Tuesday 11 August 2015

Sleazy, Crude and Boastful

Hello everyone! One of my patrons sent me a message asking me to explain the difference between the crude, sleazy and boastful npc traits. I figured I'd put it here so everyone can read it.


Sleazy is a major trait that influences a lot of npc's behaviour. Originally it just started as something to affect npc's conversation, with the idea that a sleazy man who talks about sex a lot would be a good match for a girl with an overactive imagination who likes thinking about it. It has a conflict with refined girls, as they like things to be 'proper', which means they aren't so comfortable with overt sexuality.
It's also opposed to the charming trait, and the 'romantic' personality type. You won't see npcs with sleazy and either of these.


Since then, it's had a lot of extra content added – too much for me to give a complete list for this blog post. It's the trait I use anytime I want to add content that needs the npc to be very openly sexual, especially if it means going beyond what would normally be socially acceptable.


Basically, sleazy npcs are all about sex. They talk about it more, they'll show sexual interest very directly by e.g. staring down your top, they'll take sexual actions more often, including inappropriate ones like touching you up in clubs. When you make out with them they're more likely to grope you in intimate places than to give you a tender kiss. 


Crude is a holdover from the old days long before the game was online. I was planning to have a massive set of written dialogue for each personality, modified by traits and crude was to be one of these. The general idea was that crude men would be blunt, to the point, and somewhat rude. This would put them in conflict with refined girls, but it would be easier for the player to figure out their likes and dislikes.


This dialogue system proved to be a complete failure, and was entirely scrapped. By the time of release, I was very tempted to remove crude. It had only a couple of references in the game and I wasn't sure it justified its inclusion. It also had some overlap with sleazy which I mostly resolved by handing them over to the sleazy trait. Crude still has the same opposite traits – charming and romantic, although I wonder if perhaps it should only be limited on the charming trait and not the romantic personality.


Because npc traits don't require me to add UI elements to support them, I decided to leave it in and see if I could add useful content to it later.
This happened to some extent and Crude now has many more references in the code, but it's still a minor trait compared to sleazy. Most of its effects modify dialogue rather than changing an npc's behaviour or adding new actions.


Boastful is the newest of these traits. This means it has the fewest game effects, but also a quite well-defined role. Boastful men are proud, arrogant and like bragging about themselves. It has a varied effect on relationships – he might be an annoying braggart, or he might be so interesting that his boasting is fascinating. Boastful men go well with shy girls as they like getting to do all the talking.
Otherwise, they have a few special actions based on their arrogance. For example, if a man fancies you and you ask him to be your friend he might suggest becoming boyfriend & girlfriend instead. Most men won't do this if you already have a boyfriend, but a boastful man is convinced that he must be far better than any romantic rival, so he'll ask you to dump your current partner for him.
It can also lock out some content. The newest event chain in 0.3.8 involves an npc coming to you for help. Boastful men are far too proud to admit that they need someone else to solve their problems, so the event will never happen for them.

Well, I hope that was interesting for you. Now go out there and find a crude sleazy braggart for some sexy fun!

7 comments:

  1. Gratz on hitting 4k for Patreon!

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  2. Congratulations on getting 4k! Can't wait till we can create our own NPCs

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    1. Thanks! It's likely to be implemented in September sometime - the "prove me wrong" vote will finish soon so I'll be doing that for 0.3.10.

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  3. This is a very nice description. Telling us what you're thinking about personalities is both interesting and insightful into the game's design.

    Of course, since this game is evolving, you have the difficult task of settling on a personality's role before you can tell us what it is! The dichotomy between crude and sleazy being a perfect example of how things change.

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  4. I was curious as to how the friendship portion of the game works. I have reached the maximum amount of friends and there are a few different types. However nothing really seems to happen. I have set my game length to 150 weeks and pretty much spammed through the time after making friends and I think one time a random event occurred. I'm just wondering if there is more to this than I know or if it's just not all implemented yet. Anyway thanks in advance!

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    1. The main effect of having friends is the get the weekly stat effects that you can see on the friends screen.
      There's a few special events that can only happen if you have certain types of friends and more will be added in the future - these trigger off the friend's personality traits, and not their weekly stat effect, although weekly effects are also based on personality.
      I also plan to add more social events which will let you easily spend time with your friends. It looks like I'll be focused mostly on Patreon reward content for August and September though, so there won't be much in the way of friendship stuff for a month or two.

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