In fact, I am collecting a large number of AI images from websites like "ehentai" and "pixiv". The number of images is sufficient, and the art style is relatively consistent. Players in the Chinese community are slowly creating characters. We have also considered using CG from GALGAMEs to mass-produce simplified characters. Meanwhile, we are preparing to create general dialogue templates so that players can modify and create custom setting files. However, the biggest problem is that our languages are different. So the things created by the Chinese community may not be usable for you.

For now，I have nearly 550+ characters' AI pic folder. They have no tags. Most famous ACG characters have enough or even too many pics .While unpopular characters' pic have poorly tens of pics. In the future we may use  our own AI to create the pics you need. But for now, I'm just  collecting and downloading AI pics.

Quote from: Goldo on Nov 18, 2024, 08:34 AMSo there's a review section on F95 and I went through them to get a feel for people's reactions to the game. Thanks to you guys who pitched in, by the way!

I am left a little confused by this exercise, though. Everyone seems to agree the base difficulty is too grindy so there's that.

But:

• Some people love that there are girl packs, others hate them and want them removed
• Some people love the management part, others say it's boring
• Some people love the story, others say it's the worst thing they've ever seen in a game
• Some people think the UI is good, others that it is clunky and barebones
• ...

I guess now I know what these game developers must feel when they read Steam reviews.

What do you think is relevant criticism and what is more noise? Do you think I could implement some kind of skippable tutorial or 'welcome to the game' part to explain things to new player, to hopefully make it less deceptive?

I would rather not turn new people away in the first few moments with a bad presentation of the game, if I can avoid it.

Tbh, I enjoy the grindy part. It's something of a "par for the course" with a management game. It's fun to take it slow and steady through the ranks.

I've probably played about 100 hours in the past few weeks;

One thing i can say is that fear seems hard to decrease (on 0.2, no idea where to get 0.3), the penalties for giving a wrong gift are too severe,

and the process of interacting with each girl can be tedious, I almost wish there was a "Manager" role you could hire to say that X girls get Y interactions daily to spend your interactions in an automated fashion, but who knows.

Thanks for making a really great game.

Fear indeed doesn't have an easy way to reduce it, but most interactions where you're nice to a girl lower fear a bit, too. OTOH, your slaves should fear you. High trust makes them a bit too independent.

0.3 beta has its own thread.

As I said in the previous post, I once had an automated master bedroom where you could set it up once, and then repeat your previous trainings for everyone. It was really finicky code-wise, and nobody ever proclaimed great love for it as a feature. So, IDK...

I think the grind issue is going to be divisive no matter what, there are already difficulty settings but I'm not sure the people complaining are actually using them...

I'm willing to add a pop-up explaining about the difficulty settings and giving more details to new players so they feel okay choosing an easier one, but I feel like re-balancing all difficulty levels would be overreaction. I guess the auto-rest feature could come earlier, and NG+ allows you to unlock it immediately, but I still feel it shouldn't be available Day 1 so that players have a chance to play around with the schedule and get a feel for it. Auto-job is an interesting idea, could be something to experiment with.

Regarding traits, I definitely don't want to compromise on the original vision which is: 'Traits give flavor to your girls and nudge you towards trying different builds, but they shouldn't prevent you from doing what you want with them if you are willing to give up on min-maxing'. Strong traits would defeat that. I guess I can think of something, but not sure it would succeed:

Spoiler

What if after reaching, say, a given rank, you get to 'evolve' one of your girl's Traits into a superior version? This way, A) You get more bang for your trait, and B) Since you get to choose only one, you do not feel the obligation to re-roll if the other traits are sub-optimal.

[close]

For girl packs, I'm not sure a larger basic bundle is the answer here. People seem to have different expectations in what they want from girl packs and how many they actually need. I think what would be nice would be:

1/ To have a dedicated thread with a list of good packs for starting players, possibly focusing on high-rated packs that also offer custom _BK.ini and perhaps stories.

2/ To have bundles of several girl packs for new players (for instance: 'final fantasy bundle', 'real-girls bundle', and so on). I think it would be really cool, but I guess it would need to come from the community as I won't have the time nor the skills to do it.

