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Post by krezar on Jan 14, 2011 0:09:32 GMT -5
Slow day today, got back earlier than I thought I would. Drew this up to HOPEFULLY explain myself a bit better. This isn't meant to look like a drag and drop menu, it's just like this to show how the house could expand ( and a few other things I drew in while thinking about it ) into the area around it. Obviously, the farm house only has a little room to expand ( maximum number of rooms = XX, whatever ) while the mansion comes with a huge amount of space already. Different plots would have different types of houses for them, and each would have more space to expand ( I guess that drag and drop could work, but it looks like a pain in the ass to code ). I made the main room bigger since I figured that's where the items are stored, and where the PC's room would be. It's like the trunk where the rest of the branches come off. The picture could change with the house expanding, or just plug on more rooms. I hope that cleared it up a bit. and I think it shows the best of our ( mine and Last Scouts ) two ideas. Expandable and good looking. Attachments:
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shiar
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Post by shiar on Jan 14, 2011 6:15:39 GMT -5
Firstly, greetings. I'll try keep my posts to a minimum, but that shouldn't be much of a problem since I usually just read the blog (one of many reasons I'm vaguely surprised I signed up, actually).
To business: not a fan of the isometric perspective, though your second picture is indeed much more convincing, Krezar. While I'd rather a top down 2d view for simplicity, it does raise a few points that I really like, such as the fact that you can create and place an annex on your plot, rather than (at the moment) I imagine converting one of the guest rooms into a dungeon, and I positively love the idea of the green creeping into your little complex! Lots of room to brew daily events with a monster infested jungle creeping closer to your door.
I rather envisage the expansions as modules rather than rooms, as I'd expect any expansion would entail a degree of item storage and, more importantly, lets certain buildings have sensible numbers of occupants. For instance, your initial shack could have 3 rooms: two double rooms (master and minion) and a single (slave). Stables and milking parlours, on the other hand, can handle more depending on size (and staff, admittedly), enabling more "clients" at the same time. One cow girl at a time in the parlour makes sense balance wise, but it doesn't really track when you realise she's technically unsupervised.
Perhaps have an overseer slot so you can assign your minion to make them work harder? And, since misery loves company, I say nuts to a full house, I want a full dungeon instead!
This, in turn, allows for more play with defining the properties; the farm has a fair plot to build in, but little accommodation in the main house . The mansion, presumably in the city, would have plenty of rooms, but little ability to expand without ruining your garden and hacking off the neighbours, thereby limiting your use of stables and such without paying extra for renovation work. You could build a bunkhouse on the farm (or literally expand the house) and have more outbuildings, but most of your slaves would much rather live in the mansion .
I'll stop there, before i make this extensive post longer, and I'm fairly certain there is a thread related to this already....
I will add, however, off the earlier posts, that I'd like to vote the definition of loli as "Whatever the cops think". I sincerely doubt they'd take the "In the series she's a hundred and thirty year old elf" excuse. Sadly, as with so many things these days, appearance trumps substance.
Finally, thank you Daisy and co (arty people, at least) for your work so far, feel free to ignore me completely, as I know that a lot of what I've suggested bends plausibility in the game's design.
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Post by flagnine1 on Jan 14, 2011 17:29:40 GMT -5
out of all the ones I have seen so far I still like the current the best. with a pic of the house as the background with available rooms showing. An extra simple text box can give a brief description of the house for upgrades. such as:
Simple Farm House Clean and in good repair The green is 30 meters away A fence surrounds the property 1 Empty Room 2 Stables and one milking station. 1 Dungeon
This can also give the players a heads up if something is becoming a problem such as Cleanliness or recent damage due to monster attack. The distance of the green increases chance to be attacked by monsters from it the closer it is.
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Post by compuscribe on Jan 15, 2011 3:21:29 GMT -5
The problem with a simple text box, especially one devoted to parroting mundane statistics, is that it becomes easy to ignore. It's easy to overlook a number that's slowly getting smaller and smaller with each passing day, especially after you've been playing a while and you start glossing over text you've probably seen a hundred times before (after all, it was unimportant for the last 20 days; it's probably still unimportant, now), but it's much harder to miss the wall of green about to overrun your house.
The first two Fallout games had that problem. All sorts of information was displayed in the message window in the corner, but most of it was mundane combat data telling you how much damage you or your enemies did, so after a while, nobody bothered to read any of it, and a lot of players missed crucial pieces of information because of it. (Okay, being relegated to a tiny portion in the lower-left corner of the screen didn't help, either, but there is a bit of a "boy who cried wolf," phenomenon, as well. There was so much mundane text being churned out that, when something truly relevant popped up, it was dismissed out of hand.)
