Game dairy: 001

Hello everyone! This is going to be the start of a regular post I want to start doing; said me a dozen times by now. Anyhow, I'm going to bring everyone up to date on game development and behind the scenes stuff that some of you may not have noticed or know about.

The first major thing I'm going to touch on is art for the game. Right now our artist has had to take a month leave due to some personal matters in her life. Art should resume some time in late March or early April, but I'm not sure and I don't want to put any pressure on her. I'd also like to take some time to talk about mental heath, if you're struggling they're are people who care about you and self harm is never the answer. Don't be afraid to reach out, even to me, my DMs are always open to those struggling.

Alright, with that out of the way lets get into the meat of what's been going on. Right now I've been working on the intro and thinking about what kind of things I want to add to the game and what I want the demo to look like, as well as art for the game's itch page and patreon page.  

The intro of the game is almost done, right now I'm 3/5 of the way done with the obese intros and I plan on finishing them up tomorrow and wrap up the intro by the end of the month. These are some of the longest descriptions I've ever written, with them being about two and a half pages long each, and that's just the slob full/partial versions, I haven't even done the non-slob versions. I'm not super happy with progress, but I have a ton of stuff in my life going on so I can't be too upset with myself.

I plan on having a demo out by the end of February. The Demo will be bare and will only have the court room, dining hall, Aide and basic kingdom management included.

 The court room is going to be reworked because the code for it in the base game is basically held together with duct-tape and fairy dust. I'm placing a much higher focus on quality through out development, which is part of the reason things have been moving so slowly as I really want this to be polished as much as possible before you guys play it. For the court events they should play like what all of you are used to, however I'm going to add more alts to events, more redundant events and more minor story lines. I also want your aide and advisers to play a bigger roll in court events. I also plan on adding more things like the player eating/being fed, burping, dress ripping, people reacting to your appearance or weight gain.

The dining hall is also going to be revamped. I'm going to use the system I started work on in the version. If you ever shared a meal with Sarah, Erica or Midnight you've seen the system in action. It makes coding events, small talk and food sizes a breeze. I also plan on adding a system where food costs money, so if you eat extremely decadently it'll cost you, or for bigger sizes you'll consume a large amount of food from the kingdom, but it'll be a bit till I add that.

The aides, May and Charles, will be getting reworked as well. I plan on adding the ability to use them to summon other NPC's to you rather than you having to go and find them. I also plan on giving them a set daily schedule, in the mornings and evenings they will be in their quarters or other locations depending on if an event is triggered. I want to add this so that your aide actually feels like a person rather than just a simple robot that follows you every where, plus it lets me make some more unique events. Aka, May getting stuck the kitchen doorway after some late night snaking ;)

I've talked about kingdom management to death by now, but there will be a lot of changes and there will actually be a reason for you to bother with it as, if you don't manage it, game over. I'll make a tutorial on how to manage it when the demo comes out.  

Anyhow, with that out of the way, lets talk about something I want to add: Raiders! Raiders will be recurring events that will put strain on your castle. They will force you to build better walls, hire more guards, build more garrisons, fortify the capitol and maybe even test your magic skills. Raiders will come depending on a few different thing and it will depend on what group of raiders is attacking. The lowest tier of raider is going to be the starving peasant rabble. These raiders will only spawn if your kingdom is very poor or has a low amount of food. They only steal food and are super weak. The next level of raiders will be the goblin raiders, they will steal mostly gold, but will steal a little bit of food. There will be a variant of the goblin raiders, Swarty goblins steal only food and the more they steal the fatter they get, which can lead to you capturing them eventually due to their inability to get themselves unstuck from the more narrow doorways in the castle. I have a few more tiers of raiders, but you probably won't encounter them until late game, so no point in yapping about them yet.

Anyways, thats it for this post, if you have any comments or questions feel free to ask them. Until next time!