Thursday 7 May 2015

A quick update

Hello everyone!
I hope you're all having a good week. I've just got home after voting. Just a few hours left, if you've been leaving it to the end of the day to cast your vote.

I've also been working a bit on the new friendship system today. I think for the next release I'll put out a basic framework with the game mechanics but not the scenes. By 0.4, I plan that to befriend someone you'll need to play through a scene where you hang out with them socially; but in 0.3.3 it'll just be an action that adds them as a friend without any special scenes.
One thing I'm still thinking about is how to handle "bad friends". Of course it'll be easy to give someone a friendship effect that increases stress, decreases money or whatever to represent a needy or exploitative friend. The problem though, is that there wouldn't seem to be any reason for the player not to immediately un-friend them. Well, I'll keep thinking, and of course I plan to refine the system as I work towards the 0.4 release.


Finally, some more depressing links for you. Spanking isn't exactly my cup of tea, but while looking over ATVOD related issues I found a link to some recent posts on dreamsofspanking.com about being targeted by ATVOD:
http://dreamsofspanking.com/blog/2015/4/the-first-letter
http://dreamsofspanking.com/blog/2015/5/under-investigation-by-atvod

The second link is especially worrying - ATVOD's tendency to "out" adult video makers by publicly revealing their real names is really rather nasty, considering how many people face discrimination from involvement with the sex industry. It also means that even winning an appeal against an ATVOD ruling can have a seriously negative on someone's life.
Of course Newlife doesn't need to worry about ATVOD for now, as they only regulate UK-based video sites, not games. However, this is likely the regulator that the tories want to put in charge of all online pornography. Maybe I should start looking into other countries to move to!

29 comments:

  1. The chilling effects that the identification procedures that the censors are demanding and the outing of providers' names both seem obvious. Justified, of course, by a nascent moral panic about the "epidemic" of children accessing pornography online; who, after all, could possibly be against protecting the children? And also consider that IF YOU DON'T PUT ALL THE STUFF IN NEWLIFE THAT I WANT I'LL TIP OFF THE ATVOD!!!!!! THOUGHT YOU COULD LEAVE OUT ANAL SEX HUH WELL THINK AGAIN!!!!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!

    Are "friends" synonymous with female NPCs in terms of game updates? Or will the game actually allow you to befriend the guys?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Female NPCs won't go in this month. To begin with you'll have to choose your friends from among your toes. Each of the ten will have a separate personality, but if you don't keep them all appeased then they'll turn on you and make you trip when you're dancing.

      Delete
    2. Will characters who pick the Outgoing trait also have hexadactylism and thusly more friends?

      Friends definitely fit with the lifesim aspect of the game, but what about the erotic part? Friends with benefits wouldn't be any different than the sex scenes that are in the game currently, and threesomes are obviously a rather large endeavor. Since there's already turn based 3rd person sex of a sort in the film scenes, any chance something like that could be refit into scenes where the PC watches their friends get laid? If you hit the club with a guy friend and act as his wingman, why not get a chance to peak at the results of his successful round of seduction?

      As for female friends, might as well have them and the player completely lez out at every opportunity, because even though women may tell me that I'm full of shit, I know they all do it!

      Delete
    3. And one other random idea if you're looking for things to put in the Friendship update: have friends act as insurance for the player in the mugging scene. Add a random chance in the scene that the player isn't necessarily walking alone if they have friends, so that the thug chooses to slink back into the shadows upon seeing you.

      Delete
    4. Hello!
      The outgoing trait will increase your maximum number of friends. At the moment it's a simple 1/2/3 + boyfriend for shy/neither/outgoing.
      I'm thinking about ways to compensate for shy girls. Maybe they'll get a bigger relationship boost on making a friend because the new friend can see that it's a big deal for the player to be close to them.

      There won't be any erotic friend content in 0.3.3, but I'll definitely be looking into ways to add it later in the 0.4 versions. Voyeuristic content is a sound idea, and friends will add another excuse for shy/awkward girls to end up with men - your party-girl mates will definitely encourage you to go out drinking and get close to guys.

      Well, I added a note about the mugging idea. That does make sense and it'd give another small benefit to making friends.

