Fewer additions than yesterday, but I'm pretty confident I did more coding for this yesterday than I will again. I hear all the feedback about difficulty and about all the many scenes that should be in the game and aren't. I plan to make the game gradually harder as I move towards 1.0, and I plan to be adding more scenes to this game as the fancy strikes long after 1.0.
It is now possible to nominate a bodyguard once certain conditions are fulfilled. After some thought, I decided that the PC's slave girl bodyguard would be for sexy intimidation as much as for combat effectiveness. So, she will be described as wielding a straight ceramic sword more or less like this, and a machine pistol like this or this. For those who prefer muscular slaves, there is now something at which your preferred slaves excel.
I've found some horribly obvious and unreported errors in playtests that suggest that some events aren't being seen much. I won't spoil them, but the wider a variety of things you try, the wider the variety of events you will see.
Download: Mega.
Tip jar: Patreon.
I have an important question I need feedback on. How long do you want a full game of Free Cities to last? To be clear, there will always be the option to just keep playing, but the scheduled events will run out at some point. I get the impression some are playing a single game for much longer than I thought. I had originally intended that a playthrough would reach the endgame (where the player is drowning in money and has seen all major non-random events) after not more than an hour or two. If this is not so, I will space my planned events out farther.
I have an important question I need feedback on. How long do you want a full game of Free Cities to last? To be clear, there will always be the option to just keep playing, but the scheduled events will run out at some point. I get the impression some are playing a single game for much longer than I thought. I had originally intended that a playthrough would reach the endgame (where the player is drowning in money and has seen all major non-random events) after not more than an hour or two. If this is not so, I will space my planned events out farther.
v. 0.2.01 Patch Notes:
- Bodyguards. As usual, this version adds bodyguard mechanics while future versions will give them events and interactions, so for now they have relatively little to do other than stand around and look intimidating.
- Addition of an option to discard a slave (not sell her). This may preserve games in which a bugged slave appears.
- Significant update to obedience changes: there is now a limit to how much a slave's mental state can change weekly. This should not be a noticeable difference 95% of the time; it mostly covers a couple of exploits.
- Rebalance of milk production. Notably, slaves born male can still lactate via drugs, but will always produce less due to having less natural mammary tissue for the drugs to affect.
- Review of cash reporting; reported profits and actual cash increases should match up better. Milking was absolutely wretched at this.
- Many new callouts of a slave's ethnicity if the player has that setting enabled.
- New events.
- Other bugfixes.
Yay for new version! Grammatical/stylistic issue - starting up a fresh run, notice that the initial description after picking the type of start includes the following:
ReplyDelete"Finally, it has a slave nutrition system connected to the arcology's hydroponics bays. This system produces a tasty protein-rich drink that provides the physically active female body all its necessary nutrients while leaving the lower digestive tract extremely clean. It even causes a mild increase in sex drive.
Finally, the previous owner seems to have left in something of a hurry. He could not get all of his slaves away. There is one left; her name is Lola."
One of those "Finally" isn't quite as final as the other. Maybe replace the first one with "There's also" or similar?
Hah, good catch. As you might expect I've read the damn thing so much I barely read it any more, so things like that escape me.
DeleteLore inconsistency:
Delete"Since she's devoted, she works as a milkmaid, strolling around in public selling her milk fresh from the nipple. She makes ¤700. Her dick annoys the slaves who help with the milking machines by dripping cum all over the place as she is milked."
The milking machines mention should probably be removed from a devoted shemale's summary since she's not using the milking machines to earn the credits. (Not a high priority, I understand, but I'm just putting things down here when I noticed them so I don't forget.)
Training bug is still there - personal attention page is still letting master choose "train" for max-skill shemales after the weekly update cutoff. (I know this will have to wait for an overhaul as you said in the comments of the last update.)
DeleteThis isn't new (has been happening to me for at least the last few updates) or major, but the game will occasionally generate a "slave fucking another slave" event when there is only one slave total.
DeleteIn a similar vein, amputating your only slave results in the following prelude to assfucking on the main screen: "X is carried past your desk by another of your slaves."
Where are these ghost slaves coming from? Are these the poor girls who died in the prior masters' tenure in the same arcology? Are they sticking around due to unfinished "business"? Are my shemale slaves getting ghost blowjobs and keeping this from me?!
