Version 0.1.3: Quality of Life

Quality of Life

By now, enough people are playing the game that I'm receiving a bunch of useful feedback from people who have played the game a lot. Based on their feedback and issues with the game, I've spent some time cleaning up the UI and improving the experience of handling larger colonies. What may seem simple when you only have 10 girls starts to break down once you have 100 or so.

UI Improvements

I've described the exact UI changes in the changelog, so I'll just show some images here:

Bound Equipment

Ero Dungeons had the concept of unlimited equipment. Once you had 4 of an item, you got an infinite amount of them. This reduced the grind and kept loot relevant. It worked since you could just swap out any gear of your party anyway, so it just removed tedium. This of course won't work in Ero Hunters since your employed girls also need equipment and crafting is a core component of the game.

So now there is the concept of bound equipment. Once you equip an item, that item stays bound to a girl. It can be unequipped and equipped at will, but never returns to the inventory. This means that you don't have to (and can't) swap equipment between girls. This, combined with preset loadouts significantly simplifies equipment management.

Wolves

There's a new monstergirl race, the wolfkin. Unfortunately, the quality of life improvements above took quite some time, so she isn't fully finished. As of now, they have their unique classes, the Druid and "Feral". The latter happens when the wolfkin uses her transform move, healing her to full and giving her a new set of moves (akin to the Abomination in Darkest Dungeon).

But, as mentioned, this isn't fully finished. The wolf is supposed to turn a lot furrier once transformed. Additionally, her cursed role is the Pet role. As in Ero Dungeons, I'd like her to kneel for that which will require some wrangling of the animation system. Of course, that's inevitable, since it would be boring if all monstergirls were just girls with animal ears.

Next

Tall vs. Wide

Resource costs were too high in the past, and this has caused players to simply catch more ratkin and build more production buildings. The primary issue here is that the game starts to slow down once you reach 200 girls. It's still playable, but around 500 girls autosaves start taking a second, and it only gets worse from then on. The second issue is that it's really impersonal. You don't care about those 200 Ratkin you only caught to chop lumber, and you don't care that you could get a 20% improvement by using a different monstergirl.

The solution for this is simple, roster limits. Of course, without changes to the core systems, this just makes the game unplayable as resource generation would be too slow. The goal then is to give players more ways to squeeze the most of their monstergirls. This will inform the mechanical decisions I'm making going forward.

Next Steps

So next week I'm continuing on the wolves, and will also carry on with QoL improvements and fixing the inevitable bugs that this large UI change has brought forth. It's also time to start implementing the remaining mechanics.

Housing (and roster limits) should encourage building tall and investing in a small amount of highly capable monstergirls.

Fatigue (which will get fully reworked) should encourage swapping out your main combat party every so often.  

Level Caps (depending on technology) should prevent you from overleveling and just clearing the entire map.

Training should further allow building tall and improving your girls.

Ports can be built on the other landing sites for quick travel.

Condensation merge similar monstergirls together to improve a single one (as in Palworld). This ensures that captures are still needed without bloating your roster.

Trading similar to the above, you send monstergirls to the mainland for resource rewards (instead of improving a selected monstergirl).

Changelog

Major:

• Wolfkin, see above.
• General UI update, see above.

Minor:

• Offspring from breeding now gains a stacking Domesticated trait, improving compliance.
• Lacking stats no longer prevents employment, but slows down production.
• Having more stats than required now speeds up production.
• Removed the differing base experience gained from defeating enemies.
• Buildings can now be overrun by monstergirls.
• Haraberu further improved the mod manager.
• Equipment is now bound to a character once equipped, see above.
• Modules have been fully removed from the game.
• Added Small textures for bunnies.
• Girls that are released can now occur again in wild encounters.
• The night is now Purple and slightly less dark.
• There is now a level cap at 50.
• The pacification range of combats has been extended to also include neighbouring tiles.

QoL:

• Demolished buildings now fully refund their cost.
• You no longer need to stand next to a building to interact with it, distance only matters if a building is overrun.
• Timelines at the top of combat are now cleanly split to reduce confusion.
• GirlInfoPanel:
  • Added text to the button in the Overviews, so you now what the tabs mean.
  • Reworked the Party Selection screen so swapping party members is no longer unintuitive, also added filters.
  • You can now save and load party presets.
  • Cleaned up the Roster to allow more girls to be visible at once, additionally adding tooltips and filters.
  • You can now quickly swap to the job of a girl.
  • You can now set equipment loadouts to quickly gear up your girls.
• BuildingInfoPanel:
  • Cleared up the clutter in the old Building panel.
  • Reworked the worker selection screen and added filters.
  • You can now upgrade buildings with a single click.
  • The Breeding UI has been streamlined a lot.
  • You can now quickly select any building, including through filters.
• New Game Scene has been cleaned up.
• Tiles can no longer be instantly recaptured as soon as combat ends.
• There's now a cooldown between back-to-back random encounters.

Bugfixes:

• Taunt wasn't working correctly.
• Demolishing buildings didn't update pathfinding correctly.
• Breeding pen would stop working once strapons reached a production target.
• Strapons were missing recipes in the strapon manufactory.
• Strapons did not respect production orders and would lose recipe on save/load.
• Using an experience WoolMage to produce wool would break production.
• Fixed several tooltip errors.
• Incorrect arousal on Latex Plug Gag.
• Muscular and similar genes didn't affect replaced moves (like Quick Jab).
•  Equip moves would take gear out of your inventory.
• Unequip moves would unequip randomly instead of sequentially
• Stat tooltips didn't describe the effect of stats and had incorrect base values
• Outpost view range could be misaligned and Outpost highlighted tiles weren't drawn under buildings
• Fixed a bug where mod manager would not show which mod is currently in debug mode

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

PATREON | SUBSCRIBESTAR