Thrallworks Update #9: Follow Me

What's happening folks?

Is the question you'd be asking me in the singular. So what has been happening?

Well, I've been hammering away at game design and similar plottings (as well as commission stuff) and I figure I've got a few concepts/ideas together now to talk to y'all about that I'll be aiming to implement soon.

Levelling her up

So you may have noticed on the Project File for L-D19 there's a whole bunch of stuff and stats under the Skill Development and Psychological Development tabs.

Yeah, those htings. Come the end of her education all of these criteria are tested, but certainly with the Skills counting for more than her Psychology.

The outcome of these determines the project's final grade. Though Thrallopedia would seem to suggest otherwise, and Obedience/Acceptance is certainly required for your personal bonuses, that's not the main determiner of the final score.

So, how do you bring these stats up?

Lessons and Breaks, Her and You

(Hahaha, so haggard. Expect this layout to change too)

The 'tutoring' part of the game is going to be fairly customizeable in that you will get to set how many lessons/breaks there's going to be and how much free time you give yourself, with a default set of 10 hours a day of lessons- lessons will be 2 hours long, so that's basically 5 lessons in a day.

Lessons themselves are split into 2 types; Primary Lessons that are meant to develop a thrall's Skill in a given task (or potentially multiple skills), and Secondary Lessons that normally boost a thrall's Psychological development.

Secondary Lessons are important, because how well a thrall is doing psychologically directly affects their ability to learn and develop other skills. Lets check out the basic concept with an example. PREPARE TO GET BORED!

Here's a lesson to teach L-D19 thrall ettiquette. As you can see, to learn Etiquette takes focus (and perhaps a couple other things, like showmanship), and over the course of the lesson, drains her focus, at a rate of -5 every 15 minutes.

So if she has something like, 20 focus, then after the lesson, she will have 0 focus! And being drained of the stat she's supposed to be drawing inspiration from for education will lead to significant education penalties.

Oy. You know as I write all of this I realize just the breadth of the topic and wonder if there's any good way to summarize it, or give you the interesting bulletpoints. Well, lets give it a shot, in 10 points.

• The main tutoring screen has a small monitor to show her current 'mood', which you can modify using triggers, drugs and her PCU. Triggers include CMS Triggers and regular old triggers!
• Although thralls like her do not suffer physical fatigue, she can still become mentally drained. So you can also assign recreational activities, go for walks with her, leave her to her own spare time, watch 'tv' with her, let her go out with Cerise, etc.
• Although thralls like her do not suffer physical fatigue....you do! And mental! If you want to teach her well, you need to take care of yourself too. Book a show to go see, spend an evening unwinding with a harem thrall, just go have a chat with some friends, get a good night's sleep...
• ...Or pump your brain full of feelgood drugs and stims and pray you don't collapse.
• You need to assign 'Tests' for her to find out where she's sitting on her various stats. They aren't just given to you; though Cerise can generall evaluate her feelings of Obedience/Acceptance.
• Obedience/Acceptance are largely obtained through 'Asides' though you can get bits and pieces in lessons.
• You also need to book her surguries, and generally can decide when to introduce new lessons, though some will require her to be enhanced in some fashion.
• You can approach other dancer thralls (thrall? thralls?) for some lessons to leverage their expertise to help instruct her.
• You can spend some time 'reviewing' mapped CMS states to try and improve already existing CMS Triggers.
• Eventually, as your familiarity with the material rises and the subject matter, you should be able to increase her stats faster, meaning you should be able to make L-D27 a high quality dancer in maybe half the time.

Whatever TDL, I don't want some manager screen Where's the smut?

Well! Every lesson will have 3 'scenes' in it, Developmental, Review and Drill, that get unlocked at certain thresholds as she becomes more well-versed in the lesson.

These are different from 'asides', (small scenes that happen during/about breaks) and contain a little more art and a few more choices than the average- nothing as huge as an Orientation, but each will certainly have some key choices in them.

Wot Leik?

Well alright fine just play a rough one. 

Above is a link to the Scene Repository, wherein there will eventually be many scenes, all of which will be going into the game!

Password to Access it it: FollowMeSinkDownDropForMe

Obviously you won't want to play some of these because of SPOILERS but this first rough one is relatively benign, being one of the first lessons you can develop her in; a spot of good old fashioned hypnosis to improve her focus! And establish a trigger to use too.

Art's not completed, all grey detailwork still currently, but you can get the gist of it I reckon.

(There would have been a couple more scenes to add in, but it seems I accidentally deleted them in a fit of pique when my comp was giving me grief about memory space.)

Bug Fixes:

• None

Grammar/Spelling Fixes:

• There was one, I swear. Can't remember it though. Some grammar. :)

Reported Error I Could Not Replicate:

• Keller's room, taking a view in to Ty Lee and she's not wearing the right colours. After telling Cerise off for how she was acting.

Known Error

• Missing Synaptic Congruity waveform in Trust route

Anywhoo that's the news for this fortnight. I've plenty of Thrallopedia Labourer art to do, but expect a polished-up version of the above scene and the start of some roughs for the training portion of the game soon!

Link to the Current Demo!

Enjoy!