Horny Mage Academy Devlog: Humans and Basic Companion System Design!
One of my main goals with Lily's project is just exploring all of the different ways I can design unique and fun enemy designs to serve as obstacles and fun events.
So today we're going to take a look at the new enemy designs, as well as Andrew's new character art!
Andrew: The wandering Half-Nekomata Swordsman
First appearing very early on in Horny Mage Chronicles, Andrew was very focused on his swordsmanship courses.... and not much else!
Until Olivia gives him lots of private, one on one tutoring that is!
While he starts out hiding it in Horny Mage Academy, he eventually becomes comfortable with the fact that he is half-nekomata, a race of reclusive cat-people, and as a result no longer hides his tail and ears.
In Lily's Adventure, he's a full-fledged swordsman of considerable power! Or, at least, he would be until a fun accident makes him forget everything temporarily! (Wouldn't be much of an adventurer for Lily if he tagged along with monstrous strength, now would it?)
COMPANION DESIGN
This was a fun problem to work out. The balance system, while mostly working, doesn't quite capture the correct pacing of a system with companions.
Spending time downed felt a little meh when you have friends fighting on the field, so the current plan is to have it be disabled with a companion and instead engage in erotic scenes after certain special attacks enemies use, skipping balance and jumping straight into erotic combat!
Here is an example of the animations and skills I've been working on. He has a gap closer that lets him flash step! (But it was a right pain getting him to use it without spamming it every 2 seconds!)
Eventually he will get another few skills to round out his abilities, but for now this feels like a good start. His swings will actually deal decent damage to enemies (as a swordsman that makes sense to me!) so he should be a real help on the field!
HOOLAGIN BRAWLERS
Bam, pow! They got a charged up punch!
This deals heavy damage and knockdown when Lily is alone, but launches straight into an H-scene when she's with Andrew!
The goal of that is to increase the speed and pacing of combat when you have a party. Otherwise, the strategy becomes "EH, just let the catboy handle the combat while I'm getting fucked" and that's.... not exactly ideal for balance!
HOOLAGIN MAGES
Taking the targeted boss aoes and moving them to a regular enemy was somewhat more difficult than you would think. I eventually figured it out, and they should properly stop casting comets when you kill them!
They also chuck rapid fireballs and run away from you, but don't worry. Teleportation and corruption attacks are being saved for their nighttime variant.
BoomShrooms
If you look carefully (or not so carefully) at the comets, you'll see they trigger a few more explosions! Those are the boomshrooms, a volatile new gatherable item needed for later explosive-based recipes.
But be careful, they'll pop with no rewards if you hit them with any attack, so don't let enemies hit them! (or do, it hurts them too!)
Human knockdown and scenes are still a minor work-in-progress, as they will work differently depending on if Andrew is with you or being left at home!
Now, I still have to design new maps and combat encounters, so expect changes and tweaks until I get it all feeling right!
Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you again soon!
Lily's Erotic Potion Delivery: (Horny Mage Academy Combat Demo) Early Demo Release!
Join Lily as she starts a new adventure in a starring role in the combat update! The demo includes the start of her adventure, as well as a peek into the strange events happening around this small little remote village.
Simply unzip the files to your preferred location and run game.exe!
Known Issues
- Animation Slowdowns and flickering between parts, particularly when it's trying to load in multiple seperate segments, especially internal views
This issue will be addressed in a later update, and mostly has to do with how I structured most animation sets to be seperate parts so things like transparancy overlays could be loaded in at runtime. This can be easily fixed by making single-animation sets, but I want to try a few things to see if I can keep everything interchangable at runtime for ease of development
Lack of facial expression/emote animations during dialog (or overuse of such things during certain dialog scenes
This is related to the above error, as certain emotes/expressions were/are overwriting idle animations at times and had to be removed and redone
The village is a little bare and empty at the moment, as I'm lacking art/character sprites for more NPCS.
