BBBen
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Update - Kimiko spreads Iku's legs (I'm proud of this pic)
🕑 Added 2017-05-15 13:00:00 +0000 UTC tl;dr - I've been buried deep in making LMO. I've got important new features and endings coming up for v0.3.0. I explain what I use your LMO transcripts for below, and lastly I'm planning more or less to announce the PAL expansion title and features tomorrow.This week's image
This is probably fairly self-explanatory. :) It's from the planned Iku/Kimiko threesome. If you're interested in the technical side, I'm very happy with how I was able to make this work because it's quite a complicated pose with some unconventional bends in places, and Iku's boobs look pretty believably squashed up, I think.
LMO v0.2.1
You might have noticed, if you've played it, that I disabled the undo function. I wasn't sure whether to pull the trigger on that, but I really want to encourage you to go with whatever ending your playthrough produces, not just the ending you get for having high stats. Right now with the cheats available it seems like people are mostly going for the high trust + high lust ending, which is really only one branch. The last update included endings for high trust + low lust and low trust + high lust as well, and there will be other endings that aren't necessarily about getting trust and lust up high.
I don't know if you've picked up on this too, but I think it makes a real difference that the game now will never (or hardly ever) give you a default ADRIFT error response. Now you'll pretty much always get a response that treats what you just typed as actual words from Twyla's mouth.
LMO v0.3.0
EFon and I have got plans for a whole bunch of new endings, so we've had to work out the priorities of what should be implemented first. The plan is to have nine endings by v0.4.0 and to have most of the necessary programming elements in place for those by v0.3.0. I've already added one of the new endings, although it's a minor one, and I'm in the midst of implementing some of the game's most important pieces that are currently missing - the ability to give the guard a hand job or blow job.
I am planning to probably put v0.3.0 as a public release to generate some interest, but I will be putting out v0.4.0 fairly soon afterward just for patrons, and that will have significantly more content. This isn't totally cynical - all of this stuff takes time to work on so I can't put everything into 0.3.0 without major delays anyway.
What I use transcripts for
I thought it might be worthwhile explaining what I actually do with those transcripts I always request from LMO. Basically, when I get them I can see what commands have been typed and what the game did in response. In a normal game these are useful because I can find bugs more easily or see what extra commands might be good to include. In LMO it's essential - I can see what players are thinking and trying to do and how they will respond.
LMO is like a chat bot in some ways, but in other ways it's not. Every response I write is a custom, bespoke response designed to directly reply to whatever you've just said while developing the characters and hinting at other things you might be able to do or talk about.
The method is basically that I just read through them and add replies to as many commands as I can; sometimes they are rather big ones that need a lot of work and I might put those off for later, but much of the time they are quick things that I can write up a short response for and then move on. Ideally, I want to have the game able to respond to basically everything that I've seen in any transcript so far, except for a few weird, obscure things that I'm sure no-one will ever type again.
Other times I actually already have a response in place and I just have to edit the command so it will respond to different phrasing. This happens a lot - I'm regularly finding people are getting the right idea but just haven't used the words that I thought of when writing it up. I know this is a criticism some people have against the game (and sometimes text adventures in general), basically "how am I supposed to guess the exact words the author game up with for the commands?"
Well, in a game like Pervert Action: Legacy I handled that by trying to lay out all the commands needed very clearly, introducing them all in the course of the gameplay and keeping the number of possible commands relatively low anyway. LMO is a complete flip of this idea, you do need to work out what to say, but my plan isn't that you need to guess the exact wording I've come up with. I want transcripts so I can try to guess EVERY DAMN combination of words, or at least all the likely ones, that you could come up with to say something. I can come up with quite a few on my own but I will always need a lot of transcripts to give me player input data.
Another thing I can see in transcripts is what the flow of the gameplay is like - I can see how long it takes before players start to flail around and run out of ideas, which means I can start holding your hand a little more at the right times. In these early versions the game feels clunky but my eventually goal is for the game to feel eerily intuitive, having a precise response to even pretty obscure stuff you try to do and understanding the way you think. I don't know how successful this goal will be, it really depends a lot on how much interest and support it generates.
PAL expansion pack
LMO 0.3.0 is mostly what I've been working on this week, btw, although AWFreyr is still plugging away on the PAL expansion pack writing. I meant to make the public announcement for the title and features of the expansion last week, but I wound up feeling too busy and distracted the whole time to actually get around to it. I'll probably try to do it tomorrow instead.
Quite a wordy update this week. Anything to say about it? Go ahead, I'd love to hear it!
Comments
HuhnDoener
How about showing a Fumi pic tomorrow? Love the preview image though :)
BBBen
Thanks!
Hank Rillek
Cool to hear your thoughts and design process behind LMO, I can see why you need the transcripts!