      Delete
  2. Possible approach: add a "resentment" mechanic. When interacting with an NPC, the player character can randomly gain small disagreements and annoyances with them. Subsequent interaction with a resented NPC will generate stress (and/or result in slower relationship progress, cause the player character to respond more harshly in conversation, make sex less satisfying, etc).

    Resentment can be cleared by meeting up with a friend and complaining about the target: "My creepy boss is always hitting on me!" "Melissa is such a whore - that's the only reason why she was promoted!" "Sheila's wardrobe is so tacky!" "I hate it when Robert hogs the blankets and leaves the toilet seat up!". Thus, the player has a reason to maintain a relationship with a toxic friend: it allows them to meet occasionally, bitch about all of the cool people, and then go back to normal life.

    If you want to get REALLY ambitious, then each resentment/bitching message would be based on an actual game mechanic (e.g. job promotion, attractiveness, sexual frustration), and would give the player some insight into WHY the player character feels stress. But a simple numeric variable (which gets reset to 0 with a "You complain about all of your problems and then feel better" message) would probably suffice.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for the suggestion!

      To begin with I think I'll just have positive effects, but I could have tradeoffs. For example, a friend who's really fun to be with (so a -2 stress effect instead of -1) but who mooches money off you.

      One of the longer-term ideas I've had for proper bad friends is to allow friend types to unlock special actions or events and your "bitch about your other friends" idea might work well as one of those.

      As for resentment, I'm somewhat reluctant to add another relationship facet simply because of the added complexity, but I could see it as an on-off switch. I'll put a note to think about it more. The liking system has the general problem that if you're nice to people then your relationship will pretty much always increase so there's not so much late-game conflict. I've had various ideas on how to change that, but none that's definitely the best so it helps to have some more things to consider.

      Delete
  3. Your site and the sites that host your game are not technically in the uk. Just change street address on google to another country

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's unlikely to work. To quote the owner of dreamsofspanking.com:

      "It's not enough to just move the hosting of the site overseas - what ATVOD care about is who has "editorial control" of the site. In order to effectively slip through their net, I would have to sign editorial rights for Dreams of Spanking over to an agent overseas."

      That said, the idea isn't entirely without merit and there might be such means to avoid the issue. Perhaps if I stopped making the game available through the blog but posted it on forums. Or if even forum posts were forbidden I could make it patron-only but allow the patrons to distribute the public jars if they wanted.
      Still, I think we need to wait and see exactly what laws they bring in before looking for ways to stay safe. For now, ATVOD only have authority over video-sites so they can't touch Newlife until the Tories bring in new legislation, and a lot will depend on how that legislation is worded.

      Delete
    2. Don'tcha have any patrons overseas who can help? You can still upload builds on Patreon and they can write down the changelog and stuff?
      Darn. This is such a shitty situation.

      Delete
    3. Well, I doubt changelogs will be a problem - it's only "adult content" that'll be restricted.

      Anyway, it isn't the time to make specific plans yet. We don't know for sure how the Tories will word the law to give ATVOD more powers. For example, it might be that they specify "images or video" as in some other pornography legislation, which would put Newlife off the hook. For now all we can do is wait and see.

      Delete
  4. just keep calm, tommy, and make this open-source, or at least make this open to localization/internationalization, because i'd like to translate this.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. my java decompiler sucks

      Delete
    2. Someone asked for open-source on the previous blog update. Splendid Ostrich said that public sharing wouldn't happen until the game is finished.

      I suppose that *limited* sharing to a vetted group of translators is possible... but the game probably includes a lot of hardcoded English strings and it would be disruptive to convert everything to ResourceBundles.

      Delete
    3. with the right IDE, getting those hardcoded strings is not much of a problem

      Delete
    4. I'm not comfortable with other people modifying or even viewing the code at the moment. There are a lot of code quality issues that I'd want to clean up before anything like that.
      As such, even in a limited way I don't intend to make the source available.

      Anyway, I think the time to look into translations would be when the game's content is finished. I often rewrite things and that would make the game a translation nightmare as people would need to redo lots of their work with each update.

      Even if I do release the code, it won't be under an open-source license. Even just off the top of my head, there's some things I can think of that I wouldn't want people doing with the codebase, so I'd need to retain some level of control.

      Delete
    5. nevermind, decompiled it with intellij.

      Delete
    6. How is that an acceptable response to me saying "I'm not comfortable with other people modifying or even viewing the code at the moment"??

