Alpha Devlog 7: Overworld Mechanics

Idea

As I mentioned before, the idea behind Ero Hunters came from Palworld. I thoroughly enjoyed the loop of "go out to catch pals", "put them to work in your base", "let them make palspheres", "use those spheres to catch more of them". It's technically in the survival/crafting genre, but as with most "survival" games, "survival" isn't really a part of it, and the base building is more akin to a small factory game.

So the idea was to merge the Ero Dungeons overworld and the Ero Dungeons guild together, allowing you to build buildings yourself and assign girls to work there. In those buildings you can craft gear and consumables, or just gather resources. Going into dungeons gives you resources and all that stuff as well, but primarily allows you to capture new monstergirls to work for you.

Prototyping

I always find it interesting to see how game mechanics come to be and what the reasoning behind them is. Here, since making factory games or city builders is difficult, some simplifications have to be made, the primary ones being "no belts" and "no pathfinding". So here's a list of the attempts:

Attempt 1

The first idea was to handle resources as Starsector handles them. If one building produces 4 wood, and another produces 8, you don't have 12 wood to work with, but 8. Any building that consumes 8 or less wood works fine, and anything else breaks. Resources are universal.

This had some upsides as you'd need high quality girls and equipment to produce enough of a resource and couldn't just spam more resource buildings. Unfortunately, this didn't stop players from placing buildings wherever they want.

So buildings also had an access rating (a concept also from Starsector), which depends on how far your building is from the closest storehouse and could be increased by employing ponygirls there. It didn't really help a lot, since you could still build a Latex Extractor at the other side of the map and just place a storehouse next to it. To fix that I'd have to make storehouses link, and make access a lot more convoluted, which isn't a good idea.

Attempt 2

Resources are no longer universal, but stored in specific buildings. You can connect buildings with eachother to transfer resources between them. The speed of this transfer depends on the obedience of the girls working in them, while the amount of goods produced scales with their stats.

Since you no longer have access to resources yourself, buildings had to be built using a different system. If you place a building foundation, it would leech off building materials from storehouses until fully built.

This wasn't a very interesting system, but the final nail in the coffin is that it was hard to mix with dungeons. Dungeons should also give you resources as rewards, which were hard to move into the system. Though in general, the design just wasn't very good in the first place.

Attempt 3

Resources are universal again, this time in the normal way, not the starsector way. The whole concept of "access" is removed, and buildings directly produce to a sort of universal inventory. The amount of goods produced scales with the stats of the worker, while the production speed depends on their compliance. Building buildings required an upfront resource cost to place a foundation which then slowly turns into the full building. To prevent the player from building everywhere, you had to build outposts which expanded the area you can build in.

It was workable, though a bit too easy to chain outposts together. Worse though, the stats of the girl didn't really matter, whether you get 5.21 wood or 9.18 doesn't really matter, just build an extra lumber camp. But the core of this attempt seemed solid, so I continued with this.

Final Tweaks

Instead of resources produced scaling with stats, buildings have recipes. Each recipe, like a move, has a minimum stat requirement. The monstergirl either has the required stats, or can't perform the recipe. This gives clear thresholds to the player.

Instead of building outposts, you need to pacify an area before you can build there. This is either done through overworld fights or completing dungeons.

To prevent the player from building everything next to eachother and blocking themselves off from parts of the island, each building spawns with roads all around, preventing you from building buildings directly next to it. This is just a temporary workaround. Eventually (but not in the tech-demo), the player will be able to build roads themselves, and you need to be next to a building to enter it.

Dungeons

The goal of the overworld is to make the player think: "Just one more dungeon"

The goal of the dungeons is to make the player think: "After this dungeon I just want to make some more changes in the overworld"

For this, dungeons do the following:

• They increase the buildable area in the overworld.
• They give you resources and gear (including ones of higher rarity) as rewards.
• They pass time at a faster rate (2min per combat, 1min per 

Finally, going inside dungeons passes time by a significant amount per interacted curio or started battle, leading to you getting more resource by actually doing dungeons. Apart from that, dungeons also reward you with resources or gear by themselves.

Building Types

Resource Production

The basic buildings take some (or no) resources in, and then produce an output provided that the workers fulfill the minimum requirements of the set recipe. Resource buildings can have different recipes with different stat requirements. All buildings can be modified with modules, which affect all employees within a building.

Guard

Guard buildings slowly pacify the area around it and prevent new enemy expansion into the area. It's a lot slower than going into dungeons, but it's automated.

Crafting

These buildings allow you to craft every type of equipment/consumable/module depending on the building. Recipes are generated automatically by the game depending on the equipment/consumables/modules that exist in game.

Breeding

You can combine two girls with a strapon (catalyst) to breed a new girl. The specifics of the offspring depend on the strapon used. In general, it takes the race of the mother, take genes from either parent, and they start as a level 1 commoner. Genes also have a chance to get upgraded so you can breed Ratkin with legendary genes. While the breeding progresses, an image - depending on the race of the mother - will slowly be revealed. The red line image is clearly a placeholder.

Cross-breeding and further niceties are planned, but won't be there for the tech demo.

Research

Research is pretty much a necessity for a game like this to prevent overloading the player with information. I just recreated the Research screen from Factorio for this. Research is performed at a shrine by Shrine Maidens. You start the game with an abandoned shrine on the map, but can build them yourself later. This is common for most research, you first have to gather stuff manually (from dungeons), and later you can automate it.

Research is just a temporary name. You're actually sacrificing mana or whatever to the Gods. Unfortunately, the Gods aren't in yet, since they're also closely linked to move types.

Other Stuff

Moddability

Unlike in Ero Dungeons, buildings can be fully modded.

Day Night Cycle

There's also a day night cycle now, since some goals are triggered on a "per day" basis. For a developer, it's one of those things that take a couple seconds to implement, but looks very cool. So it gives you the impression of progress.

Counter Animations

In Ero Dungeons, some moves - mostly grapples - had a counter animation. Implementing those was a nightmare since it meant a lot of copy pasting and tweaking in Godot. Now, with the new Animation editor, the whole process is a lot smoother.

Here's an example of a dodge animation: https://x.com/madodev18/status/1859892249196396878

Mapmodes

I cleaned up the visuals for the different mapmodes. Here's an example of some mapmodes on the pre-alpha island.

Timings

I'll release a private pre-alpha sneakpeek around December 6 for subscribers on Patreon/Subscribestar. The core gameloop is mostly finished. An early pre-alpha will never be fully balanced, be bugfree or contain a lot of content, so I'll see how far I'll get.