Project Wild One v0.07: Nice and Juicy

The new version is now available to upper-tier supporters! In at least two weeks, it’ll go out to lower tiers, and in a month or so it will go public for everyone!

Finally rolling this one out! It’s been a hell of a journey, but I’ve talked about the challenges I’ve run into a lot over the past few dev journals, so let’s focus on what’s changing with this update, because there’s a lot to cover! I’ve made changes across so many different parts of the game with this update, there are some obvious connections here and there, but let’s just try and organize it into major sections of the game that have been affected.

Description Changes

The bulk of the work-hours I’ve put into this update have been centered around a ton of behind-the-scenes upgrades to the game’s Logic Parsing system, primarily to get ready for the big AI Overhaul, but also giving a huge boost to the flexibility of the Text Parsing system handling how events in the game are described.

Every time something “happens” in the game it is described in the main text output. You see your actions here, other characters’ actions, changes in Intent and statuses, changes in health and many other things. About 99% of this text is generated by the Text Parsing system: I feed it spreadsheets full of Descriptions paired with Instructions for when to use them, and it compares your exact situation to all those different descriptions to find the best match, using those instructions.

I had been proud of this system when I first developed it, but it was still very restrictive in how it was built. If I wanted to add one new term to use in Instructions, it was a lot of work, and there were a lot of concepts the Instructions just couldn’t refer to at all– they could talk about the “actor” and the “target” of an action if there is one, but if you’re having sex with someone and you have an orgasm, you’re technically not “doing your orgasm to them.” So the old system couldn’t make reference to the person you’re having sex with!

That’s about the most basic example that comes to mind, and it’s hard to explain just how vastly improved this system is. The important thing is, it is so much easier to work with that I was finally able to stretch my legs with writing a little actual prose again! Until now, all the text in the game was pretty much “filling holes” so you had a basic description of what’s going on. For this update, I finally had a robust enough system for detecting different situations that I could actually get creative and come up with descriptions that sound fun or sexy and just add them because I thought they would improve the game! It feels great to finally be able to add a little writing that feels more like prose and less like just… the bare bones of description.

I ended up sinking a decent amount of time into writing out more descriptions, and I’m fairly confident you’ll find the game a much “juicier” read, now! The old descriptions are still there, but they’re basically the “fallbacks” for when your situation doesn’t hit the requirements for any narrower, more evocative descriptions, or when you already got those descriptions recently and they’re still “on cooldown.” I try to avoid repeating the big elaborate descriptions too often.

I know the game was already kinda “bulky” in its descriptions sometimes even before this, and I want to avoid making the text feel overwhelming. That “cooldown” effect is part of that, but I’ve added another new feature to try and help combat this: Prose toggling! At any time, you can open a small control panel in the upper right corner to control how much of the main text you want described in full detail. If you only want full descriptions for events involving your own character, or only for your target, or only for other characters, there are toggles for each that will change all text displayed, even retroactively, to reduce everything you’re less interested in to pretty much the shortest, simplest descriptions possible. This should be a big help any time you feel like you’re swimming through loads of text!

As a side note, I built a little tool for myself to help make sure that all these Descriptions are working okay and are balanced decently against each other. I can now run the game in “autoplay” and accumulate stats on how much each Description is used over a long period of all the NPCs playing with each other! This helps me a lot both with seeing how the NPCs are behaving in their “ecosystem” and seeing which Description Instructions need adjusting to make sure they aren’t showing up constantly or not at all. It’s helped a lot already!

I could go on for a long time about all the things I’ve added to the Text Parsing system, but the important thing is, there is a lot more text in the game now, it should be a lot more descriptive and fun to read, and it should be much more rewarding of your specific situation than before! I’m hoping this will generally make the game a lot more enjoyable just to play around with and explore situations!

Now, let’s talk about the changes I’ve made to the fundamental mechanics of the game…

Mechanical Changes

I’ve been seeing a fair amount of frustration from players with certain aspects of managing Willpower and Reserves, and the system I mentioned above for running large-scale tests on how encounters tend to go underlined a lot of that. I took a hard look at the systems for characters managing their resources and made several changes, though I tried to use a light touch with most.

I’ve increased the effect of “foraging” so that when you Rest, you’ll gain Reserves and body fat faster. I’ve also slightly increased the rate at which you regenerate Health and Willpower. However, all characters now have a slow but constant drain on their Reserves as a sort of “running cost.”