Quote from: hacksign5 on Nov 24, 2024, 09:49 PMOne thing i can say is that fear seems hard to decrease (on 0.2, no idea where to get 0.3), the penalties for giving a wrong gift are too severe,

Giving a bad gift does not raise fear, it can only impact mood and love. If you want to make up for a bad gift, flowers are always appreciated (unless you pick the color she hates).

Quote from: vadi92 on Nov 24, 2024, 09:02 AMThere are cheats in the game. He just needs to change debug mode from False to True in bkSetting.rpy (line 58) or he can use the King's way mod.

I think adjusting the difficulty is the real solution to the grind.

Quote from: Goldo on Nov 25, 2024, 12:25 AMI think the grind issue is going to be divisive no matter what, there are already difficulty settings but I'm not sure the people complaining are actually using them...

It's a universal truth that people refuse to read things on their screen. Maybe making the user go through each menu screen rather than allowing confirming from the first page would help

Quote from: Jman on Nov 24, 2024, 10:13 AMBut that's what the basic girl pack is. Is this again a suggestion for 'expansion packs', possibly with characters from the same franchise?

Yes, I was referring to expanding the base pack or creating prebuilt expansions

Quote from: Goldo on Nov 25, 2024, 12:25 AMFor girl packs, I'm not sure a larger basic bundle is the answer here. People seem to have different expectations in what they want from girl packs and how many they actually need. I think what would be nice would be:

1/ To have a dedicated thread with a list of good packs for starting players, possibly focusing on high-rated packs that also offer custom _BK.ini and perhaps stories.

2/ To have bundles of several girl packs for new players (for instance: 'final fantasy bundle', 'real-girls bundle', and so on). I think it would be really cool, but I guess it would need to come from the community as I won't have the time nor the skills to do it.

Either would be fantastic

Quote from: Jman on Nov 24, 2024, 10:13 AMI tried strong traits in Bonanza. I'm a great fan of those, but many a player couldn't really wrap their head about the fact that girls now had to specialise. Well, perhaps it was more of a side effect of early game balancing, but still...

And traits are perhaps the main thing that makes girls actually disctinct from each other. If these are moved to 'fluff', what else is there short of visuals, the rare virgin, or personality (which is kind of hidden right now)?

Adding trait-specific dialogue to even one part of the game is a Sisyphean task, though.

The solution to trait cohesion problems the packmaker didn't address is the Headhunter , or the official alternative when that becomes a thing.

I wasn't sure what Goldos intent was which is why I listed out two options. I also like strong traits.

Quote from: Goldo on Nov 25, 2024, 12:25 AMRegarding traits, I definitely don't want to compromise on the original vision which is: 'Traits give flavor to your girls and nudge you towards trying different builds, but they shouldn't prevent you from doing what you want with them if you are willing to give up on min-maxing'. Strong traits would defeat that. I guess I can think of something, but not sure it would succeed:

Spoiler

What if after reaching, say, a given rank, you get to 'evolve' one of your girl's Traits into a superior version? This way, A) You get more bang for your trait, and B) Since you get to choose only one, you do not feel the obligation to re-roll if the other traits are sub-optimal.

Upgrading traits would be amazing.

Another idea could be some kind of training system to remove negative traits. It could be like the negative fixations or something you pay for like a class

Quote from: Jman on Nov 24, 2024, 10:13 AMCharm boosting is actually an example where at least the biggest effect is relatively easy to notice: 50 points of charm gives you an extra waitress customer per night. It's even pointed out in the UI now. But there are lots of smaller effects, many of which are not very clear-cut and aren't amenable to smacking the player over the head with a "this is what it does" message. There are also blurbs about customers liking charming girls if that's what they're into during sex acts, which is the other relatively strong effect. So, I suggest it's at least halfway a problem of player inattentiveness, and in a game with as many moving parts as this, it's not possible to 'solve' a checked-out player.

Fair enough.

Quote from: Jman on Nov 24, 2024, 10:13 AM'Gold per customer/day' isn't really important for this discussion, since all you really care about here is your final income. It'd be useful once you're actually trying to optimise your customer base or scheduling, but that's far from the level of attention to detail we're talking about here. And that final income nicely is tracked in the stats page.