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DeleteThe lactation event with the "fuck her while she's being milked/delay her milking and fuck her in public" choices still has the "public" option broken. It ends in
Delete"You fuck her pussy and ass, one after the other,"
despite the slave being a shemale and has no text after to indicate any in-game benefits.
CORRECTION: the choice DOES provide a reputation increase, it's just not indicated in the event text because of that glitched last line of text.
As it happens, there is a difference in HTML between is and isnot. True fact.
DeleteBodyguard's details page, instead of jobs, says: "She is your bodyguard and is not available" - maybe add "to be assigned" or "for other tasks" or something to make that a complete sentence?
DeleteOh, right, why I noticed the above - wanted to do some surgical alterations on the current bodyguard, but those are from the same segment as "jobs" and not accessible. If intentional, the above sentence should mention this.
DeleteAlso, "slave bodyguards" wiki passage doesn't exist. Link is red, following it gives "Error: the passage "Slave Bodyguards" does not exist"
Delete@DrPill, On the "ghost Slaves" thing, since these are primarily sexual slaves you have, id imagine youd keep some more/less fortunate slaves (depending on your opinion) who ARENT used for sex, just household maintenance, maids/laundry/shooing those pesky door to door salesmen, etc. heck, they prolly are considered the same as appliances and ownership is sold with the property
Deleteyeah, you COULD argue itd be more time/cost efficient to use modified security drones for these purposes, but then again, theres a class about having a battalion of maids to clean up after ALL of your messes
and since sex-slaves, as a decent to high value commodity, would obviously then be worth more and sit higher on the "social ladder" than say the maintenace slaves, it would make since that a sufficiently bored and rules permitting slaves would abuse them as their own personal "slave of a slave" kinda scenario
I like the idea of "minor league" workslaves who aspire to be promoted into the sex "major leagues". It would need to get noted somewhere in the lore, though, because as things stand right now the game implies you ONLY get the 1-3 slaves based on the start you pick.
DeleteOr there could be alternate scenes / lines about the automated machinery of the arcology that's controlled by the AI performing these duties - as in, that lone slave isn't fucking another slave, it's fucking the integrated sex toys instead. And there could be further alternate lines about the AI enjoying "herself" if you picked "alternate personality" in the non-random event.
These are interesting ideas and I'll mull them over.
DeleteDepending on how much breast/lactation content you have, I could spend an entire day playing this and would gladly do so.
ReplyDeleteWell, there's a lot. There's actually less than there would be if I weren't reining myself in, since I'm a big fan of tits and milk myself and I don't want to turn this into an author's-favorite-fetishes-only thing like some other games I might mention. So more is planned. More is definitely planned.
DeleteI would be totally fine with an author's-favourite-feshishes thing as long as there was more. Being able to create an army of virgin buttslut cowslaves is my favourite part about this game so far, but it wouldn't be nearly as interesting if that was all I could do.
DeleteSo I started my new game, and one of my slaves was "Box" who has the custom descriptor "Her amputation sites have titanium rings that go through to the bone. She is blind, and comes in a beautiful rosewood box lined with velvet." But she isn't actually an amputee per the actual game stats :P
ReplyDeleteSee the "Known Bugs" post. The hardcoded slaves are highly imperfect, but since there's more than 100 of them it takes many hours to do a full check. I'm going to review them once the stats stabilize so I only have to do it once.
DeleteRight on. Just had a thought. I have a slave that was pre-muted and I had her turned into a dairy slave. Next time you feel like adding a new modification option, how about some kind of vocal-cord sabotage or special training that only let's them moo. >:D
DeleteThere are already some mechanical/electronic ways of restoring some speech function for throat cancer patients, so while voice cord removal might not be reversible within the game's timeframe (barring any special advances in especially grown/3Dprinted/etc. replacement organs), it should certainly be possible to replace vocal cords with an electronic device that the arcology AI can program and modify.
DeleteBesides cow, I suspect cat and dog would be popular replacement options.
Yea. I wasn't thinking of repairing them so much as just having the option to 'alter' the vocal cords rather than just cut them.
