Progress Report: NG+ and Curios I

Curios

It's time to tackle the curios. Quite some were added at the beginning, but there's a lack of variety, especially in the dungeon regions that were added later. To start, I've added regional variants of the good old wooden and iron chests (and mimics). These chests will now only appear in the Forest, while each other region has their own variant (with its own effects). Below you can see the wooden/iron chest variants for each region:

New Game Plus

The concept of new game plus is pretty straightforward. Once you've (almost) finished the game you can restart the game while keeping some of your progress. This then allows you to pick new or different destiny perks. The possibility for NG+ is available rather early at the church, the specific options are shown below:

Curios: Retrospective

Let's talk about Curios for a bit. The next, unannounced game, I'll be working on will need "Curios" as well. Every game that contains dungeons needs something in those dungeons to break the monotony. Coincidentally I've named these things Curios here, after Darkest Dungeon. Apart from breaking up the monotony, they preferably also tie in to the core mechanics of the game.

For example in Darkest Dungeon they are a provisions and a knowledge check,  tieing in to the risk-reward system of provisions and the natural meta-progression of learning the dungeons (though everyone just uses a Wiki really). It isn't a perfect system though, since there's always an optimal choice. Either you have the provision and you interact, or you don't and you ignore the Curio.

In Ero Dungeons, the attempt was to make the Curio choices both depend on your adventurers (with choices based on quirks and personalities), and also be partially based on luck. However, I don't think this works very well. The "luck" based Curios are actually quite rare, and the player doesn't really (have to) engage with them. Personalities are too hidden, most players probably don't know the personalities of their adventurers (the overlap between Quirks/Crests/Personalities/Desires is also a problem here).  And even if they did, it wouldn't really give any meaningful choice, only flavor.

I've played "The Lesser of Two Eves" recently, a new game by Aika, known mostly from TrapQuest. It switches up the monotony of combat with a chance wheel. The main character can choose multiple options, but as her familiar you can spend influence to disable some of them (depending on their chance). It's a very interesting way to handle choices, meaning that it isn't all RNG but leaves the specific risk management up to the player. So you can only be mad at yourself for not disabling the small but disastrous choice, The influence is also used in combat, making it a further tradeoff.

Now let's relate this to Ero Dungeons, I feel that Curios are most interesting when they offer a gamble. And it's also what I've been leaning into for the newer Curios. For example, a vault in the labs can give you 95% chance of loot, but 5% chance of triggering the alarm and starting combat, or petrifying one of the partymembers. Combined with using influence (it would be morale in Ero Dungeons and [REDACTED] in [REDACTED]) this gives the player interesting choices in how to engage with Curios. It would also allows the player to engage with lewd content even when playing optimally. Anyway, it's too late to change for this game, but I'll use it as inspiration for the next one. It's also expandable, since specific party conditions could add choices to the wheel as well.

Let me know what your opinion is about this, either in the comments or in the Discord.

Next

While adding more Curios, I got sidetracked by the lamentable state of the dungeon layouts in the game. Those will get completely overhauled next week. The goal is to have more diversity between the regions, and not just have every dungeon be a rectangle where you move from one side to the other.

Changelog

Major:

• Region specific treasure Curios, see above.
• New game plus, see above.

Minor:

• Updated Japanese translation, thanks HinokinoK!
• Removed the deprecated "no nudity" censorship.
• New presets: Saryth and Momiji.
• Mod state is now shown in the Mod Manager, instead of just an icon.

Bugfixes:

• Can equip script could cause crashes if checked on an enemy.
• Quirk icons weren't modulated in the dungeonconclusion.
• Completionist quirk didn't trigger for Elite+ dungeons.
• Fixed overworldscene flickering on Steamdeck.
• Stat tooltips didn't display effects that affect all stats (such as mantras).

If you want early access to these changes (and a debug console), support me here:

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