Update (02-Jul-2022)

Alright, thanks! Yeah, maybe I need to think that one a bit further, lol. I detailed under Merdelain's comment, some more thoughts on why I chose to do it in a certain way, or what I was trying to achieve. Sorry, it became quite long winded, but I would be interested in hearing your thoughts there, as well. I wrote the reply such that if you read the first couple sentences of each paragraph, you'll get the idea of it.

Great, thanks! I’m glad to hear how it went in medium. Also, sounds like morale cost is roughly where it should be. Let’s see how it goes with future scenes, and we can rebalance later if needed. Speaking of, as you suggest, for the next build I can tone down the officer contribution to the harassment chance. Let’s see how that feels. I liked that you sometimes flew to other stations without missions, to take a better potential opportunity and recover some morale that way. That’s exactly the behavior I was hoping for! Lastly, I agree with you that the morning scene selection system can be better. I’ll put it on my to do list, but it might come a bit later.

In regards to why should the player turn down the offer in Darkmorrow Arena, I think I might need some more thinking on this. The main problem I am trying to solve is that the character should not want to take on the deal. In her head, it should be a dilemma between making more money but not degrading herself too much. I want to then present that same question to the player, but of course the equation is different for the player. They want to see the main character in lewd or humiliating situations, or maybe transform her from a proud warrior to a submissive slut. To deal with that, I thought I might propose that if the player chooses to continue and take a deal, then they might risk a bad end to the game or your score.

That might not be the best set up, though. Maybe a better way to do it is for the merchant to offer the bodyguard 3 deals. Each deal will present different kinds of monsters, different payouts, and also different obligations for the main character. The player then must choose one of these 3 deals, and the other 2 get discarded. This could represent the main character thinking about what she is willing to do, sexually and in terms of mortal danger. But, it could also represent what obligations the player might want to pursue and what challenges they are willing to take.

This brings up another conundrum for me. I really want to include permadeath, and a sense of “maybe you as the player want to stop, before the combat challenge gets too out of control”. I’m not really sure how I want to do that. In archive, it might say if the character survived or not. Or, I might set the score to 0 if she didn’t survive. I was also thinking of using different endings. For example, if she lost against goblins, maybe the ending in the archive states that she became a goblin baby maker for the rest of her life. But if she quit with over 10,000 coins, the ending might say that she finished her life as a bodyguard and retired as a proud shop owner.

It might be better to remove permadeath, altogether. But like you said, I want to keep it, to encourage replayability. I like your fable idea too, of offering extra (and sexy) challenges. But, I don’t think that is exactly what I want to achieve. I think what I want to focus on is a gradual but permanent growth in the relationship between the merchant and the bodyguard. I don’t just want the merchant to be able to grope her butt for this one trip. I want to normalize it afterwards, so that he can then do it all the time, and it becomes a normal thing in her life. That way, they might have started off very professional, but by the end, she might have become his sex slave, and she was accepting of each marginal step along the way. At the same time, I want to also pressure the player to quit early, maybe because the battles are getting harder (or any other reason). But if the player perseveres anyway, then they should be rewarded with a deeper, more trusting, sexier relationship between the two characters.

But, maybe the Fable approach is the right way to do it. Maybe the merchant says something like, "I'll offer you 800 coins for the trip, but also 400 coins extra for this trip and every future trip, if you let me grope your butt whenever I want, from now on." Then the player can choose to just take the 800 coin deal, or the 1,200 coin deal, and unlock some sexy scenes for the rest of the game. But, doesn't it feel kind of weird, that I'm double rewarding the player in one choice, and offering them nothing in the other deal? Each deal then needs some kind of punishment for the player, themself. Maybe it needs to come down to multiple proposals, and the player choosing whichever is best for them. I'll give it some more thought.