Delete@DrPill
Deleteactually, even today, cat and dog "replacements" are a popular concept, because they are POSSIBLE, but most countries consider those kind of surgeries illegal and self-mutilation, basically doing it to yourself gets the surgeon arrested and the patient hospitalised, heck, actual-horn implants and ear-extension/modifications are only legal in a few western countries, and then only as long as the procedure allows itself to be reversible if needed
just mentioning since i know author said theyd avoid anything not possible within 10 or so years of now
just pointing out theres a difference between whats possible NOW and what would even be legal in 10 years, medical science is actually WAY farther ahead than anyone realizes, its just some of the newer possibilities arent *allowed* because people consider a little too close to *evil nazi super science*
i for one welcome the future of japanese catgirls and russian doggie girls, and i guess english would prolly have fox fetishes or something, and all those norwegian merpeople
Out of curiosity anon, do you have any reliable sources about the horn implants? I'm interested, because these type of implants permanently break the skin and therefore are a permanent infection risk.
Delete@anon2 not specifics, and yeah, theyre an infection risk but the countries that legalize them (in contrast to the variant legal in say, the US, that is implants below the skin that dont break it), most of my experience with it has been with friends-of-friends who had it that i only occasionally meet when they come to the US, and then curiosity research afterwards, from what i understand keeping it clean is a serious concern, but not one so severe as to make it impractical (if i can remember ill call up my friend when its not the middle fo the night for her and ask where her friend was from,
DeleteFrom the vagina description: "with pink pussylips ; she is a vanilla sex expert" - there shouldn't be a space after pussylips.
ReplyDeleteElsewhere: "with darker black pussylips ;she is unskilled at vaginal sex" - there should be a space after the semicolon.
After exploring the sexuality of a rebellious slave, the training objective defaults to building devotion instead of breaking her will.
From the new 'snatch and grab' event: "You recieve no response whatsoever", should be 'receive'. "liason VTOL aircraft", should be 'liaison'.
Devoted shemale slaves: "She's on such a heavy dose of female hormones that she's losing the ability to independently maintain an erection. She is at half-mast: she is so well trained that she can keep herself this way indefinitely."
It seems like bodyguards can't get random fucking vignettes on the main menu, and if selected for them that section is blank instead. Is this intended? Shouldn't bodyguards be constantly available to be dicked, and thus have a section on the main menu like fucktoys?
When selecting a bodyguard, the FC Encyclopedia recommendation is for 'Slave Bodyguards', but it's red and clicking it gets the message "Error: the passage "Slave Bodyguards" does not exist".
The bodyguard intimidation calculation seems to give inconsistent results week-to-week, even when the slave in question doesn't change in any way.
Sometimes get end-of-week error: "Error: <>: error within contents (Error: <>: bad evaluation: state.active.variables.trainerShowoffIDs is undefined) - looks like it's for a new event that isn't firing properly.
Had a bodyguard get the 'slave trainer' random event, possibly because she was training slaves before she became a bodyguard.
Got "Error: <>: bad evaluation: state.active.variables.trainerShowoffIDs is undefined" at the start of the slave trainer random event. Also got the slave trainer event with a slave on the promenade.
DeleteAnal tattoos cause still-tight assholes that would otherwise retain cum to dribble them out after fucking.
With 'tie her up and take her virginity' on slaves that are obedient when bought, the coloured text in "colors her impression of you with obedience" is orchid instead of pink.
Bodyguards remain as your bodyguard even if sent to the brothel/dairy/promenade. If they're brought back from them, then they're still set as the bodyguard even though their job is set to whore/milk cow/serve public.
Buying just the shemale from the 'woman selling her trap sister' event made it so she still had a 'fuck her with her sister' option, which kept switching between an unrelated mother and daughter. Later, buying just the mother from the 'aphrodisiac addict mother and daughter' event had the same effect.
As for game length, it seems like you're trying to serve two masters here - on the one hand, you want players to have the freedom to indulge their fetishes instead of being forced to find and stick to the 'optimal' way to play, but on the other you want some kind of difficulty so that there's actual gameplay instead of it being an effortless sandbox. Right now you've found a good compromise - making enough money to survive and buy new slaves is fairly easy, but making enough to throw at every opportunity you get is difficult. Right now, in the early game there's the closing strip club, the desire to buy drones before the arm yourself event and then the event itself, hire mercenaries, the snatch-and-grab, the arcology expansions, the dairy/brothel/promenade/bodyguard... and that's not even considering players that want to buy the expensive healthy-trained-obedient-young-unique slaves instead of going for the fixer-uppers.
