Update: March 2021

Here’s a bit of an early update for you. I shared some of this on the Discord (which started after venting some frustration over trying to update an old scene), and figured I may as well share with everyone else…

I’ve been going back through existing scenes and adding either notes for future me on willpower checks or code for applying “indoctrination” or “obedience”-type brainwashing. No gameplay impact just yet, but it gets the underlying mechanics in place.

Doing a complete trial run through the game, I found my character’s indoctrination was at 20% and obedience was at 2% by the end. That actually doesn’t sound too bad for a first attempt, using mostly the existing dreams (just be glad I haven’t added anything to the nap section just yet…).

Some questions came up on changes to the player character’s identity (the shift from the PC seeing himself as a man suddenly trapped in a woman’s body to actually identifying as the woman “he” sees in the mirror) and sexual orientation.

The former has had some weak mechanics in the game for a long time. It’s affected by the current body type (more curves = harder to not see yourself as a girl), clothing/perfume choices, amount of time spent using the mirror, and slow shift just from waking up every day in that body.

The latter…well, that’s much more of a mess, the extent of which I hadn’t realized until I did a search through the code to check up on it.

I don’t want to get completely off-track working on it, but I did see an opportunity to take some of what I worked on with indoctrination/obedience and whip up a derivative function to add some standardization to events that can change the PC’s orientation.

So I did just that and seeded the events into a bunch of places that seemed appropriate (flirting with men, sleeping with men, etc.). It’s not remotely balanced and it only goes one way (I’d really like to have mechanics where it can shift in both directions, and perhaps gravitate toward bisexual), but since there’s a lot of stuff that’s gated behind the PC’s orientation, making it possible to shift it at all seemed like an important thing to have sooner, rather than later.

In testing, it probably worked a little too well, as my PC had lost all interest in women by game’s end. (I've got my little developer cheat window that allows me to spot-check some important stats, as you can see below).

 

Testing also made it painfully obvious that lots of existing content wasn’t properly designed to handle this. I’m not sure if it’s going to be a matter of certain scenes needing to be time-limited to prevent them from showing after the player has had enough time to shift their orientation, or if all of them need to be expanded in order to adapt to it.

It’s an incredibly messy challenge, unfortunately.