Breeding Season: Alpha Version 5.3 [Update 11/3/14]

[Ironvein]

Just realized a game logic error.

If no harpies or butt stallions show up in the shop, and the clients will not ask for them until you have the upgrade already, what is the draw to make a player want to get these upgrades other than curiosity?

There is nothing pushing us to get those upgrades at all since monster sell prices isn't determined by the breed but the stats.

[Ironvein]

From what I understand of the 'story', you job as a breeder is really to turn rabid, rapist monsters into calm, controllable sex pets.

If that's true, "BAD THINGS" should happen if you can't (won't) use up all their bred/harvests per day. Not necessarily immediate, but left unchecked could cause problems later (run away, berserks, orgies, etc.).

Other ideas: Not feeding monsters ought to at least negatively impact MOD; I should think the reason as obvious.

There should be a time limit (due by x/x date): failure to fulfill order affect Fame negatively (right now, I hardly ever look at clients at all <need money? sell jizz>) and change the order (they gave up on you).

Fame should determine how good the clients are (ex. just starting out with no fame, you really shouldn't be able to get a gold/silver clients, gotta prove yourself first <3 bronze clients>).

[Ironvein]

Other Idea I meant for last post:

Releasing Monsters back into the wild should up the chances of that breed showing up in the monster shop. Paying to restock the store doesn't really make sense (if they had them, they would sell them).

[FruitSmoothie]

Saved games aren't loading from the start up menu, though they seem to be working fine from ingame. I mean if you save and advance a day ingame, then try to load game from the ingame menu it'll go back to the day before. But if you restart your browser, it erases your saved data now. I tried starting a new game and loading a save from the ingame window instead of the Load/New game start up weindow, but it said there was no saved data.


Using Firefox for example, I also tried Chrome and the same problem.

This worked fine before the latest patch.

[JustDoug]

Minor bug: If breeding produces offspring and one of the monsters involved was on their last breed/harvest, using 'R' while trying to name the new arrival brings up the 'One of the monsters...' no-more-for-you alert as if you were trying to use the hotkey for 'Breed.'

Opinion: UX flow needs a lotta work but the basics and ideas are really promising.

Tips: get rid of those tiny windoid-closing 'X' targets. Buttons should be quick to target, easy to hit, located using a common scheme, hotkeyed if it makes sense and not get in the way of flow. Oh, and informative pop-ups like those, "You just got a consumable..." should not force an interruption to close them or hang around longer than the parent windoid.

[RougeRivers]

Saved games aren't loading from the start up menu, though they seem to be working fine from ingame. I mean if you save and advance a day ingame, then try to load game from the ingame menu it'll go back to the day before. But if you restart your browser, it erases your saved data now. I tried starting a new game and loading a save from the ingame window instead of the Load/New game start up weindow, but it said there was no saved data.


Using Firefox for example, I also tried Chrome and the same problem.

This worked fine before the latest patch.

I'm having the same problem with safari.

[Ironvein]

Minor bug: If breeding produces offspring and one of the monsters involved was on their last breed/harvest, using 'R' while trying to name the new arrival brings up the 'One of the monsters...' no-more-for-you alert as if you were trying to use the hotkey for 'Breed.'

Opinion: UX flow needs a lotta work but the basics and ideas are really promising.

Tips: get rid of those tiny windoid-closing 'X' targets. Buttons should be quick to target, easy to hit, located using a common scheme, hotkeyed if it makes sense and not get in the way of flow. Oh, and informative pop-ups like those, "You just got a consumable..." should not force an interruption to close them or hang around longer than the parent windoid.

This game is very much beta, the stuff you are mentioning are finishing touches. The creator needs to focus their priorities to making a good game engine first (where the work is done), and then cosmetic touches such as those.

[FruitSmoothie]

I tried to find a work around to the no saves loading thing but nothing worked.

Just bred a couple more perfect monsters from the latest update again. It's strangely addicting. I think I'm going to stop looking daily for updates for a bit though so I can enjoy more improves all at once. Hope you can keep finding time/drive to work on this, it's the project I'm most looking forward to on these forums. I don't know why somebody didn't try this sooner.

And yeah, the duplication thing seems to happen when you sell the same monster twice at the client window since they don't disappear from it until you exit and come back in. The second time I had it happen it again duplicated the first 4 monsters in my breed/sell window for whatever reason yet again. Unlike last time I only had 5 original monsters so when they duplicated I ended up with 9 total.

[JustDoug]

This game is very much beta, the stuff you are mentioning are finishing touches. The creator needs to focus their priorities to making a good game engine first (where the work is done), and then cosmetic touches such as those.

Closer to advanced alpha, as not all the elements are in place, but that's software for you! Looks like it could be one of those incredibly entertaining, engrossing time sinks that sometimes float to the top of the game pile. And it also has the all-important primary ingredient in its make-up: humorous pr0n!

Anyway, it's the interface behavior I'm talkin' about, not how it looks. It's best that the basic mechanisms and flow go in early, establishing them as fundamentals of the engine rather than trying to wedge them into your code-pile later on. That sort of planning has become de rigeur since they've came up with all that fancy, new-fangled object oriented stuff and usually makes later changes/additions a lot easier.

