My Catgirl Maid Thinks She Runs the Place - Scorpio
Thank you to everyone that has played the game and supported me during development of the game. I am pleased to announce the release of a little, paid dlc with some extra stories.
Putting Madeline, Miyu and Angelica as the stars in their own stories, the focus shifts to what a relationship between them and the MC would like.
They're just fun little stories with a chance to have more cute and funny moments with the characters. I hope you enjoy them!
THE ORIGIN: Blind Maid l DEFINITIVE EDITION - Waraní Studios
-Vera catch you throgth the wall solved. -Monsters cath you Church solved. -More monster on Chapter 1. -Miss minimap after exist inventary solved. -Music level volume reduced.
The last time I spoke here, I promised to focus on developing a more fleshed out hearts and minds interaction for the game (more social projects, political leaders, more lasting consequences to how you interact with the villages). This hasn't changed, and will still remain the main task for the nearest future. I have, however, reached a limitation in how the AI brain works. I initially made a somewhat simple system, where each actor senses the events around him, and tries to pick the most suitable action for his current mission. This works fine, but the problem is - the more complicated a mission is, the more unreadable the code that manages it becomes. For example, if the enemy units are doing a foot patrol, their goal is to move from point to point, looking for anything interesting they might wanna check out. So far, so good. But, what if they should check out a village, instead of a random map point? What if they stumble upon and unguarded enemy car? What if they get enegaged in an unexpected place? What if their allies need help? What if they're in cars themselves? They then need to stop, exit them and continue the mission. All these things are being tracked by the mission script, making it more and more hellish to manage and read. I cannot continue writing the AI this way, cause it completely discourages me from making any more complex interactions (whenever actors leave their cars, I need to remember why - is it the location they were going to, are they stopped in traffic, is it something else), and in general - if at any point the AI gets engaged by your troops - it has to abandon the original mission completely, because it has no way of remembering what it was trying to do. The solution I'm currently working on, is switching to a more modern and robust way of writing this code - a node based system, similar to a behavior tree. The AI will now always remember at which stage of it's mission it is, and after I'm done writing the "nodes" for various interactions, I can start making really complicated plans for it. The same system will be used for other parts of the game, starting with behavior in combat, to the in-game politics.
How will the AI be different when I'm done
This is a sample view of an AI mission, where instead of a single monolith of unreadable code, I now have a structure I can track, and think of as "point to point" interactions for the AI. This lets me plan entire behaviors, like: 1) go to an area 2) exit cars 3) enter a building 4) if engaged, abort and return to this plan later 5) etc.
What does this mean for the game
The AI will get smarter, and I will again start making new interactions for it. The first thing I'll do will be adding political leaders to the game. The leaders would be moving from village to village, changing the civilian sentiment in favor or against you, promoting their local allies, maybe organizing protests. As the player, you'll be getting new missions related to them, new demands to meet, and so on. This sort of complicated interaction would be impossible to make with the old system.
What's coming next
The next big update will add politics and more hearts and minds strategies for the player, like new social projects for you to develop, and more interesting interactions with the locals.
When is it coming
With the summer season in full swing, I'll take two weeks off by the end of August (gonna be my first time getting any downtime since 2019). Before I leave, I plan on finishing the switch to the new system for all existing AI missions. This might not be immediately visible for the players (after all you rarely see what the AI is planning to do, and why), so I also plan on implementing smaller, unrelated changes as well. Expect new units, as well as some QOL improvements. Planned release date - end of September.
This week we continued working on tavern personalities. Two more characters added to the pool of tavern patrons. One is Historian, the other is Retired Captain.
If you buy a meal to Historian, he tells a two sentence epic tale(!) about a long forgotten hero. This gives our hero “Inspired!” major effect for 5 days. “Inspired!” gives +2 to melee and ranged attacks.
These two sentence tales are procedurally generated. Here is an example: “Once there was a supersitious silversmith who has gone to the far end of the world to fight a giant. At the end he was victorious but poor.”
The other character our hero can meet at the tavern is Retired Captain. He wants our hero to buy him a meal. If our hero buys a luxurious meal for 100 coins, he gains “Captain’s Friend” major effect. This effect lasts for 5 days and grants our hero a 50% sea travel discount.
With the Oracle and the Elder Scholar we mentioned last week, there are now 4 new characters at the tavern. We are working on some more for the next update to make the taverns more populated and varied. Thanks for reading :)
Beta Access and DreamHack Beyond's Indie Playground Starts Today!
We are part of their Indie Playground event classified under the Humor Booth section and it would be amazing to see you attend the event with us! You can check out the other games participating on this list: https://dreamhack.com/beyond/indieplayground/
We prepared a very special trailer for this occasion and just in time for our Beta release! You are all invited to test the current public build of the game by checking out our store page!
* Fixed incorrect lighting and reflections in the Orientation area. In general it's a bit darker overall however it does promote using and experimenting with the LightStick. * Fixed reflections of some materials. * Updated the teleporting/transporting effect to look more polished and shine a temporary light in case you transport to a place that is completely dark. * Fixed some camera exposure settings in general.
Please let us know if you run into any problems or have any feedback please let us know on Discord: https://discord.gg/ctMSXrwYfU