Those were more of a personal ask
I do think it's hard to tell where a girl is performing the best though using the current stats. It's fine for the regular jobs since you can only work one at a time, but for the others you can have multiple enable which results in different numbers of customers and thus different amounts of gold per customer even if you don't receive the most customers in her best role.

Quote from: Jman on Nov 24, 2024, 10:13 AMWhat are 'free actions', anyway? The master bedroom? Personal training is one of the more interactive and well-liked parts of the game, so in that case I don't really understand where the "lacks any depth" comment is coming from.

Increasing base actions has been done by various people: Kite80 (just lots more of them), OhWee (base went from 2 to 5, I think?), myself (free boots as part of an 'easy' difficulty option). Not sure any of these should be in vanilla.

I think there was an idea for 'free morning stroll' at some point, but it got shot down. Anyone remembers why?

And I agree with vadi that eventually, you have lots and lots of AP and a player who just wants to click through the game won't really use them all.

I once had auto-night-training, which I guess was mechanically different from manual training. Not sure anybody really liked it, and it was kinda fragile.

Yeah, I don't particularly agree with the original reviews complaint here. I'd have to mess around and try it to see if it feels any better with 1 or more extra actions, but I don't really think it's worth the effort.
Auto training could be an idea or an option to use 3x AP to get 2x the base training value or something ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Quote from: Jman on Nov 24, 2024, 10:13 AMFree play mode is its own thing now, isn't it? NG+ adds a bunch of extra options, but a new player really shouldn't be messing with core game mechanics if he only wants to cut out the story.

I think that's only unlocked after you beat the game once right? I meant having only the option to turn off story for your first run.
Personally, I like the story though so I don't really care if this doesn't exist.

Quote from: Jman on Nov 24, 2024, 10:13 AMOh, and I don't think the checkout comparison is really relevant, except as a rather abstract example of how small improvements in UI can have a big impact. BK is orders of magnitude more complex, and lacks the cutthroat competition even the dingiest e-store has to survive

The main point was that the UI/UX has a massive impact of how people perceive and interact with it. I'm not an indie dev, but I often see these elements sitting on the back burner when they can be very impactful.

I feel that trait evolving is trying to have your cake and stuff your cheeks at the same time. Either the evolved trait is strong, in which case we're beyond the original vision anyway, and forcing the player to grind to access the good stuff - which was one of the original complaints. Or it's not strong, and thus largely just a fluffy exercise in pointless busywork, since the completionist will want to upgrade all two dozen+ of his girls.



I'm not sure forcing people to verify their difficulty level will change anything. I once had a difficulty selector screen with multiple warnings, a gong sound, and players still chose 'normal' and expected it to be the modern normal where you can just click yourself through the game.



As to removing negative traits, Trait King has something that's almost but not quite this. Many negative traits there can evolve into sort of hybrid, mostly-positive-but-still-a-bit-negative versions of themselves.



More stats are nice, but I think tracking those is what already contributes massively to save sizes and perhaps a bit of a performance hit, too. Then again, this stuff is already there, so might as well use it. Good point about the different sex acts giving different profits, that's indeed not easily visible right now.



Alpha&Omega also had a super-training mod where you could invest more AP to get more training done. He promised he'd redo it for 0.3... sometime. I myself made advanced training twice as strong stat-gain-wise, and allowed MCs with good charisma/spirit to perform more training/hypnosis sessions per day. Doubt either is going to make it into vanilla, and neither was fire&forget, so wouldn't address the issue all that well.



Yeah, storyless mode is gated behind NGP, which it really shouldn't be if we want to address these complaints. I also like the story, but this has been one of the more common complaints, ever.

Hello,

A little off-topic on the big subject, but in reponse to some modding ideas I have/had :

Quote from: Jman on Nov 25, 2024, 07:50 AMAlpha&Omega also had a super-training mod where you could invest more AP to get more training done. He promised he'd redo it for 0.3... sometime. I myself made advanced training twice as strong stat-gain-wise, and allowed MCs with good charisma/spirit to perform more training/hypnosis sessions per day. Doubt either is going to make it into vanilla, and neither was fire&forget, so wouldn't address the issue all that well.