I, for one, like the idea of a modular house. Yes, it's more complicated, but it adds that little something extra to the project that makes the presentation seem a little more professional. (Besides, if you build a dungeon, it'd be nice to actually see a dungeon, somewhere, even if it's a tiny, caricaturized sprite of a dungeon. Yes, there's the picture, but that tells you nothing of how it fits with the rest of the house, even on a conceptual level.) The presentation absolutely needs work, but it's a work in progress, so that's the fine. The idea, however, certainly holds promise. (Of course, that's easy for me to say: I don't have to design any of the art assets or find someone to do it for me.)
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Post by docclox on Jan 15, 2011 6:25:35 GMT -5
I'm tending towards "keep the current system" as well. Pretty it up a bit by all means, but keep the background image as the primary mood-setter.
Failing that, I think I'd prefer Last Scout's suggestion. It needs custom art, but but with a little work and imagination the house could be anything, from a castle to a space station. to a mine to a treehouse
krezar's suggestion can do this too, but probably not so easily. The artist doesn't have much exterior to work with, so much of the nature of the dwelling needs to be illustrated using the narrow strips of interior wall that are visible. This strikes me as a much more difficult task.
The big advantage of krezar's system as i see it is the isometric grid. If we index the grid, we can change the position of rooms from house to house. So we could have a farm with outhouses for slaves, or a centralised slave pen ... but that's a lot more work, and I'm not sure the payoff would be worth it.
[edit]
I don't particularly see a problem with a text box. The problem with the fallout games occurred when they used the box for alerts. If you weren't looking at it, you could miss the information entirely. But it worked well for static information and mouseover text, which is how we'd be using it.
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Post by daisy_strike on Jan 15, 2011 6:57:06 GMT -5
TextBoxes:
1) Actually in my original concept there was a way to bypass all the mundane stuff and just get events. It has been lost at the moment but the fast game will come back, someday, maybe.
2)We really have any real EVENTS yet that appear in the text box. I plan to add continue? questions for when real EVENTS happen so you won't just click over it like I always do. This should be seen in the next update with the farmer task... I hope its still thought not applied.
Houses:
1) Nothing is set in stone and won't be changed in this version.
2) That being said all of them have a lot of potential and if i do implement the other versions I will probably keep the original version as well as an option, some people like simpler.
3) Either way gonna need more debate and artists... I cant draw a straight line with a ruler.
Daisy
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Post by zenzou on Jan 15, 2011 16:23:15 GMT -5
For assistance will there be a way to set different training based on time of day?
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Post by daisy_strike on Jan 15, 2011 16:44:30 GMT -5
Nope but you can select multiple trainings or one training. Its still up to the assistant really what she wants to do, as always my basic concept behind assistants is that you are not the assistant.
Daisy
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Post by redcape on Jan 15, 2011 23:16:24 GMT -5
Here's my attempt for the new screen design. Basically it looks like a combination of last scout and krezar idea. Use isometric view and implement house customization/expansion. Might be hard to implement but will be worth it I think ;D i55.tinypic.com/2q182vm.pngpsd files is in attachment if you want to modify or play around with it. Attachments:
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Post by flagnine1 on Jan 15, 2011 23:57:05 GMT -5
about redcape's idea have them wander around a bit like sims.
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Post by docclox on Jan 16, 2011 6:04:11 GMT -5
My major concern with redcape's suggestion is that the sprites are quite hard to tell apart. It's not an issue in combat, because we have the minipics to tell us which sprite represents which girl, but without them, it can be quite difficult. Doubly and trebly so when we start having multiple instances of the same girl. If I have four Menaces, it's going to be impossible to tell which one is which just from the sprites. A mouseover pic would help I suppose... about redcape's idea have them wander around a bit like sims. And that would make it harder to get the mouseover Also, we don't have walking animations, so they're just going to rattle around a bit. It's a nice idea, but I don't think it's going to work. Not without an awful lot of effort, anyway
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Post by compuscribe on Jan 16, 2011 12:07:07 GMT -5
That was kind of my thinking, as well. Even if the girls can only face one direction and stand perfectly still, if you want the sprite to reflect the girl's current outfit, you'll need a separate sprite for each one. If you allow multiple facings, you'll need to multiply that by at least 4 (possibly 8, depending on how fussy you get). If you want to animate them, as well, then you can multiply that by another factor of 3, and that's just for a simple 4-frame animation (the "standing" sprite is typically used twice in each loop, so there's at least that). That's a lot of extra sprite work! I know I was the one advocating making the presentation a little more professional, but there's definitely a limit, especially when it's almost entirely a one-person job.
