Plans for v0.36 and Beyond

Bug fixing is going well for v0.35.0*, and I think it's time to lay out some goals for the next few update cycles for Lab Rats 2. All of this is subject to change as I run into difficulties and need more time, decide something is less fun than anticipated, or inspiration strikes. Here are some things I'd like to do, in no particular order.

First, I have a laundry list of minor tweaks and improvements gathered over my last couple of playthroughs that I want to implement. Most of these changes are quick hits, things like adding opinion based dialogue to an event or adding different dialogue to events that have triggered before. Others are usability tweaks to systems like the clothing designer and serum research screen to sort things in a more useful way. I expect that a big chunk of v0.36 will be crossing off the best bits of this list.

Second, I want to revisit serums and, specifically, how multiple serums stack. Currently if you have a reliable way to have a girl test serum you can have her consume multiple simple serums instead of spending time to perfect a more complex one. I'd like to implement a system to limit how many doses of serum a girl can have in her system without suffering from unintended side effects. This would likely be in the form of a "toxicity" score, and each girl would have a toxicity threshold they can tolerate. Complex serum production techniques would provide more trait slots for the same toxicity cost. This would also be a good time for me to rebalance the existing serum traits, as well as add some new ones that let you manipulate toxicity.

Third, it's time I addressed the problem of girls sex skills and opinions. Right now both are set from the moment the character is generated. Increasing Sluttiness as a corruption mechanic is fine, but explicitly changing a girls opinion would be a lot more fun. Once a girls sex skills are variable I also want to take a look at all of the existing sex positions and expand them, so that each level unlocks something new that she's able to do (or that you're able to do to her).

Fourth, a long term goal has always been to add a rival company of some sort to the game. This would serve the purpose of providing some sort of external pressure to the player, forcing them to work on growing their business and/or damaging their competitors. A big part of this would be corrupting opposing employees to head-hunt the most capable or plant spies inside of their ranks.

An additional goal that isn't gameplay but would be immensely helpful to me would be to fully automate my rendering and image processing workflow. Currently there are five different steps I need to take to go from posed clothing in Daz to image inside of LR2. At each step I need to do a tiny bit of manual work and run a different automation script. Writing a master controller for all of the individual bits would free up more of my time and reduce human-errors that can slow down the process.

There are plenty of other things I'd like to work more on an expand, but this is a pretty good taste on what I'm going to be working on in the near future. Let me know what you think, or if there are other things you'd like to see on the priority list!

*Not-so-fun-fact: The cause of image errors that occasionally pop up are due to a bug inside of Python's dedicated zip file library and how it handles multi-threading. I've implemented a work-around that fixes it without significantly impacting performance, and at least this time it was someone else's mistake!