This “running cost” scales with the size of your character, which is a change I’ve added to several mechanics. Starting with this version, the larger your character is, the more Reserves you have to work with, the faster you regenerate or store Reserves, and the more effectively you forage. In other words, bigger characters just gain and use more Reserves faster than smaller characters. This means that a normal amount of fat for a small or large character will last them a similar amount of time, and that it takes a more similar amount of Resting to recover from most kinds of activity, including expending a lot of cum. Dragons should be less exhausted all the time just from keeping their balls full.

Speaking of exhaustion, I know it’s been a pretty rough problem getting locked into endless orgasms when some NPCs just won’t leave you alone, and your Willpower bottoms out. I’ve made a lot of adjustments to the AI that will hopefully help with this, but in addition to that, I’ve set it so that your stimulation is now tied directly to how tired you are– the lower your Reserves are, the slower you gain Arousal and Pleasure. This means you should have wider windows to recover as things progress, and if nothing else, when you start growing exhausted it should gradually become virtually impossible for you to orgasm.

And actually, speaking of generating cum, I’ve adjusted the mechanics there as well. You now spawn in with fuller balls so you don’t waste so much of your resources early on filling up, and your rate of production is partly affected by how aroused you are, so you’ll go slower when you’re chill and faster when you’re running hot. And another note on Foraging, it is now less effective when you are overburdened!

Lots of random bits and bobs. I’ve made some important changes to how penetration works! I found there was actually a significant bug in how moving during penetration is handled that basically just “skips the hard part.” I intended from the start for an especially large insertion to just refuse to go in until the orifice is worked open a little, and for knots to be difficult to just stuff in or pull out once they’re fully deployed, and when that didn’t work all that well at the time I thought it was because my concepts wouldn’t work how I wanted them to. Turns out I just missed a line or two of code! You should now find these “hard parts” to actually be “hard” at all, sometimes. Knots should be harder to pull out, and large insertions should take some time and grinding to get started.

Along with that, I’ve adjusted how you take damage from larger insertions: it used to be a linear thing based on the diameters of the hole and what’s going in it, so that, roughly speaking, you’d take 10% damage from taking 110% of what you can manage comfortably, or 100% damage if you take 200% of your diameter. But that’s not really how it works– if you’re slow and careful, you can minimize the pain and damage significantly by working yourself open slowly. I’ve switched it to an exponential system so that while you still take 100% damage at a 200% insertion, you only take maybe 2 or 5% damage if you take a 110% insertion. And if you take a 300% insertion, you’ll take a lot more than 200% damage… Hopefully this will make things feel a little more realistic, and reward taking care a little more!

Lastly, I have a few changes specifically for the folks interested in vore. I noted that NPCs tend to not engage in all that much vore on their own, and part of that is because they don’t tend to have a “good hole” for it, despite some of them clearly leading voracious lifestyles. So I’ve changed character generation so that when an NPC is generated capable of vore, each hole that can vore has a 50% chance of being “pre-stretched” by a certain amount! This lets each character possibly have one or more holes they “tend to vore with” and thus will be more willing to and more capable of voring whoever they meet with it. Additionally, I’ve added two more traits both for NPCs and for you to upgrade to if you like: Cozy and Delicious will inherently make other characters more inclined to be devoured by you or to devour you, respectively!

Now, I’ve touched a little bit on it, but let’s dive in on the changes to how NPCs will act!

AI Changes

I know folks have been frustrated with a lot of things about NPC behavior, and I’ve been frustrated with a lot of it myself. I kept putting off getting into any big changes because I knew I was “about to do the AI Overhaul!” But I have to keep pushing it off to tackle other things and to avoid going too long between updates, so I finally bit the bullet and took the time to try and fix some of the more egregious issues.

All NPCs now have a centralized sense of “how much they want to end this encounter” that draws from a lot of factors and influences both their chances to Retreat and how much they want to start, continue, or stop any sort of Engagement that might make it hard to leave. This should reduce a lot of the “waffling” we see where characters might start and then stop sex over and over, or otherwise alternate wildly in behavior. There are a lot of little inconsistencies like this in the AI since it’s been a series of patch jobs over updates, and that’s a big part of why I’m so desperate to replace it with a better system, but this will hopefully help with some of the biggest issues in the meantime.

