Project Wild One – Feature Plans

All the basics for at least making the game functional. A lot of work in their own right, but a lot of it has been as placeholders for what comes after.

Almost any other game will have NPCs with predefined goals like “defeat player” or “sex player,” but gameplay is much more open-ended in PWO, and they have a lot of options for how much to engage with you. Even just the simple, cobbled together placeholder system was a pretty big challenge in its own right.

A system that manages each Orifice and whatever’s behind it, handling damage from stretching as well as various ways for its capacity to change both in the short and long term. Made to handle the insertion of pieces of anatomy or whole bodies with equal ease.

A flexible system for everything that is “happening” and needs tracking, from being mid-orgasm to mid-vore to mid-nap, handling all the over-time effects these might have and all the interactions between different Engagements happening at the same time.

A system for procedurally generating characters across a whole range of sizes, giving them each appropriately sized anatomy, and giving each type a spread of traits with different weights to form trends across species where each can still be a unique individual.

Expanding everything to let NPCs interact with each other, remember each other, and have their own webs of relationships both including and independent of you.

Rather than each action having a static description in the Main Text Output, or choosing from a few simple options, I developed a system to allow nigh-on infinite expansion of description options, with an internal system for detecting if the situation matches each possible Description, prioritizing some over others, and allowing each to have its own custom “soft cooldown” before it’s used again.

This visually represents upcoming turns to help you get a feel for both the passing of time and how long your actions take.

How could I make a furry game without them? I did need to put some extra work in to make sure they’d work right, though.

This expands the game so NPCs can wander on their own, interacting with each other out of sight, building relationships or getting in the middle of something for you to stumble in on.

This adds a little bit of resource management to make just having sex with the same person for days straight a little less practical. You can run out of stamina, and replenish it from your body fat, which changes how heavy you are, which in turn can make it harder to move or leave you weak if you have too much or too little.

Be it body fat, fluids, people, or whatever else can end up inside you, holding more than your natural body weight slows you down and adds a Willpower cost to various actions.

As your character gets more complicated, having a way to keep your progress becomes important. The game is still in too much flux to save everything, but your character can carry on to a new area when you come back to the game!

This adds some balance to adding traits to your character, making it less about infinitely building up and more about choosing how to specialize. It also opens the door to adding many more traits without the game getting too broken.

This is a sort of pseudo-programming language I developed inside the game to allow for complex logic in the various spreadsheets I use for adding content to the game. It allows for much richer and more finely tuned Descriptions, but is also crucial to building systems for more complex NPC behavior.

The beginning of PWO’s flagship feature. I talk about it in full detail here, but the short version is, every character builds a sense of what’s going on around them from what they’ve seen. They build up more abstract ideas of the situation and what others are like over time, and they can reinterpret past events as they gain new insight. This is basically a robust, flexible system for building “minds” by hand inside the game. The absolute basics are centered around just understanding what’s going on, but there are many ways to expand from there.

The ITM learns a lot from what you do, but this extra addition helps it learn from what you don’t do. It assesses every action by its context in the moment to extract more info from it by implication.

The option to alter your actions adds a lot of fine control, which helps a lot with making intentions clearer and not going too far, or too gently, for your intentions.

Another limiter meant to make encounters feel more real and meaningful. Pain makes foolish or dangerous decisions feel more meaningful, and encourages working to keep everyone comfortable… or allows you to better incapacitate foes.

This helps both with the general visual appeal of the game and with quickly assessing what’s happening, especially in complicated scenes where many characters are acting at once.

The Trailblazer Trait lets you “bring along” the NPCs you’re closest to, so you can build and maintain a relationship over the longer term.

This system offers both long-term goals to strive for and a series of game augmentations to let you gradually customize your own experience, or enjoy different styles of gameplay depending on your mood.

If I expand the ITM to track the various needs a character can have and develop an understanding of what actions work toward or against its needs, I can finally discard the old placeholder system for controlling NPCs and let the ITM completely handle their behavior. This should make characters much more rational and consistent in how they act, with much better handling for complicated situations.

