Proposal: "Digestive Dungeon", a vore-flavored parody / homage game to Darkest Dungeon.

Assemble a crew of hapless adventurers and send them into battle against the monstrous forces of a cult trying to resurrect their fleshy, gluttonous god to devour the world, where they will either gain experience and bring home the spoils of war, or wind up contributing their own flesh to the cult's cause. Just like in Darkest Dungeon, you'll need to manage your party's mental state as much as their physical health, but in Digestive Dungeon, you'll need to worry about them building up Arousal instead of Stress as their enemies go for the groin. At 100 Arousal, they'll be unable to hold back their hidden, shameful Kinks, acting out in ways unconducive to a successful mission; at...
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Why didn't I just use XML for the ToMW file format

Like seriously it would have saved so much time over tweaking a binary file format with visual editors

smhfml

Old habits die hard. Thanks to Grandia II, Super Mario Maker, and Splatoon, I haven't gotten anything like real work done all week, and a number of my "legit" project ideas are pretty well planned out already, so those swathes of empty time I get at work didn't have much to put them toward. As a result, ToMW's been flittering around through my brain like a stuck song. So since the last blog post was a pretty sour note to go out on, I figure I might as well channel that mental energy into something mildly useful.

http://i.imgur.com/POjNpJ3.jpg

So I figure it's worth looking at what went wrong in the process of designing the game, and within the design itself.

In terms of process, I can instantly point to the...
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Let me tell you a story.

My first job was at a small software development house, one of those entrepreneurial upstart places with a team of like six people doing new development work, two people supporting our workhorse product, one manager, and a dude in a suit. Things were going well; we had good, smart, dedicated workers on our team, the product was a useful one, we had clients ready to buy what we were selling as soon as it was out the door. Then, at 2 in the afternoon halfway through the week, the suit called us all into the meeting room. He'd been unable to beg the investors for more money. Effectively, the company was broke; at a bare minimum, there was nothing to give us a paycheck out of. So, pretty much instantly, we were all out of a job. That's why, every...
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ToMW Beta 38 is here: http://www.mediafire.com/download/m64d8 ... W_B38a.zip

This week's Big Idea was the scaling-by-level feature. To summarize tersely:

1) Zones now have an experience level defined.
2) A Contents Table, the structure that determines how items randomly drop, now has a "By Level" mode. A Contents Table so defined uses the Weight of each entry (normally used to assign the probability of any one entry being selected) to determine which entry is most appropriate to an input experience level, if any. The last entry with a Weight lower than the experience level passed in is the one selected.
3) All of the mechanisms...
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Oh, shit. I have to release a build this week. Okay. Here. http://www.mediafire.com/download/ekp4p ... MW_B37.zip

The biggest change to this build that isn't a stability fix is in response to feedback from Askhelad. All of the physical not-actually-magic spells have been moved to a new, non-selectable class called Mutation whose skills are always treated as class skills (meaning they're purchased at the cheapest rate).

Now, as for what's on the horizon... though Tales of the Mystic Wilds is ostensibly in a feature freeze, any feature that will clearly result in a net reduction in effort to reach the final release of the game is permitted on the grounds...
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Get it here: http://www.mediafire.com/download/ehev2 ... W_B36b.zip

Some interesting program changes this week-- the game is ostensibly in a feature freeze, but these were either necessary or had QoL implications that made them worth the effort.

The first major change is that I've added a compression step to the handling of the game's World and Game Save files. Essentially, that means that the game's largest files are now effectively zip files with one file in them. Since most of these files are either plain text or integers with a limited and predictable range of values, that means they're extremely amenable to compression-- the specific example of...
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Here it is: http://www.mediafire.com/download/nvnlw ... W_B35a.zip

Delivered a bit early because I've had all week to work on it, and I'm running low on new bugs again. So, here's the latest build.

My latest design conundrum is how to handle mind-altering effects, if they really do need to be changed from the way they are now. Right now, as a refresher, an enchantment that compels a particular behavior gives you a saving throw each turn to resist its effects, otherwise the creature's control is handed over to a separate AI. This can result in some schizophrenic behaviors out of those affected, especially when the effect rate is 50%. I'd like...
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It's here: http://www.mediafire.com/download/b93k9 ... _B34-1.zip (fixed)

Other than stability fixes, I hacked my way around a significant performance issue when tiles are defined with infinite-duration emitter effects. Now, any such tile will propagate its emitted effect into the surrounding tiles once on zone creation, and never again thereafter.

There will be no streams this week. I will be watching Summer Games Done Quick (http://www.twitch.tv/GamesDoneQuick ; ...
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Got an early drop this week. I ran out of crashes to fix and I have no major outstanding features. A few requests / want-to-dos, but nothing I actually feel like engaging with today given that it's 1) EVO weekend, and 2) Splatfest is on in Splatoon.

Get it here:
Old build is dildos, get this instead: http://www.mediafire.com/download/1dir9 ... MW_33a.zip

In terms of new features, there's only one thing: Poobaloop the Foodseller is back in the village, ready to sell various grass-based foodstuffs to help you power up. Just keep in mind that even if you can buy the best stuff by selling the clothing you start with, you might not be...
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