[HartistaPipebomb]

Honestly I would call it more of a pre-alpha.

Also, the menu behavior needs to be reworked in general. I've never gotten this far on a game before so I was kind of hacking it together as I went not knowing what to expect, but now that I have a better idea of how the menu system needs to work I gotta refactor a lot of it.

I'm going to try to figure out a fix for the save system by the end of the week, but after that I'm going to be slowing down on this game a lot. Probably a modest update about once a month.

[Krios2401]

I think it goes without saying that a tutorial which explains what various stats do would be nice. Also if what the test dialogue said was true and you'd have a monthly goal, a little tweaking is necessary since the random generator has a couple of times thrown me impossible client requests since they demanded specific stats which i couldn't meet since there were no monsters with boosts to that stat available. But hey, for early stage development? I really like this.

...also, personal fetish but we get some creampies?

[Ironvein]

When you satisfy a client it calls a function to remove the monster reference from your "owned monsters" that splits the array at the point immediately before the monster and immediately after the monster on that array, then glues them back together. What's happening is that I am somehow gluing the first part in twice, so the new array isn't "first half, second half" it's "first half, first half, second half". Since the array is just storing references to the monsters any changes to one entry on the array will affect the other, which is why it's not a "true duplication", it's a duplication of references to the monster.

EDIT: It ends up the solution to this problem is easy, there's an as3 "splice" method that I can use, whereas I was attempting to "slice" and then "concatenate". I'll check to see if this fixes the problem.

.... That sounds like an awfully complicated way to do it.

Why can't you do something like this:

/* assuming ranchMonsters() is the array that stores the references of the monsters, maxMons is the number of monsters in the list and monSold is the index of the monster sold */

for x = monSold to maxMons -1 /* or -2 to get the index of the monster before the last one */
ranchMonsters(x) = ranchMonsters(x +1) /* overwrites the previous monster with the one after it */
/* thereby removing the sold monster on the first loop */
next x

ranchMonsters(maxMons) = NULL /* remove the last reference on the list */
maxMons -= 1 /* one less monster */

/* end code for sold monster */

Basically, it looks for the monster sold on the list and moves all the monsters after that up one on the list. Then delete the last one on the list (since after the loop he would be copied) and then change the count one less.

I don't know what the Flash syntax would be for that, but it's the simplist approach in most other languages.

[sefrim]

hello im new here and i regestered just to comment lol. i love this game i have to say this is the single greastest flash sex game i have played and its not even done. cant wait to see it finished. good job and keep at it!

[Fakesley]

Looks neat so far. I have a few questions:
Will there be a male player character? I'm fairly sure the answer is no because of the huge amount of extra work needed, but if you decide to add a futa option, you might be able to reuse some of the animations.
Funny how many (adult) games these days are more likely to include "women" with penises than regular men.

As for the story/setting: What do the clients actually do with the monsters? Force them to fight (either in war or against each other)? Kill and eat them? Keep them as sex slaves? All three options sound pretty messed up.

you need to suspend you disbelief and just enjoy the game.

I have no problem with that, but a good explanation is better than having to suspend disbelief. I was just wondering if an official answer to my question would actually be available.

The clients have sex with them, but don't worry the monsters invariably like it. The monsters feed off of the energy of fulfilled desires (hence why they grow in power when you feed them sex juices). Having sex with them is actually the most constructive way you can use them; they could feed off of negative desires, like the desire to kill someone else, and an atmosphere of too much oppression will make them react violently. As a preview of the further storyline: basically there is a goddess of chaos and a goddess of order, and the followers of the goddess of order created the empire (of which Delilah is a member). The empire got too strong and enforced oppressive policies on the entire world, so in retaliation the goddess of chaos created the monsters to rape and pillage. The breeders try to strike a balance: they capture and restrain the monsters from raping random people, but they try to match the monsters to people in a controlled manner so they can still fulfill their desires. This setting stuff will all make it into the story-line eventually.

That sounds like a decent explanation of why the player is not a horrible person.
One question though: If the monsters are such a horrible plague on the land and the breeders are just trying to contain them and keep them from hurting people, why breed more of them? Did it start out with the breeders being motivated by helping people and later deciding to focus on profit instead?
My apologies if it sounds like I'm nitpicking or being too critical; I just think a good backstory is important. This one sounds good so far.

As far as male player character, it's an addition I'd like but it's not on the table just yet.

Better than nothing. Thanks for the consideration.

[JustDoug]

The problem being that it might be the monster-in-the-middle being removed. He's using a poor man's dooubly-linked list approach, time-honored and approved by the Ancient Ones, only using an array of pointers to the objects and concentating... Well it's old school, but works once you figure it out.

Aside to the Author:
The sol file is... Well, it looks like you're doing something with XML mixed in with binary and... It's pretty horrid looking,whatever it is. The Test Dialog text and some of the monster description strtings are spinkled genrously over it, making up the majority of the file.