I think if you just keep expanding the things a player will want to throw money at, then you'll prevent the compound interest snowball of eternal wealth for longer and longer. There's no way to set a strict game length for this sort of thing because everyone's coming in here with their own fetishes and goals, so the best way to do it is give them a smorgasbord and let them build their own goals, and players will organically arrive at the game length that pleases them.
"I have an important question I need feedback on. How long do you want a full game of Free Cities to last?".
ReplyDeleteDepends so much on the mechanics and story. There are games I rush through on easy mode if the mechanics are weak and want to see the story. Good mechanics with a weak story means getting to the end is completely irrelevant and unnecessary. So far it looks like my preference would be that this game would not be playable through in one evening although there probably isn't viable ways to stretch this game to last 'forever' either. Naturally you *can* make options in the beginning that space out the Story Events but that alone will not do it. Longer games obviously need a bit more difficulty and preferably a bit more complexity and the complexity part is probably a bitch to implement.
I'm probably reasonably happy however this game turns out but these ware my thoughts. --Slarkki
Serve your other slaves, serving a shemale, "...whenever she feels like recieving an enthusiastic blowjob." "Recieving" should be "receiving".
ReplyDeleteShemale amputee on extreme aphrodisiacs and hormones, "...she's unconsciously humping her ass against whatever's next to her for anal stimulation, and humping her dick against whatever she can manage, and humping her dick against whatever she can manage to mount without limbs." Weird repetition at the end there.
Had a rebellious virgin have this message pop up when she served the public, " Her pussy is now broken in.@ "
List of things amputees shouldn't be able to do:
Non-random event where mercenary falls in love with slave, "She hugs him, sobbing into his shoulder. As they walk hand in hand down towards his quarters, she gives the nearest camera a little wave and ...'" Hugging, walking, hand in hand, waving.
Serve your other slaves, shemale serving an anal-loving amputee, "Wiktoria pulls her anal girltoy into bathrooms and corners constantly so she can ride that asian dick with her white butt." Can't pull anyone anywhere without arms or legs.
Buttslut interest event, buttslut is the amputee, "She's standing in front of the couch with one leg up on the cushions, and you're giving it to her up the ass." Can't stand, no legs.
Buttslut interest event, shemale on hormones interested in butt stuff, "Wiktoria hesitates before explaining herself, and she's obviously aroused: though her hormone-filled body can't get her dick hard any more, she's got a string of precum between her member and her leg." No legs.
Amputated after having spent a while bodyguarding, "She is skilled at combat: she is comfortable with the use of modern firearms and edged weapons, and her hands are deadly weapons." Skills lost, deadly weapons removed. I really do love taking away power through amputation. Huge muscles, combat specialists, none of that matters when you don't have arms or legs. Just imagining having that kind of control over a person is exhilarating.
Masterful whore event doesn't really make sense if the slave is an amputee and a mute since there would be no voice to talk with and no hands to sign with.
Cumslut whore event, mute slave, little room left choice, "...She gestures at her stomach, makes a sign for "full," and then makes a sign for "never."... She signs that you taste great." Can't gesture or sign without hands, unless there's some kind of face-only sign language I don't know about.
Cumslut whore event, Bring her along, "Miss Anne is instructed to follow you and assist. She's tired, so you let her tag meekly along, masturbating gently as you use other slaves or just watching lazily. But whenever you're on the point of coming, you switch to her mouth and let her finish you with a few sucks and pumps of her fatigued hands." Having an amputee follow you would take a long time, might want to change that to carry around. Not able to masturbate. No hands to pump with.
Concerning how long a game of Free Cities should take, I think the spacing between non-random events is fine as is, it just feels like there's too few of them at this early stage in the game, though I'm sure that as you add more of the non-random events, the game will feel more fleshed out and substantial. I guess what I'm saying is that once it feels like there's enough of them, that's how long the game will be. I'd hold off on adding any more arcology upgrades though. With how much the later ones cost, those upgrades feel like they're only there to be a money drain since they don't seem to cause new events or give you new interesting slaves or open up exciting new slave shops to buy from. They do make for a good endgame though since you really have to wheel and deal your slaves to earn the last few ones, so at least they've got that going for them.
