answer/feedback:
1) As I've already explained, I'm not that big of a fan of repeatable events - especially not if they force you to grind something. Therefore, (repeatable) cabin events will most certainly not influence affection points. But I'll probably add some wholesome feel-good events in the cabins. At the moment, I've only implemented a short swimming event with Pirlia.
And there will probably be no "Let's-Fuck-Button" in the cabins since I want to keep sex scenes in the main events and the RNG-shower.
I'm very unsure about the lore drops in cabin-talks... First of all, I've written the in-game lore-wiki for this purpose. As soon as a topic is mentioned in story events, a wiki article will be unlocked/updated. The cabin lore talks could be used to convey non-essential background information. For example, Ladira's big 500-line monologue about the Veludran noble families in 0.1 was a little bit of a mistake in retrospect. This monologue would have been perfect for what you suggest - especially since we'll probably only ever meet 2 out of the 5 mentioned families... But the problem is, if I make these lore dumps optional, I have no way to make sure, readers/players will have the necessary knowledge to understand further events. For example, the mentioned ladira_medbay_01 event is a requirement for every event, which needs a baseline understanding of Veludran nobility or knowledge of the Cerser family in particular.
Additionally, Sarlé is probably the only one, who would tell you her whole unbiased backstory from day 1. I think it is way more interesting to get the girls' backstories bit by bit while getting to know them better and better until they open up. But of course, the best way to show a girl's homeworld is boots on the ground on said planet. So it's very unlikely I'll implement such a system.
2) The problem with designated persons at certain times is, that I only have 4 slots for 10 persons, when I stick to day-cycles. I maybe could implement a week-cycle for showers while the rest runs on day-cycles or I could let one girl break out of her normal routine by random.