Might I suggest a function using a sol 'save' object, each element/var property a transcrib/ed|able object of the monster's values, with another array of item object properties for inventory? By using an array of objects, you get procrustrean properties as a bonus, allowing saves to span versions and variable number of elements a lot easier, provided you don't remove properties from the transcribing object(s) and handle setting sane var default values if they don't get read in (duing the loaing function, I'd say).

[Toyloli]

I have no problem with that, but a good explanation is better than having to suspend disbelief. I was just wondering if an official answer to my question would actually be available.

Here's my take on the matter.
The point of breeders since this is purely sexual in nature is the concept that these monster girls are kept as pets by rich persons. Much like the concept of pokemon, owners keep, look after, feed, play with and screw their monsters on a regular basis cause it's fun. They wouldn't mistreet their monsters cause this would be wrong and illegal.
Their world clearly allows the keeping of monsters, especially monster girls as pets and treets them with some level of respect. Enough so that a breeder would give up her own body to improve their stats.

The job of a breeder is to 'train' monsters to have the kinds of personality, appearance, coat, skills and talents that a potential owner would want.
This is why that woman in the sample dialog is upset. She and her group clearly think either that the keeping of such creatures as pets is wrong, or that it's in some way uncivilized and that the monsters should be allowed to remain in the wild (screwing whoever they wants when they want).

[HartistaPipebomb]

The problem being that it might be the monster-in-the-middle being removed. He's using a poor man's dooubly-linked list approach, time-honored and approved by the Ancient Ones, only using an array of pointers to the objects and concentating... Well it's old school, but works once you figure it out.

Aside to the Author:
The sol file is... Well, it looks like you're doing something with XML mixed in with binary and... It's pretty horrid looking,whatever it is. The Test Dialog text and some of the monster description strtings are spinkled genrously over it, making up the majority of the file.

Might I suggest a function using a sol 'save' object, each element/var property a transcrib/ed|able object of the monster's values, with another array of item object properties for inventory? By using an array of objects, you get procrustrean properties as a bonus, allowing saves to span versions and variable number of elements a lot easier, provided you don't remove properties from the transcribing object(s) and handle setting sane var default values if they don't get read in (duing the loaing function, I'd say).

I am 95% positive that the way I handle the arrays now (using the splice function) is really the simplest and most ideal way. I've actually already fixed the duplication problem, I just haven't uploaded the fix yet.

As for the save file, I made it in (admittedly) the laziest way possible but I personally think it's serviceable and doesn't require me to put too much effort into writing save and load methods for every new thing I add. All of my objects are implementing IExternalizable and therefore serialize without much effort on my part, and I just stuff the entire GameState object into the SharedObject. Eventually once the game gets closer to completion and less is changing I'll be able to make save files work between releases, but honestly right now I don't really want them to.

As for the XML: this shows up because I've put all the monster definitions and dialogue into XML files for easy editing while I'm working on them, and potential mod-ability later. The reason they show up in the save file is because the GameState is storing them in an XML object.

[Ironvein]

I am 95% positive that the way I handle the arrays now (using the splice function) is really the simplest and most ideal way. I've actually already fixed the duplication problem, I just haven't uploaded the fix yet.

It depends on weither we are talking about a 'traditional' array or an arrayList object.

A basic array, normally cannot change its size on it's own (I make an array of 5 items, I cannot change that size of 5). That's probably why you need to 'Splice' function to basically rebuild the array from scratch every time you change the number of members.

There is also an arrayList object (sometimes known as a linked list, or queue) and that is actually mutable. This is usually the type you want to use when there isn't a fixed length for the array. My psuedocode idea was assuming this rather than a traditional array.

I'm not saying that you need to rework everything, since you have found a solution; but there are better ways to handle it. Food for thought as it were.

[HartistaPipebomb]

Also, as for the storyline junk: The empire (as an official stance) actually hates sex in general and thinks it's a disgusting practice that must be done purely for the continuation of the species. Delilah would most likely rather have all the monsters killed. As zealous followers of the goddess of order they enjoy control and oppression essentially "just because".

The breeders definitely have a profit motive, but partially they are breeding specifically to stick it to the empire (which is why Margo is so hostile to Delilah). They want to subvert the empire, but they don't want to do it through rape and murder which is how the monsters would go about it if they were uncontrolled. The monsters react directly to an atmosphere of repression, so the more sexually repressed the people around them are the more violent they become, but the more satisfied the people around them are the more docile they become.

As an aside, there is a third faction you haven't been introduced to of feral people who live in the wilds among the monsters, actively participating in the raping and pillaging. There's also the elves who are technically a form of monster, but they're aristocratic and civilized and instead of violence tend to satisfy themselves through extreme decadence and kink and the moral corrupting of humans.

EDIT: Also, I would say that "Sex Pokemon" is a pretty good way to look at the relationship between the monsters and their owners.

[Ironvein]

That's cool, can't wait for the backstory to actually be implemented and add some depth to the game.

Making lots of money with nothing to spend in on, gets kinda boring. That's why I'm focusing on breeding part of the game than fulfilling client requests.