Rogue-Like Update 12/30/17

So the end of the year is winding down, and I've promised to get Emma out to you in some form within the year. That actually looks like it'll happen, although I still need to test a few things. I wanted to give you guys some more insight into how I developed this game, and why certain things take the time they do.

I started brainstorming this concept, I knew that I wanted to make a game, but I didn't have a fixed concept in mind.  After some brainstorming I ended up with the Rogue-Like concept because I figured that it was relatively untapped and cool IP at the time, and a flexible enough setting to allow multiple girls to show up along the way.  I'd never done any programming before (not really, anyway), and while I knew that I'd wanted to eventually have multiple girls in the game, I didn't know what that would necessarily mean from a design standpoint.

So I started building Rogue, and the entire time I tried to keep in mind how her features could be expanded to include another girl in the action. Even so, by the time I got started on Kitty, I realized I had a lot of work to do. Certain things that could be assumed with only one girl in the picture got a lot more complicated with two, like trying to display both at once without them overlapping too much, or making sure that they were aware of each others' presence in the room.

If I'd just made a completely separate mode that was just Kitty doing all the things Rogue could do, it would have been a lot simpler, but my goal was to eventually have a lot of interaction, and I spent a lot of last year designing systems to allow for that, and that meant rebuilding large chunks of the game.

So now I've started in earnest building the systems to allow Emma to be added to the mix. I've already adapted most of the core functions of the game to take her into account, and when I added the systems for Kitty, I tried to design them as best I could to be expandable like that. Once I've got three rolling, four or more should be easy from a code design standpoint, but I still need to get in and make some tweaks to various systems to make sure they work right.

Emma also presents a slight special challenge in that she's a teacher, not a student, so while every room in the game is designed to have only two active characters in it at a time, in the classroom she can be a third in a special role, and I'm still working out the best way to handle that. I'm also trying to figure out the best way to include many girls in the game so that you don't keep getting the same ones showing up all the time, or never see one of them, etc. I need to figure out the best ways to give the ones you want priority for appearances.

That work will be the next thing I work on on the programming side, as well as adding some of Emma's basic sex scene coding. I'm probably also going to change the UI a bit, let me know which stats you'd most like to see added to the basic screen UI, and also what I should add to a "character sheet" style UI when I get around to that.

On the art side, Emma's base sprite is mostly done, I still need to make more clothing options, some hair options, some "special effects," that sort of thing. Then I need to make up the base artwork for her various sex scene options, and will likely turn a lot of the clothing for those poses over to some of my friends that have been working on the project. At the moment they are working on stuff like some new backgrounds, and some new clothing sprite options I want to try out. We'll see how that goes.

2018 should be a really cool year for Rogue-Like, we'll see how long Emma takes to finish up, and I have new content to be added for Rogue and Kitty, and who knows, I might even have time to start on Laura. But first thing's first, winter is coming.