And all of that doesn't even factor in the work required to implement the animation once you have the sprites. (I'm trying to decide if Flash's movie clips would make it easier because the implementation is, at least conceptually, a bit more straightforward than the typical approach of cropping sprites from sprite sheets, or harder, since you'd actually have to make all of those movie clips, yourself, whereas, once you've got the sprite-cropping & placing code working, you can basically just throw sprite sheets at it, assuming the sprites have similar dimensions, and the code will do all of the work for you. Either way, there's definitely a fair amount of work involved.) And let's not forget about the collision detection with any furniture in the room. We don't want girls walking over tables or through beds, after all.
Basically, I'm not about to argue that seeing the girls walking around their rooms wouldn't be a nice touch, but I really don't know if it's worth all of the effort that would be required to make it happen.
On a side note, there probably needs to be a clearer distinction between the normal and master bedroom modules. (The master bedrooms should be noticeably bigger, for one, since they need to accommodate two people: a girl and either you or an assistant.) Since they function differently, you need to be able to tell them apart at a glance. As it stands, it looks like you'd have to rely on trial and error until you memorized which was which. What's more, all of the rooms are probably a little too large, in relation to the screen, since you'll need room to add more, and you probably don't want to have to scroll around to find them all.
Other than that, it definitely shows a lot of potential.
[edit] And just to clarify my point on the text box, if as proposed, it displayed information such as: Simple Farm House Clean and in good repair The green is 30 meters away A fence surrounds the property 1 Empty Room 2 Stables and one milking station. 1 Dungeon
That information isn't going to change an awful lot from one day to the next. In fact, the vast majority of it isn't going to change at all. You might remember to check it occasionally, when you're getting set up, but once you've established a decent routine of cleaning the house and keeping the Green at bay and everything seems to have reached a nice equilibrium, that information isn't going to change as much, and many players will stop paying attention to it. I know in Whore Master, I keep forgetting to check the cleanliness rating. Then all of a sudden, I'm like, "Oh! That's right! I had to give the maid a few days off to rest and I forgot to put someone else on the job. That's why I'm suddenly losing business!"
Now, the cleanliness issue might be unavoidable (it'd be tougher to represent graphically, and I'm not sure if I'd really want to see it, anyway), but the encroachment of the Green would be a far more pressing concern, and you wouldn't want that sneaking up on you just because the girl responsible for cleaning away the brush got sick and you forgot to put someone else on the detail.
That said, I suppose a compromise would be to color code the status text. They could be green when they're under control, yellow when things are starting to slip, and red when they're becoming a serious problem. I still prefer the idea of actually seeing the Green getting closer and closer to your house, but the color coding would at least make it a little harder to simply overlook, if it does get implemented as a text box.
[edit 2] To clarify my clarification (yeah, that's not confusing at all), "they" would be the individual items that compose the status text, so for example, "Clean and in good repair," could be in green, while, "The Green is 5 meters away," might be in red. (That was hopefully pretty obvious, but the writer in me couldn't stand the ambiguity.)
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shiar
New Member
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Post by shiar on Jan 18, 2011 7:15:24 GMT -5
Just a thought on the text box; do you really need that information to hand? Turn by turn, the most salient points I can think of are green encroachment, repair, cleanliness, runaway status and probably illness. It just seems that if it's static, it makes more sense to hide it somewhere and call it up rather than to constantly be reminded you can't afford that nice new apartment or monster proof fence.
Not sure I like the sprites, but since the minipics overlap enough that I just page through my stable until I find who I'm after, I don't find the idea objectionable. That said, also quite happy to use the current system (tweaked slightly), Krezar's pic just gave me ideas.
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Post by redcape on Jan 20, 2011 22:01:55 GMT -5
Another mockups for the new screen, I decide to scrap the isometric concept since it's too hard to build the assets and configuring good display layout without became too confusing This mockups is more like back to basic with a few changes, especially regarding drag&drop thingy and girl's minipic. Uploaded with ImageShack.usPlease tell me what do you think and give a feedback.
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Post by flagnine1 on Jan 21, 2011 1:28:26 GMT -5
I like it. I don;t know how hard it would be to program. Two quick things.
First how exactly are girls assigned to rooms and rooms given jobs. It not very clearly explained in pic.
Second is there a way to show green encroachment? I know its something that we have talked about a few times on this topic.
Over all I like it.
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