Update (11-Jun-2022)

Hi All,

Delivery Pilot: Dreams and Debts:
I just wanted to give a quick update. This week, I've been adding the morning events that I've written to the game. This was pretty involved. In addition to adding the text, I also had to carefully add the conditions for when each text piece is usable. I also built the harness that checks if a scene should be played, and then plays it. I gave it a test, and it more or less worked. Still, I'll take some more time to further test and polish it. I wasn't super impressed with my writing in practice, but that's alright. You only get better with practice, right?

Here's how I've designed it to work. Once every morning when the main character goes from the hanger to the offices, if the intro tutorial morning scenes are not playing (so not the first 8 days or so), then the game rolls a 100 sided die. If it rolls below a certain threshold, which I'll come back to later, then a morning scene plays, where the main character notices the people around her paying her unwanted attention. This is a short scene, typically around 5 messages long, but the content changes a lot, based on what she is wearing. If she is wearing a really scandalous outfit, then she will lose more morale, as well. Therefore, taking on more obligations will help raise income, but it will also make it harder (hopefully) to balance income vs. morale. The threshold to trigger the scene starts at 20 (out of 100), but it goes up by 10 for each obligation on that station. So, if the main character has a lot of obligations on a station, then the people there will ogle her far more often. The threshold can never go above 80 (out of 100), and the dice is only rolled once per day (so, it is safe to go back to the plane and then come back to the office).

Right now, my plan is to make a release of this game at the end of the month, with the morning scene included. If I get some spare time, I'll also add some more quality of life features. One feature i really want to add is to let you finish the game early, if you have enough credits to pay off the debt. You don't have to do it, but it would be an option. I also thought about changing the obligation selection system, such that it will always offer an obligation of the highest relationship level requirement possible. But I decided against it, because in a lot of situations, it will make all the stations offer the same deals over and over. Instead, what I think I'll do is add more weight to high level obligations. This way, if a high level obligation's requirements are met, although not guaranteed, it is a lot more likely to show up. The game actually already does this, but I'll ramp up those weights a lot more.

Working on the morning scenes also made me think it would be quite cool to make a game that runs on dice rolling tables. Like, the player is told that the game is rolling a 1d10 or a 2d10, what the possible outcomes are for different values, and then the roll is made in front of the player. That's not what's going on for DPDD, but maybe for another game.

Personal:
On a more personal level, I've been playing a lot of Kingdom Death Monster lately with some friends. It's an interesting game, and I think I would rate it a 7/10. On the good side, I think it has a very solid and fun gameplay loop, with a lot of RNG to keep you in suspense. Also no surprise, I love the art style. But, I also have some gripes about the game, some mechanical and some are just personal preference. My main mechanical complaint is that it felt like there were too many things going on. Despite our best efforts, we kept forgetting certain on-going effects or certain phases or rules. On a personal preference level, I didn't really like the focus on boss rushing. I don't mind fighting bosses, but as the story goes on, the focus seems to really be a lot more on fighting bosses than on growing the settlement. I like that people have intimacy and have children, and you feel a sense of progression between fights. But, I think that's not really what KDM mainly is.

That experience really made me think about what kind of game I would make. At first, I was writing up a small modification to the KDM core rules. But after a while, I started to stray far enough that I thought it should be it's own game. Really, it should be its own game, because if it can be a computer game, it can really sort out that first and biggest issue I mentioned, that there's just too much for 1 to 4 people to keep track of. I think it's really helpful to have a computer do it, instead. Anyway, the big change I would make is to have a focus on (and keep records of) when someone was born, who married who, who had which children, people eventually dying to old age, and having a sense of generational change over time. Like, you might have a character who is a badass warrior, but even he or she gets old, and then the sword is eventually passed on to a new and budding hero. But the legacy of the old warrior lives on in the annals of history (kept as records by the computer).

Anyway, let me know what you think, or if you have played Kingdom Death Monster and have your own stories. Cheers!