I'm probably just clumsy, but twice now I've gone to sell a slave and clicked "Discard her" by mistake. An extra line break or two between sell and discard, or moving discard over to the right would help a lot, without needing to add in a "are you sure" style dialogue.
ReplyDeleteTying this to the "minor league" idea from another comment thread - maybe instead of a direct and irreversible separate link for each action, have a "get rid of" page a single link goes to, where the master can choose between SELL (cash gained), RELEASE (rep gained?), and DEMOTE (turn into a "manual labor" background "house slave").
DeleteGood call. And DrPill, that's actually how the code works now, it just isn't visible. If I do manumission it'll be a bigger thing than just that.
DeleteHad a "hates anal" slave gain "buttslut" trait through whoring, received message in week update:
ReplyDelete"She's climaxed a lot lately to anal stimulation, so her previous hesistations about buttsex vanish."
Hesistations = hesitations.
I'm just spit-balling here, but could we perhaps get and implant to install into our shemale slave so we don't have to keep feeding them hormones? Of course it would have to be expensive to offset the fact that you can just turn them female and be done with it. Regardless, this is an awesome game! I'm loving it; keep up the good work.
ReplyDeleteThat would indeed make sense, but it's handled the way it's handled now to make life a little easier on the coding side. You'll observe that the space is used for hormones with XY slaves and contraceptives for XX's: this is because the code thinks hormones and contraceptives are variations on the same thing.
DeleteI did notice that actually, it makes sense. So it's possible that it could be implemented future when you have the time?
Delete"I have an important question I need feedback on. How long do you want a full game of Free Cities to last...I will space my planned events out farther."
ReplyDeleteThis is something I wanted to bring up earlier but didn't really see a way to do so properly. I feel the in-game time passes too fast.
My stance is this: there are already a lot of different events that could fire in a given "downtime interval", but only one is ever shown to the player. Sexual interactions, non-random plot and plain old slave market fluctuations all use the same event spot. As new events get put in with every update, this issue will only get worse. The most exciting bits of FC are hidden in the random events, which take time to set up and trigger, which is why the games go long.
The other angle on game length is that the game currently does not track the individual age of slaves. This leads to nonsensical "birthday" events - which, to be fair, are explained in the event lore by the slave nearly forgetting what birthdays are and how they work, but still breaks immersion somewhat. Worse are the cases of fresh "18 or 19" year old slaves, whose profiles still have the same numbers in them despite my games lasting well over 200 weeks. (Replacing the numbers with "barely out of her teens" would make the issue less noticeable, but won't make it go away.)
I think you, the dev, aren't recognizing which part of your creation the people are enjoying. You see FC as a springboard to the wasteland game, while a lot of the people are loving the fabulously wealthy life of a landlord customizing and fucking their sex slaves.
My suggestion would be to re-scale events to happen DAILY rather than WEEKLY, with a scheduled "market fluctuation" event on a Saturday and a scheduled "plot" event on a Sunday (or possibly both rolled into a "weekend" event slot). This would require a lot of work, since you'd need to scale down the income from slave jobs and change how/when specific types of events trigger, but it would give players more time to enjoy FC due to more frequent slave interaction events.
Gotta disagree with you, rescaling the game would mire it down pretty heavily if there's any attempt to stick to realism. The current 'tick' of a week makes the breaking of slaves and the molding of their bodies via injections show results within a few turns, while slowing everything down by a factor of seven would drain the fun out of things.
DeleteA valid point about the scale, but I still think something should be done about the number of events seen in an average playthrough. Currently, it's possible to have weeks when nothing triggers, or when the only trigger is the slave price change (when you don't care about it), or when the only trigger is a plot event. Maybe it would pay to have separate triggers for different event types - one for slaves, one for plot, one for market?
DeleteI'm just worried about the times your slave stable is full and you'd love to get a particular event for a particular slave but something else keeps triggering every week instead.