Once I’m sure NPCs are making decisions in a reliable manner, I’ll be ready to add some chaos. Emotions can be unpredictable and complicated, and they’ll make NPCs more erratic, but also make them feel more “alive.”

Moving the creation of NPCs over to a spreadsheet-based system will allow much more complex systems both for differentiating types from each other and for making each individual more unique. I’d like to build a simple “history” of various factors that come together to influence their personality and how they interact with the world.

Storyline, objectives, and more progression/unlocks. These have been waiting for the other important supporting pieces to be ready.

Go to different areas, encounter different creatures and familiar ones in different proportions. Different descriptions, different location features?

One of the central themes of PWO is struggling with your urges and trying to harness them rather than let them control you. One challenge of the game will be how you handle your urges, how much you indulge them, what sort of “relationship” you form with your new body.

While your instincts will sometimes challenge your control, they will also aid you in many ways. Some actions can be more effective than usual when you agree with your instincts, giving you an edge over others.

Part of the balancing act with your instincts will be the choice to simply let yourself “run wild,” letting your instincts choose how to act for a length of time. If you time it right, you can probably enjoy all the benefits with no downsides, but you risk doing something in the heat of the moment that you didn’t want. Doing this might help you sate your urges, but it might also make it harder to maintain control in the long term.

Keeping a creature satisfied is much more complicated than just filling a single meter, and managing your own satisfaction will be key– and will also give you insight into how others in this world think and work. The ITM system will be integral not only to NPC control, but to the feel of your own gameplay, through managing your instincts.

The ability to save and quit at any time without losing anything is inherently necessary for any game focused on adult content. I fully intend to make sure you’ll be able to quit and still come back to the same characters in the same landscape, though it’s possible I’ll need to restrict saves to outside encounters.

There’s so much going on under the hood with PWO, it’s hard to display any of it to the player without it feeling overwhelming. I’ve been developing my idea of how to replace the current “detail display” with something much more graphically welcoming and information-rich in a way that hopefully feels intuitive.

I’d like to open up a lot more customization down the road for letting you sculpt your character to your tastes and encouraging different playstyles to experiment with. This could include making your orifices and your cum “do” different things, getting special powers that blur with the supernatural, and generally leaning into various special interests that might not be for everyone.

One of the central themes of PWO is how you choose to act when the world feels crazy and dangerous, and your own urges are pushing you to add to that. The choice to be tender and share simple companionship is perhaps at its most meaningful in times like this, and I want to make sure you have options to express that, and that NPCs will have the capacity to reciprocate.

The controls for how to set up your game are still pretty simplistic. I’d like to build a more finely detailed system for choosing what sorts of creatures you wish to encounter, even if a lot of the options have to be unlocked through progression.

Giving each location some unique description, and giving many of them mechanical features of some kind, should do a lot to make the world feel more “real” and give more reason to move around. It should also add interesting context to interacting with others in each area, or even alter the dynamic with some magical or exceptional features.

Adding the ability to see someone before they’re within arm’s reach should change the texture of the game in many ways. Right now things feel a little “cramped,” but having a basic system for being in the same area but having distance between you should make things feel more natural, and give more flexibility for how to interact with others.

Sometimes, you can’t pursue what you want right now, but you can try and alter the current situation to make it so you can. Enabling the formation and execution of plans would be very complicated, but go a long way in improving the depth and realism of NPCs.

A much more complicated extension of Indirect Learning. Reading from context what the emotional states of those present are like and how the social situation “feels” moment to moment would inform NPCs to make much more nuanced and well-considered decisions. Or at least to be aware they’re about to do something brash.

Having some way to track others by scent, and to be tracked by scent, allows more control over your encounters in a way that thematically makes sense. Should include washing to reduce scent, and various actions increasing scent, maybe even changing or adding to your scent?

This engine is flexible enough I could change the setting completely with relatively little work. I’m not sure how far I’d go with this, but I think settings like “packed train” or “dance floor” could be pretty straightforward. Modes that significantly change the basic flow and feel of gameplay are worth experimenting with.

As with the others, most of these would be enabled or disabled at game creation.