Super-training was an idea, but I left it alone as soon as Goldo made Advanced Training accessible to every girl and every act, independent of her likes/dislikes. In previous versions a girl without a like/dislike in an act could not be advance-trained in that act.
The aim of super-training was before all more picture-agency, and better stat boosts only as a side-effect to justify 3AP per training.
If there is a wish for stat-boosting-training, I could come back to it.


I did promise to remake the job-selection mod for 0.3, and I did indeed do so.
Why is it not in the forum? Well... The new forum doesn't allow for files to be uploaded in posts, so that's why 

I remember there being some discussion about AP effectiveness and such, independent of the fixation requirement.

The new free-training mode largely covers the picture variety, so that's another issue resolved.

You can upload files to some hosting site (Mega, Mediafire, etc). If you don't want to deal with the hosting yourself, some kind soul can probably offer to do so for you.


I think what we need is not so much super-training, but something similar to the farm for regular training, but not as separate from the main gameplay loop.

I have a mediafire account so i can upload it. Just PM me and i will send an email address where you can send the files.

Edit: the augment mod and unicorn mod are already in there.

Hello Vadi,

Thank you for the proposition !

I'll give the mod a last thourough check and send it to you then.

There is the slight problem that the mod touches core files (main.py, girlclass.py, end_day_event.py and screen.py), so I have to update it for each new patch...

Maybe I'll see with Goldo if some things can be included in a future patch if it runs smoothly.

Since it is a 100% quality of life mod without touching the balance, maybe there is a chance ?

I any case, you'll get a PM now and a mail soon^TM

@Goldo about reviews;this is something you should see https://www.youtube.com/shorts/MbTcQurCxYw

Quote from: Jman on Nov 25, 2024, 07:50 AMI'm not sure forcing people to verify their difficulty level will change anything. I once had a difficulty selector screen with multiple warnings, a gong sound, and players still chose 'normal' and expected it to be the modern normal where you can just click yourself through the game.

I think the cheapest way to deal with this, and perhaps also the most effective, if to make the default difficulty 'easy' and call it a day. People who skip everything won't even notice, but maybe on their second game they'll appreciate that more challenge is available.

QuoteYeah, storyless mode is gated behind NGP, which it really shouldn't be if we want to address these complaints. I also like the story, but this has been one of the more common complaints, ever.

Fair enough, but that's not something I feel ready to compromise on. I put a large amount of work in the story and I still think that's how the game's supposed to be played, at first. You can easily unlock the no-story mode with a simple line in the console but I don't want to spoon-feed it to the players. Maybe I could make it unlock after the first chapter or so, that way it would take less time to reach it for people who really have the VN parts.

Quote from: EvilPenguin on Nov 27, 2024, 09:56 AM@Goldo about reviews;this is something you should see https://www.youtube.com/shorts/MbTcQurCxYw

Thanks! Words to live by, and in fact, that's how I mostly carry myself.

However, I have been known in some occasions to be, shall we say: one opinionated motherfucker, so I do sometimes like to temper my ironclad certainties with other people's opinions. If only so that I can ignore them all the better afterwards.

But the truth is still with the Dude.

You could take a page from the Owlcats and call the default (easy) difficulty 'Normal' and the intended difficulty 'core' or something similar. Then again, the Owlcat approach in other difficulty-related matters has garnered a lot of hate.


Unlocking story mode after the player has passed through the first singificant breakpoint sounds like a reasonable compromise.

Quote from: Jman on Nov 28, 2024, 05:29 PMYou could take a page from the Owlcats and call the default (easy) difficulty 'Normal' and the intended difficulty 'core' or something similar.

Absolutely a classic. Some people refuse to play on easy lol

Quote from: Goldo on Nov 28, 2024, 04:54 PMFair enough, but that's not something I feel ready to compromise on. I put a large amount of work in the story and I still think that's how the game's supposed to be played, at first. You can easily unlock the no-story mode with a simple line in the console but I don't want to spoon-feed it to the players. Maybe I could make it unlock after the first chapter or so, that way it would take less time to reach it for people who really have the VN parts.

Then don't compromise. I think reading the story is proper and correct. This is the wrong genre of game if you don't like reading.