Here's my take on the game length; I'd love to enslave my daughters once they come of age.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of your kids any chance that you'd be able to add an orphanage to your arcology at some point? I'd assume it'd be very expensive what with bribing people to make it legal and just raising kids is expensive. One would think your slaves, who aren't mindbroken, would appreciate knowing their kids/future kids are safe though.
I'll second the "your own orphanage" idea. I'd love for the birth events to give the master an option to keep the child, with the upkeep costs going up to reflect the expenses of the upbringing. Being able to mold the education or development of the child would be great as well, though this would need to be done in a very "hands-off" way to avoid steering things into loli territory.
DeleteEven if you don't intend to enslave your slaves' children, having an orphanage of your own (one where you can choose what gender to raise children as) would play into the future wasteland portion of the game as well - you could preemptively grow your "tribe" and make sure it has a certain proportion of warriors (of whatever gender) to slaves (of whatever gender) to broodmothers.
That's a hard no. No kids in FC. Producing viable offspring may be the literal goal of Wasteland but if so it will end the game in victory.
DeleteAwwwww
DeleteI got the Scene where one of your slaves is training a class and an error showed up.
ReplyDeleteError: <>: bad evaluation: state.active.variables.trainerShowoffIDs is undefined
Also, the slave that was part of the scene wasn't assigned to training
That event is fixed for 0.2.02.
DeleteThe bounceback on devotion may need tweaking. Two games (on cheat) in a row my Miss Anne went fearful the first end turn. The first time I thought it was from the PA and nicer clothes, but the second was just whoring in her evening dress. I can see slowing the multi-gains, but for a slave that likes me to turn fearful seems odd.
ReplyDeleteThat's a problem with the hardcoded stats, not the bounceback code. Fixed for Miss Anne; some of the /d/ slaves will still experience it. In any case it will only affect the first turn.
DeleteWould you consider implementing a drug or some other procedure to change the height of the slaves?
ReplyDeleteAnyway congratulations on this awesome game!
If I ever make height more granular than short/normal/tall, yes.
Deletein response to your question, I'd like to see the game span on for a while. it's my personal preference that if I'm going to play a game, I want to be attached enough to that I get several days, if not weeks, of playtime. I definitely think that the rate of progression needs to slow down. not in that events that would happen around turn 50 happen at 20, but that there would be a lot more for me to micromanage. I want to be able to do research, I want to pay money to get clothes that fit my slaves, not start with every item in the game. I feel that it would extend the life of a game by a lot. also, are you planning on adding any other drugs into the game? cocaine, heroin, etc? I could definitely see that being profitable or entertaining. finally, how do you feel about having someone assist you in writing lewd events? one of the major things that I found lacking (understandably) was that there are not enough events and not enough variation in the events that happen commonly. if you like, you could release a format for us to use so that we could submit our own events to you. I know that I would be an avid user of this, as I have so much dirty ideas that just need to be vented in an art form such as this game. thanks for the update :)
ReplyDeleteI'm leery of crowdsourcing writing, mostly because I have fairly high standards and strong opinions on writing and would probably spend as much time editing as I would just writing myself. Worse, the writing in the game is absolutely littered with code to handle all the variations of slaves, so I'd either have to make the public code the variations, and deal with bad submitted code, or do it all myself. When you see a paragraph in game, it's a page of code, at minimum. Finally, many ideas won't be codable or will be very hard to code.
DeleteIf you have good ideas for scenes you're willing to share, though, fire away by all means.
To be clear: I mean feel free to share ideas for scenes you're willing to have me consider writing, not full scenes.
DeleteI read earlier that you were considering more tit content and I heartily approve. Will there be a new sexuality thing for the milk girls to gain boobgasms from milking?
ReplyDeleteOr other tit stimulation?
DeleteGood idea.
Deleteyou should have a private form to submit ideas for scenes, as i'd like for you to look over and add them without spoiling everyone :)
ReplyDeletedo you have an email address we can use to send you ideas?
There's one in my profile.
Deletejust curious, what do you think of Twine 1? which version is easier for you to develop in?
ReplyDeleteI only used it for a brief period because I needed better Javascript integration, so I'm the wrong person to ask.
Deletehow about turning them into true pet slaves log dog and cats
ReplyDelete