Update: October 2019

Sorry if I haven't been quite as responsive as usual in the last week. Between insanity at my day job and some health issues, I've been pretty tapped out.

I've gotten a lot of great feedback on the last build. There have been lots of story inconsistencies pointed out, bugs and other issues brought to my attention, story ideas and even some scripts submitted, so that's pretty exciting...also gives me a lot to work on for the next release.

I took a little time to explore more of my art options as well. I always figured I'd be looking into Daz3D for future projects, but it occurred to me that it might have potential for creating backgrounds for Interns as well. The method I'm using for backgrounds right now is okay for basic scenes, but if I want a series of CGs in a single location with lots of different angles, it ends up being a TON of Photoshop work for me. I thought I'd explore 3D sets so that I could render the angles I need. Going to take a bit of trial and error, since I'm not really familiar with the software and it looks like it's changed a lot since the last time I tried it out.

You've might've noticed in the last build that I've started adding more events that will eventually lead to hooking up with guests. (They all, sadly, are non-events or lead to placeholders.) I'm still trying to push these forward so that they're actually worth checking out.

Part of this has lead to what's probably the fourth(?) revision of the sex system. I've mostly scrapped what I had and rebuilt it using everything I've learned from the past versions and now have something cleaner, a bit less complicated, and a little easier to predict.

In keeping with the themes of the game, it's all still based on interactions between physical and psychological elements, of course. As such, a part of the process has included addressing some of the lust-triggering events that have already been seeded into the game to start taking the PC's orientation into account. Since the player character's sexual orientation changes over the course of the game, it only makes sense that turn-ons and turn-offs need to be able to reflect that.

Aspects of body transformation tie in here as well. I've long hinted that there would be more things that can be changed about the PC's body than just the visible traits. A bunch of these apply to the sex system

Here's what's in the current version system:

• Body parts are each assigned a sensitivity value
•  Sensitivity has a minimum and maximum value that it ramps up to based on the level of arousal

The general idea here is that, the more sensitive an area, the more pleasure can be produced from interacting with it.

In the previous version of the system, I had a pretty complicated system that handled how easy/difficult it was for the PC to have an orgasm. I've got with a much simpler method that's a bit easier to work with. For those who have found it in the current build, you'll know that there are already the beginnings of how the PC will be able to get some help with this.

This one is still really in flux, as it wasn't initially planned. I've been trying to figure out a system that handles how powerful an orgasm is, how satisfied it leaves the PC, etc., based on all of the other elements already in the system. (Good ones can leave the PC content for a while, while lackluster ones can end with her being unsatisfied, with sexual frustration making lust more insistent.)

This came about from some of my experiments; I was looking at how changes in sensitivity and ease of orgasm (see above) impacted the quality of orgasm system I worked out, and I discovered some interesting side-effects. Mostly, if it was made *too* easy for the PC to climax, the orgasms ended up being pretty weak.

This introduced another variable with the potential to be changed in-game: a modifier for orgasm quality. Could be fun to incorporate into the story.

Sex acts in the game have always had an intensity level (representing how fast/vigorous the action is). In past versions, I had this being used as a multiplier for pleasure, and it didn't quite work out the way I wanted. For the new version, it's being used to add more of a game aspect to the system.

The idea being that, at different levels of arousal and/or progress towards orgasm, different levels of intensity will be more or less effective. So, choosing the right action at the right time will get you better results.

I like this aspect because I can give NPCs skill levels; more skilled NPCs will know when to use the right intensity at the right time, whereas less skilled ones will make less effective choices.

When the PC is in control, the player should be able to handle these choices. I'm still trying to think of a good way to handle this that doesn't involve a menu popping up every "round," however. (The existing mirror masturbation scene should give you a good idea of how it would look if I did that.)

As you can guess from that last part, there's a need for a bit of an "AI" for NPCs. I have a start on that from a while back. It's not quite as ambitious as it sounds (or at least I hope not) since it's really just a basic structure for sex scenes (much like how the job manager handles the events that fire off at work).

As a way of keeping sex events from going on forever, "stamina" is going to be used to control how many acts the player can take. This will likely be derived from the amount of energy the PC has, though, when NPCs are involved, they'll have their own stamina to deal with.

The previous version had a lot of this already worked in (and you may be able to see some of it in the sex scene with the man who tries o romance the PC at the club). I feel like it got a bit too complicated, so I'd like to find an easier way to handle it. The general idea is that the PC should be at minimum levels of arousal for certain actions to be pleasurable. If not, being too rough will result in a bit of a penalty and some appropriate flavor text (likely some scene branching or early ends, too).

For those who are really interested in my work on this, I've got a post for backers that goes over a bit of my testing process. Those pledging $1 or more can check out that post by clicking here.

I have no idea what I'm doing, and this is a lot of trial and error on my part, but I'm going to keep trying to refine this as I add more opportunities for the PC to hook up with people around the resort, and hopefully get more of those scenes at least a little more fleshed-out.