Shuffle Me v0.3.4 Regular Update - Fixes, Improvements and new Clothes
Hey, it's Sifa :D
Hot fixes broke my schedule a little, so doing an update today (it was planned on Friday...), and will skip next Friday (since that's in 2 days). The next update will be on 5 June.
(download links at the bottom)
And few words about today's update and plans.
One-Timers
In general, I like this type of opponents. They have a simple progression and their bodies are transformed during 1 fight. They'll be a great addition to more complex campaigns.
However, with your help we found a lot of bugs related to them. For example, Camo one-timer was broken almost completely on the higher floors, so we repaired them and improved their progression.
Looks cool :D As you can see, our TF system allows us to control the "target" look for each opponent. So this one starts as a very slim boy, and ends up quite a rough baddie xD Thanks to this system, each NPC feels different from the others.
However, there are some more areas to improve. For example, all of them have the same Idle animation atm. I think making a unique idle animation would add a lot to their characters. After that, I think I'll do several simple unique animations for them, again, following the tone of the character. That Camo enemy is rough and masculine (?), so their movements should also be rough and straightforward.
Other NPCs also got updated looks and nicer looking progression.
New Clothes
You might have noticed that on the image above there are some new items presented. There are even more in the game. You see, Elisabeth, one of our artists, now works more on items and is learning Spine (animation App) what saves a lot of my time :D So I hope we'll be having a steady source of new items now :D And it's possible thanks to support from our Patrons. Obviously, our guys need to pay their bills xD For example, only one more license of Spine Pro for Elisabeth took $400... Please keep supporting us :D
With so many new items, I decided to reduce the amount of simple recolors drastically. Basically, we removed all the shades, and left the main colors only (like black, green, blue, etc.). Simple recolors are too boring to keep in the game, anyway. The plan is to replace all the simple recolors with "complex" recolors eventually. If there is a complex recolor with a "pink" dominating color - it will replace the simple "mono-pink" recolor.
In the end we have way less items, but their diversity has improved a lot. Collecting sets or other desired items should be easier.
Want to mention that I rebalanced the clothes again so they are less powerful. They help with improving your build, but they don't give you power for free anymore.
Help Tooltips
(this section is from our programmer Devoidex :D)
I don't get a lot of opportunities to do "live" playtesting. Even if you know people who know you do adult game dev and are cool with it, it's still incredibly difficult to ask people "hey, wanna help me playtest this TGTF game?" In spite of that, I do get a chance to see the game "newly" played once in a while, and it is immediately obvious within the first minute that Shuffle Me is a very complicated game XD
We still have a lot of work to do on teaching new players how the game works, but for this release I figured out how to show information about the various in-game stats when you hover over cards:
Most of these new tooltip texts already existed in in the "effects info" menu... but how many of you knew where to find that? I assume that was better than nothing, but it wasn't really useful beyond having a list of all the effects-- actually finding the bits that mattered for a particular card was probably painful. The cards already "knew" what stats they affected, it was just a matter of presenting it in a nicer way.
One YouTube tutorial later and I realize it's as simple as slapping in some extra layers to keep the tooltips "above" other game elements and reacting to mouse movement signals. A little bit of animation for fade in/out and some math to keep them positioned on screen, and they're good! These also prompted a lot of reworks of how we use icons inside text boxes, which will hopefully make writing future card effects and help text easier.
Let us know what would be helpful to see in tooltip form, or if they act strange (layering issues, staying shown when not pointing at something, etc). They shouldn't be too intrusive, but we might add something to disable them later if they're annoying. Also, I have no idea how these behave on mobile, if you play the web version on a phone.
What's next
(it's Sifa again :D)
Now I'm going to work on the introduction. As I said before, it's going to be a more advanced test of our Campaign Builder tools. I'll make new starting choices that affect your starting cards, items, and possibly even Perks. In the best scenario - maybe even different TF goals (the final look of each body part), though I'm not completely sure about that.
Sure, we'll keep fixing the bugs and implementing additional quality of life things. And new items and most likey new cards. Want to do some more 'simple' cards, because I'm afraid that new players are lost when seeing all these effects on every single card xD
We'll try adding Voices only in case the introduction is implemented smoothly. They aren't the highest priority atm, so can't promise much.
Panties and Bras will probably be implemented very soon, maybe in 2 weeks. Won't add too many of these at first, because in general I need them to start working on a new Unique NPC.
Unique Human Opponent probably needs a bit more time. Their look is ready, but I want to give them additional equipment in hands (and also panties and bra) and make some unique animations, so they are actually unique. I think I will add them to the game in about 3-4 weeks.
After all of that: Story Mode (Complex Campaign) :D
Shuffle Me v0.3.4 Changelog:
Added help tooltips for card stats and effects-- hopefully you won't need the "effects info" help menu anymore.
Opponents in the Floors campaign are fixed and had their progression improved.
Added lots of new unique items:
new Tops
new Goth items
new Camo items
and some other stuff here and there
Removed many "simple" recolors of existing items
Reworked internal item IDs again-- saves should load, but may reset the clothing & cosmetics you had equipped (and possibly some enemies too)
Rebalanced clothing stats... again...
Added a "preview TF" button to the character creator (slow automatic transformation)
Stress and arousal are now reset to 0 if you lose combat from full TF.
Stress & arousal "loss cards" no longer do TF damage, the consequences after are enough :)
other small tweaks and adjustments