      Let me be more clear:
      You do not have permission to hack into and modify the game. This is something that really makes me upset and I will absolutely take action against anyone who tries to distribute hacked versions.

      Seriously, I've made this game available to people for free, and I think I deserve at least enough respect that people shouldn't try to hack the code when I've made it very clear that I don't like this happening.

      I'll put some content improvements to one side for the next release and do more research instead into whether I can take more steps to protect the code better. For now, I am asking you directly - please stop hacking into my game.

      Delete
    7. Do you really have such a problem with people modifying your game for personal use?

      Delete
    8. Personally, I find hacking is useful to do what I want with a program/game, and to not be bound by what the developer(s) want me to experience/access.

      In a few cases, I've decompiled programs to search for unused content.

      I have yet to turn around and release anything after making modifications though, but I wouldn't be much against doing so if I only fixed bugs, made translations, or implemented existing but inaccessible content, and only after seeking developer permission and not being turned down.

      If you have serious problems with people decompiling your work(s), then I truly wish you the best in finding a way to prevent it. You also might want to, at least temporarily, take down the .jar links, cause you can open them like a book and rip out the pages right into notepad, granted notepad alone won't recognize much code-wise, but all the strings are right there as far as I can see, even the error messages I've never seen...

      Delete
    9. I'm not too familiar with the process, but would code obfuscation help to prevent/discourage decompiling? Or would that only obfuscate the source code?

      Another idea, purely theoretical, is have a java class file that is required for the program to compile, but not run. Then manually remove that file from the .jar before distributing. It wouldn't prevent people from decompiling, but it would prevent them from recompiling. Admittedly, I can already see problems with this idea, if it would even work in the first place, but it might be a place to start.

      For my part, I sometimes do very limited hacking into games, but if the developer specifically requests, to me or anyone else, to not, then I won't. It's just a matter of respect.

      Delete
    10. do not feed the trolls tommy, chill, i didn't hack anything. i was lying. this is the internet. actually, i even endorsed your game on my own blog.

      Delete
    11. All I have to say is, your the best Mr. Ostrich. As a side thing, assuming you don't want to move away from the UK, but all the legal stuff works against you, you should consider incorporating in another country. I know the US has no residency requirements and is pretty easy to set up. Canada is also a nice option, I hear.

      ~engai

      Delete
    12. @nada Ah, okay. Thanks for letting me know.

      @anonymous from May 12th:
      Thanks, but the jar version is needed so people who aren't on windows can play. Besides, people reading the strings by looking at the .class files in a text editor is something I'm rather less concerned about.

      @maikochan
      I do some obfuscation, but of course there are limits to what that can achieve. AFAIK the best way of stopping people breaking into code is to only distribute a client, and have most of the functionality on a server you control. That way they can only get at the client code. Of course there are enough drawbacks with that approach to make it unreasonable for Newlife.

      @engai
      Thanks for the suggestion. Depending on what happens with the Tories' promised legislation I may well be looking into workarounds along those lines. I'll wait until I have an idea how it's going to be worded first though. It takes quite a while to get laws through parliament, so I'll have lots of advance notice.

      Delete
  5. The solution is to make the download link on the blog a decoy version of the game, and release the real Newlife on secret channels only known to a select few. If it were making a decoy I'd swap out all of the current content for a 52 week long debate with Ivy, wherein the player attempts to turn Ivy away from her staunch anti-foundationalist philosophical views using classical Aristotelian logic, all the while taking care not to be swayed by Ivy's own perverse interpretation of Nietzschean precepts.

    I've begun a hacked version of the game with that aim in mind if anyone is interested.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hey! No-one will play the official version any more if they can get the philosophical debate one!

      Delete
  6. Do you have any plans to add more things to buy, such as food or cigarettes?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Living expenses are abstracted out. Your weekly pay is supposed to be what you have left after paying for that sort of thing. The exception is rent, which I will be adding.
      However, when the cooking skill gets added I may consider special/expensive ingredients or apparatus which unlocks more advanced meal choices.

      OTOH, I do want to add more purchasable items. I have thought about putting in a crate of beer or something. It's perhaps a little strange that you have to specially go out and buy a kettle before you can serve your dates tea, but your home comes pre-stocked with booze...

      Delete
  7. Is there an option to buy shoes/socks? Feels incomplete without them

    ReplyDelete