Slave sales so sexy

So, our first slave is more or less done for now: you get some conversations with him, you can give him 3 different orders everyday, and do some naughty stuff with him at night. You'll get 2 options with him for the sexy stuff (either you dominate him, or you allow him to turn the tables on you, and who knows where that might lead... :p), or you can be "professional" with him, and just keep him as your helper. You'll have eventually the option to free him too, but that will have to wait another time. The plan is to have a similar setup for the girl slave as well, but without the dom/sub dualism (I think she'll be more straightforward, and just be a sub).

I did spend some time this week on figuring out an alternative to the mouse targetting, and I finally found one! It's an odd mixture of my own script, another script and normal eventing, but it seems to work as intended. If this goes well, I'll ditch the mouse (which doesn't always play nice with scripts and certain UI elements) and we'll be able to play using keyboard or gamepad only. I won't release this in the current update, because I'd like to run some internal testing first (since it's a pretty big deal, I want to get it right before releasing it to the public). I will also need some time to re-write the tutorial, if that happens.

I also did some work on the combat. This will need you to restart the game (although there aren't that many fights, so you wouldn't miss much if just kept playing with an old save, but any encounter would likely be harder without updating). At first when I started I wanted the combat to be quick; I hate games where you get longwinded fights with cannon fodders for hours, but then I realized that my game doesn't have a lot of fights and doesn't use random encounters, so it's fine to have cool, longer fights. So I have started by doubling the protagonist's HP (and I also doubled any HP increase in the game, like with the heart amulets), and now I'll aim for 5-8 turns per fight with low-level enemies, perhaps even longer. This will allow players to experiment more easily, and will make combos between spells more useful, easier to try out and so on. I will also get players a summon early on, so you'll get used to playing with 2 people in the party, and the balancing will be easier for me since I'll always assume that from now on. I might aim to make the game slightly easier for the low-level stuff, especially since the new balance will need some fine-tuning at first. There might be other changes (I found some nice scripts to show summons in menu, so you can keep track of their status after the fights, for example), but those might have to wait until the content is more fleshed out.

Finally, I did some work on the League of merchants in Rahib. I might try to squeeze in a new quest, so we can finally get to see the other side, as you fight against the Zanti family (or if you are already a cowgirl, we'll just see you sabotage your own mission, and lie to the League, instead).

I think this is about it (sorry if this was a little on the long-side). If you have any questions, let me know, otherwise see you next week! ^_^