I also dialed up their desire to leave based on how tired they are. NPCs should now be much quicker to leave when they start running low on Reserves or body fat, and they should generally make more effort to graze until they’re nice and topped up before seeking company. On top of that, I added a mechanic for literally tracking how long they’ve been interacting with others present to make a “soft timer:” they’re less inclined to leave when they just met someone, but the longer they’ve spent with the same person, the more they should feel like moving on. I tried to strike a decent balance where it won’t be cutting things short too much, but where NPCs will gradually grow more interested in leaving over time to vastly reduce the chances of any encounter “going forever.”

I’ve also made a fair number of changes to how NPCs develop relationships– it should now be more possible for characters to occasionally have strong feelings about someone on first sight, and you should see more buildup of relationships over time. If you have a strong, positive encounter with a character, they’ll probably like you. If you make them suffer a lot, they’ll fear you. I’ve tried to adjust a lot of these effects to be stronger so you see more variety in attitudes in relationships and generally more positive relationships than before– and I’ve added a fair amount of Descriptions that reflect these attitudes as well!

And lastly, for the vore enthusiasts, I did dial up some of the weights for vore content in general– NPCs should be more willing to engage in vore now, especially to be devoured, and to some extent the “desire to end this encounter” leads them to accept “being digested” or “digesting someone” as a way of resolving their problems of having low Health, Reserves, and so on. NPCs will also now remember what a given place inside another character “does,” so once they’ve been in your stomach or your womb they’ll know what to expect from it, while before that they only guess that your stomach probably digests. This is because down the line I hope to implement some customization of what each area does! So yeah, hopefully all of that will make things a little easier to enjoy!

Other Changes

That’s the broad strokes of the changes with this update, but there are still a lot of random little things of note, so let’s just run down the remaining list real quick!

-Updated “Game Help” information
-Fixed character summary error during game setup
-Fixed bug allowing complete vore of a character that’s still having sex
-Fixed issues with unpredictable pronoun errors in main description
-Fixed various description engine issues
-Fixed some measurements of character volume not tracking “bloated” characters
-Fixed bug with supporter cheats and “buggy vore”
-Fixed NPCs failing to recognize “vore stalemates” with themselves

Where are we now?

I ended up taking a longer diversion from working on the AI Overhaul than I’d meant to, but I also ended up getting some really valuable work in on stuff that will help with the Overhaul, so while the post-release plan is, once again, “Try to take over the world, by writing a really good AI for yiffing!” I do feel like we’re much closer to making it a reality.

My plan is still basically to try and build it in chunks, starting with the Input: building one slice of the greater AI system I have planned, specifically for how NPCs understand what is happening, what has happened, and what probably is about to happen. Eventually, all that should plug into systems for processing emotions, long-term goals, and even some capacity for making plans, but right now it would still help a ton as just a big mass of more useful data to plug into the existing AI and help it make more intelligent decisions.

This still means that I basically need to build out a lot of the biggest, most important and fundamental parts of how the AI system will work all in one go. The foundation is the biggest piece, and that’s why I keep struggling to split it into smaller and smaller parts. We’ve got a lot of that foundation built with this update, but still half-concept and all out of sight. If things go how I hope, then I’ll be able to put together the next update as the “AI actually understands the basics of what is even happening!” Update, which will hopefully be a pretty big and obvious step up for AI behavior!

We’re still deep in what might be arguably the single biggest challenge of making Project Wild One here, so it’s really hard to predict how long this will take. I’m trying to pare it down to the simplest changes I can make so I can get the work done without too big a gap between updates. We still had a longer gap than I’d like between this and the last, but that’s mainly because I spent a lot of time on “invisible work,” then had to turn to stuff you could actually see to make an update worth releasing. If things go well, then hopefully the work with the AI Overhaul will finally reach a point it can actually be visible on its own in the next update! Fingers crossed, knock on wood!

Wrapping Up

That’s all the big points covered, so let’s finish this up for now. A lot of my playtesters are having trouble contributing these days, and we could really use some fresh blood! If you wish you could play the game early and help make it better, you’re more than welcome to join us! Take a look at Being a Proofer to get an idea of what it would involve and how you can show you can play with a critical eye! I also have a chill and friendly Discord server you may enjoy, it tends to be an unpredictable mixture of philosophical discussion and dick jokes.

This update has been quite the process, with a lot of challenges and a lot of big victories. I appreciate your patience while I got through it all, and I hope when you get your hands on the new version, you’ll feel like it’s worth the wait! Thanks for your support!