Item collection can be a little bouncy, there's a glitch in the plugin thats running dropped item pickup that needs to be ironed out
Field Spawns after the tutorial sometimes leave ghostly apparitions of enemies on the field until you leave and reenter
The status screen, as well as map screens, are incomplete/missing information. In particular the map needs to be redone entirely and the status screen is missing key information on stat levels and exp, status effects you can gain (should be on page 2-other), and stuff that will be added later for pregnancies like development timeframes and pregnancy rates
First up, the release of Horny Mage Academy's Combat demo's demo! (The demo of a demo, demo-ception?)
Lily's Erotic Potion Delivery Service is now available to all magi-tier subscribers for early access!
As I don't quite want to spoil everything that's been included in the demo (and also that so, so much of it was bugfixes/smoothing out of the core systems), I think instead I'll talk about future plans for development for HMA. Just some musings on how I'm going to use Lily's little adventure to direct and focus development on HMA mostly.
This will mostly be a text post, as it's more a musings/development thoughts rather than showing off new stuff at the moment. Apologies in advance for the wall of text.
As I mentioned previously, Horny Mage Academy's development needs a few main things complete before I can truly start digging into it. At minimum, Horny Mage Academy needs Imps, Nekomatas, slimes, and tentacle plants in terms of enemy design to have the proper variety I think it needs.
As for skills, there's roughly 60 of them needed for a base release that doesn't involve tearing apart the class system, and I have completed.... 6 or so! So still a bit off there.
More than just those disconnected parts though, I need a coherent design goal and strategy for its combat system. I like the core of HMA's gameplay, where your advancements in combat come from attending classes and jobs, making friends, etc, but in terms of design it was certainly lacking in the combat department.
Lily's game, meanwhile, isn't constrained by the requirements there. I was free to use it to test and stretch the design of the combat system's new plugins. As a result, don't expect Horny Mage Academy out of her adventure! It's much more a straightforward action-rpg (set in the same universe with the same characters).
Instead, look into the separate elements that are, and will be, implemented into it.
The resistance/in-battle sex system (this might carry over rather well if it's working!)
The spirits system (will not carry over as it's basically a replacement for your classes to learn magic)
The stat-growth upon being hit, casting spells, engaging in erotic battle, losing hp, and gathering. (This may? carry over? It's hard to tell how this would effect the balance of Horny Mage Academy's classes and clubs, many of which were primarily for stat-boosting.
The expanded pregnancy system that allows pregnancies to progress faster while in combat zones, and giving birth on the field (likely also returning! Just likely limited by area and type (ex)-humans stay the same? but slimes in a waterway grow faster?)
The (future) companion system, which I have only dipped my toes into so far, allowing you to adventure with one of your friends.
And overall the many animation, UI, pixel art, field animations, and more that have been tweaked and added.
At it's core, Lily's Erotic Potion Delivery was built upon the same game files that Horny Mage Academy was. A copy of Horny Mage Academy's last build was used, and then slowly stripped down until only the necessary elements were running for the combat system to work.
The goal with this was to remove bugs that were related to the current systems of HMA and allow me to focus development on the new combat system. Systems like the pregnancy processing systems, time-day controller, COMM systems, and more were all heavily tied to the game logic and prone to breaking when stuff was removed/added. I needed a clean slate, but at the same time didn't want to open a completely new project and risk incompatibilities rising from the differing architecture and potential plugin/load order configuration.
While I was working on Lily's adventure, I also wanted to look ahead at not just what needed to be 1-1 replaced in Horny Mage Academy, but what needed to be better. In particular, UI, spritework, animations, and better tutorials and communication came to the front of the development goals. Certain areas of the demo like the mana crafting system were held back from this release in part because the UI elements were proving difficult or time-consuming to make.
In terms of broader content that will be developed with LEPD that's not currently part of HMA, I looked at what was missing and tried to make it a goal to develop on those areas. In particular the corrupt church has always been lacking in terms of content and ascetics, so that's one area that will be a heavy focus in Lily's Adventure.
Along that note, humanoid enemies in general are the next stop on the development train. Cultists and Hoolagins in particular, as they fit into the corrupt church and the village areas of HMA fairly well, and could have interesting events surrounding them.
I'm rambling a bit at this point, but I'm excited to see where all of this will go. Thanks for reading, and enjoy the demo!
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