Hey everyone! It’s TT back with some more MonXXX devlogs!

Today we’re going to be talking about research, stats, and how the progression works.

Research is the #1 thing needed to run the facility. You need research both to fund the experiments by providing research to M.I.S. as well as to use your research to improve your experiment techniques. Today you just have to focus on your job: to get research points and run some experiments! Experiments come in all sorts of flavors, like physical, mental, behavioral, elemental and biological research. Some kin will excel at some experiment types, and fail at others, but both give research!

Even experiments with negative outcomes are a learning opportunity, though the kin may have different opinions. Failing an experiment, or getting a negative outcome can affect the Kin’s happiness, and unhappy kin are prone to outbursts, or can become aggressive!

Research points are awarded for completing experiments regardless of outcome. Research points can be invested into increasing affection, unlocking perks, discovering info on the kin, info that can lead you to new experiments, or point you to obscure behavior that could lead to uncovering the kin’s secrets!

Early version of the research screen for Flare, small boxes mean fitting text was a challenge

Research points are needed for both advancing as well as maintaining the facility. The facility has to be maintained in order to keep operating and the main way to do that is to sell research to M.I.S. who will continue to fund the research facility as long as you’re making headway with your research! Selling research points gets you funding for buying repair kits, supplies, items and makeovers for the kin’s rooms, and upgrades for the facilities, but as all things balance is needed, as research points also helps you unlock useful info about the kin!

I’ve talked about happiness and affection in the past few devlogs, and figured I’d chat about the differences since they aren’t the same! Happiness is what you imagine, kin are happy if you do things they like, and become unhappy when you do things they don’t. This is mainly affected by experiments, experiments most of the time are often frustrating or invasive to the kin, but all kin have preferences, so sometimes experiments are less negative than others, and some can even be positive if it’s an activity the kin particularly like. Many things will affect happiness for example repeating the same experiment over and over is fatiguing, and so the decrease in happiness may grow if you don’t change it up and try other things. Kin may come to loathe an experiment if you do it too much so even positive experiments can cause negative outcomes.

Unhappy kin will sometimes have outbursts during the workday leading to a facility emergency lock-down that as a researcher you’ll need to resolve! (I’ll go into more details on this later!)

Affection on the other hand is your bond with the kin, this can be improved by spending time with the kin and over time building your relationship. While you may do experiments and make them unhappy sometimes, their affection will never decrease. Increasing your affection will unlock new dialog and new scenes with the kin, as you become closer with them. This is essentially the primary way to progress a kin’s personal story.

Doing experiments is exhausting, and so kin who do many experiments run out of energy over time. As kin lose energy they also decrease in efficiency, a tired kin is less likely to produce as many research points as they’ll be less cooperative and potentially prone to a mental break. Kin need time away from doing experiments in order to recover, but it’s a balance, let them rest too often and you won’t get the research needed to keep the facility afloat with all it’s maintenance costs. Some kin recover faster than others, but they all need breaks. Happiness also affects recovery time, an neutral or unhappy kin will recover slowr than a happy kin. Managing kin’s time and energy to do research experiments as effectively as possible is a challenge but it’s your job to overcome it!

Tabbed idea we’re considering, better for putting text, plus we can add longer tooltips!

Okay so that wraps up this update! However for now things are going to be quiet on my front, unfortunately I have some IRL stuff happening over the next month and a half so there won’t be any stuff done on the programming side and I won’t be posting again until May but rest assured I’ll be back in May as we continue work! I’ll post an update when I get back in mid May where we’re at. Currently we’re still working on getting a demo of the new game loop, which we’re currently hoping to aim for July some time, though things could change.

On the art and writing side we’re going to be testing stuff internally so I don’t think there will be any posts about it, but rest assured I know the things we’re working on will be exciting to many so stay tuned in for that! I’ll make sure to post something about what they came up with once I’m back.

ALSO! If you aren’t I HIGHLY suggest joining the Discord! I started hanging out over there so if you want to chat about the game definitely join and I can answer questions for you!

Hey everyone it’s TT again! Back with some new stuff to show!

Disclaimer

Full transparency we all have day jobs so really it’s only had like 2-3 days of work!

Everything we’re showing off is super early and nothing is set in stone yet!

We’re still fleshing out ideas, , so some things may change a bunch before release, so keep that in mind!

Time Management

First I’ll chat about one of the big changes, time management. Previously you would select a kin and choose to chat with them to pick activities. Now there’s more of a focus on doing different kinds of research, as well as maintaining the facility and then the general well being of the kin.

Every day there are 3 time segments, morning/afternoon/evening, and you can assign the kin to do work, or chores during those times. If you don’t assign a kin to do anything than you give them free-time.

I’ll go into more detail on the various types of work, and chores at some point, but for now the idea is that:

You’ll need to balance these in order to maximize the speed at which you gain Research Points!

Once you’ve assigned the kin to do jobs, you can start the day

The Lab

Another change is how you interact with kin! The lab has been buffed into a fully fledged research campus! Once the day starts you’ll be able to walk around the lab, and see all the kin at their daily assignments.

You can talk to them, and you can get a gauge on how they are doing and if they like/hate the assignment.

You can also get the opportunity to interrupt them for that time slot and hang out with them instead. Spending time with them is how you advance the individual character stories, gain affection, reputation, and most importantly get spicy with the kin!

Next time!

That’s it for now, we think these changes will be fun additions, they give a lot of new opportunities for character scenes and events, and have there more to do with the kin.

There’s a lot more to all the changes, next week I’ll talk more about Research Points, and more detailed changes to progression with funding and such.

Let us know what you think and I’ll see you all soon!

Nice to meet everyone! I’m TechTsundere! TT for short. I’m a new programmer who joined the Monster XXXperiment Team! I’ve been doing game dev for over 10 years using various engines and frameworks(Unity, GameMaker, Scratch lol) and I’ve been using Godot full time for my projects for about 3 years now.

I’m excited to be finally be able to do some posting of my own! We definitely have some big changes in the works for Monster XXXperiment, and I’ve asked @AstroKaen if I can do some devlogs to help talk about some of the changes coming to the game!

As They’ve mentioned in other devlogs, while RenPy is great with visual novels, it doesn’t come with much in terms of tools for supporting other kinds of game features. With the move to Godot we want to focus on increasing the level of player interaction, there will be a lot more doing in this version along with all the ‘doing’ ;D

For the next month I’ll be much more active, posting weekly-ish, as I put together a quick greybox of the kind of gameplay we’re going for. While it won’t be as polished or complete feeling as the current version, we hope that it will show where we’re thinking about going with the game, and we can get feedback and ideas as we go through this transformation as a community!

After March I’ll personally be silent for a bit as I’ll be taking the next month and a half with some IRL stuff including a game jam, but don’t worry I’ll be back in June when that’s all over with more updates!

For now I just wanted to say hi give my quick intro and greet all the researchers!