• Lactation
• Nipple Penetration
• Ear Penetration
• Tentacles
• Special Cum Effects
• Impregnation
• Tail Sex
• Transformation
• Mind Influence/Brainwashing
• Full Tour

Probably nothing as overt as throwing lightning, but some capacity to dabble into magically affecting others or augmenting yourself could allow a lot more flexibility in exploring players’ interests and creating fun situations. This would probably be a specialization that would take some work to get into.

Some system for letting NPCs “come along” or letting you follow them when they change locations should help connections feel much more meaningful.

Letting characters develop a sense of whom they can relax around would open up options for spending time together long-term. If you feel safe enough, you could sleep or forage together with those you trust, but still be interrupted if someone shows up that you’re not sure about.

A “home” of sorts for your character and your companions would amplify that sense of togetherness, and allow for easy access to your favorite characters you’ve met.

I’d like the focus of the game to be largely on making the system for interacting with NPCs in general so rich that you can develop your own stories and relationships naturally, but there is certainly some value in having unique, named characters you can meet in the world. Finding the right balance in implementation to make them feel worthwhile without overshadowing other NPCs too much will be challenging.

The “big panel of identical buttons” approach doesn’t feel like a great fit for the more fast-paced nature of PWO, and I’d really like to develop a display for your choices that feels less chaotic and more structured. I’d also like to add a few more convenience buttons similar to Repeat and Instinct.

The information presented all over the game is still very text-heavy, and that can be exhausting and crowd the screen. I like the idea of condensing a lot of it to icons for common things, especially on character plates.

One of the big upsides of my push to build more of the game based on spreadsheets is that it makes it theoretically possible to set it up so anyone playing could just write up their own content for each of these systems and see it unfold in the game. Down the road, that could include more Descriptions for the action, different presets/species for NPCs, and maybe even adding to how all characters “think.”

There are many fun, sexy things it’d be nice to have available that aren’t coded right now. Multiple insertions in one hole, one form of sex pushing another deeper, and all sorts of hijinks with vore. Making them work reliably in all the weird corner cases is the first big challenge, and making them intuitive to navigate for the player is the next after that.

The ability to slip past more dangerous creatures, or to get the jump on someone, is an important tactical element– and the woods will feel that much more dangerous knowing if you don’t keep your guard up, some NPC just might sneak up on you. This would be very tricky to balance well, but I think it could make a significant difference to the feel of the gameplay.

Making something like cunnilingus or a handjob something that you can “start” and just do continuously while taking other actions would make a lot of people happy, but I’d want to be careful with balancing it so you don’t feel obligated to tie yourself into a sexual pretzel every encounter for the best sex.

When violence is the only answer, the current options are pretty lacking. I’d like to expand the options for combat, maybe through a series of upgrades that open up new actions and qualities.

I do have some ideas for how to play with music for the game, and I think it could be nice and add to the immersion to have some sort of “sound effects” for various actions. It would be a tricky balance making it informative and exciting but not obnoxious or crowded when many characters are in the same space.

Adding actual maps you can navigate visually would give you a lot more control and up the immersion, but also add a lot of complexity both for players and NPCs to deal with, and that may not be worth it.

I’ve kept this possibility open since early on, but it’s still tough to say if it’s actually a good idea. This can mean either leaving “the Wild One” behind to control or “become” another character, or even just taking control of multiple characters, alternating in making choices between the two of them. It’s doable, but it could be messy and unfun depending on the implementation.

Along with your physical stats, I think a stat for how good you are at perceiving others and reading into them could be useful. As a player, a high Wisdom might give you a lot more clues as to what others are thinking or feeling, and for NPCs, high wisdom might let them make more informed decisions as well.

There are a few possible systems I could build for letting characters get “larger” or “smaller” depending on things like weight.

As with the others, most of these would be enabled or disabled at game creation.

• Impregnation
• Tail Sex
• All-the-way-through

Simple in theory, but entering “Engagements” with yourself could make for a lot of headaches all over the code, and I’m not sure it would add enough to the gameplay to be worth it. Would be much easier if it was non-specific with anatomy, but that might be pretty disappointing.