Hanako Games

1.2+ - Create Your Own Minions

#1 by hanako - Jul 19 2015

New game mode! This is not finished yet, but it's playable and testable.

Custom Campaign Mode should be unlocked if you've either previously finished the game, or if you play through about the first month or so of regular gameplay (it's designed to unlock when you get past the point where the demo would end).

In custom mode, you will get a randomly-generated batch of characters. You can change their names and pictures. Some starter pictures should be automatically available, and you can drop other images into the specified directory to load up your own designs.

Stats are randomly rolled, so the challenge you face may vary wildly depending on how much the dice liked you! (Having nobody with a decent Observation stat sucks.) You can reroll, but you have to reroll the whole team at once. Good luck.

You can set the difficulty, the number of cases per week, and how many weeks you want to play.

Girls will have randomly-generated relationships, and various events will happen on weekends.

More features will be coming later.

Please do play and test and report/upload bugs as you find them, however Spiky is tied up with other things right now so it will probably be a while before the next beta update. DO report bugs! Just don't be surprised if we're a little slow about responding to them at the moment.

Re: New Beta - 1.2+ - Create Your Own Minions

#2 by hanako - Jul 19 2015

repasting standard instructions about beta patches:

Go to the Options menu. There's an Updates button on the left-hand side. From there you can check for new patches.

You'll have to specifically say if you want to look at beta patches, which are still being tested, otherwise it will only offer you the patches that are considered to be stable.

Don't download Alpha patches unless we specifically tell you to - that's usually stuff Spiky and I are working on and is likely to crash. We don't put it into beta until after I've played it.

You'll need the license key from your original download email in order to access patches.

If your current game version is lower than 1.0 because you bought way back early in development, you may need to get a whole new installer rather than trying to patch up. In which case, email me.

Re: New Beta - 1.2+ - Create Your Own Minions

#3 by Franka - Jul 19 2015

Expect a lot of these. This has potential.

Re: New Beta - 1.2+ - Create Your Own Minions

#4 by skydragonwings - Jul 20 2015

Some hairstyles seem to only be available in certain colors in the character designer. There was at least one that only worked in black and wouldn't let me change the color at all, and if I changed the color in another style and then went back to the one I was having problems with, it reverted to black. I think a few of the others may have had limited options too, but I didn't check all of them.

Re: New Beta - 1.2+ - Create Your Own Minions

#5 by hanako - Jul 20 2015

Yes, some hairstyles are intentionally only designed for certain colors, to try and keep the randomly generated students more natural-looking.

There's also more complex code when the game is actually randomly-generating people so that random students don't end up with black skin and blond hair, although when you're modifying it yourself you can create some unusual combinations if you really want to.

Re: New Beta - 1.2+ - Create Your Own Minions

#6 by Darksilverhawk - Jul 20 2015

I know this is an early build and there's more features coming, but are there any plans to add options to start with fewer than 5 minions? This is making me want to do a hardcore lone (wo)man challenge or something. Even just a three-minion challenge would be neat.

Re: New Beta - 1.2+ - Create Your Own Minions

#7 by Darksilverhawk - Jul 20 2015

Huh. Half-way through my current game, the game switched one of my custom minion's picture back to to a default one. The file's still there and none of the other minion pictures are affected.

Re: New Beta - 1.2+ - Create Your Own Minions

#8 by Spiky Caterpillar - Aug 16 2015

Did the switch happen when you loaded a game? What was the filename?

1.2.7 changelog

#9 by Spiky Caterpillar - Aug 16 2015

Crash fixes:
* No longer crash if you've somehow got a councillor as current_target - now it just won't draw the action buttons. This works around a bug which appears to have actually been caused by an ignored crash after choosing a weekend date.
* Crash loading althea_success flag at some points in her path fixed.
* Crash in the debug message warning that a screen crashed should be fixed.
* In custom campaign mode, a minion considering picking a fight with a minion who has already quit the council should no longer crash.
* Crashes loading saves made at the very end of the demo fixed.
* Crashes loading saves made during an update (how did you even save there, WHY did you even save there?) should be fixed.

Load/Save bugs:
* registration_key should no longer be stored in saves, silencing the occasional warning. (This will only affect new saves.)
* Allowed characters in custom student portraits now more permissive. This fixes a bug where some saves would lose the student portrait on load. (There are still some weird filenames that won't be allowed to load, but now I'm mostly relying on your OS to tell you that instead of the game.)
* Sanitizers for wins and losses tweaked.
* starting_minion_count should now default to 5 if undefined. (Only relevant if you've been playing the alpha builds like we keep telling you not to )
* scrubber for 'result' should now accept 'continue'.

Bugs fixed:
* FightingInTheRanks timeout should no longer leave the winner hovering forever in the targets; that should prevent her from covering up newly unlocked targets, which was probably causing the other weirdness.

Minor fixes:
* Debug messages about trimming text trimmed.
* 'a an 87' grammar bug fixed in the log string for successfully questioning the failure in CheatSheetBlues()
* Attending the fair no longer gives an 'Odds unknown' message.
* Stray pixels on the right edge of the letterbox overlay now opaque.
* multiple_councillors() now actually checks to see if there are multiple people rather than just councillors. (This may fix some pluralization problems in custom mode that nobody seems to have noticed.)
* A few more placeholder nulls to mask unsuspend-and-roll-back-onto-a-roll errors.
* In end-of-custom-campaign report cards, incomplete cases are now counted as unsolved.
* Can no longer roll back from the custom weekstart screen.
* Debug messages trimmed.
* Code for building lists of councillors now accepts all people, fixing some missing strings in custom mode logging.
* Give Presentation should no longer give you a time bonus when closing.
* Custom ending screen tweaked.
* Holding hands while giving presentations should interpolate names.
* Clicking through a custom-mode weekend event should now display all the text as it fades on to the next screen.
* String when checking baked goods for poison in a custom campaign weekend event cleaned up.
* Stress anims no longer restart their zoom on custom-mode weekends.
* Fighting In The Ranks successful solutions now reset both ranks to 40.
* 'Minions might enjoy attending it together' added to the school fair update on day of fair.
* School Fair now removes 10 stress instead of 5 in custom mode. And notes it on the update page.
* Althea no longer mentions that Mallory can see you're romancing Vonne if Mallory's been expelled.
* 'That I didn't have to be spend my life' de-be'd.

Re: New Beta - 1.2+ - Create Your Own Minions

#10 by hanako - Aug 16 2015

And the more obvious parts:

Custom campaigns now have a special case in the final week, in which two of your minions are called on to give a presentation talking about the student council. The results of this case depend on the relationship between the two minions you pick.

You can now disable up to two members of your five minion team when starting a custom campaign. Right now, I'm not letting you start with less than three people, three should be trouble enough! (Especially given the chance of losing one early on due to fighting in the ranks.)

At the end of a custom campaign, the victory screen now attempts to assign a score based on how hard you made things for yourself and how well you did. It is possible to make it to the end and still score a 0, but you have to be trying to do that badly...

The scoring algorithm may not be perfect yet so please do share scores and talk about how well/badly the game that produced them went.

Re: New Beta - 1.2+ - Create Your Own Minions

#11 by hanako - Aug 21 2015

Any comments on the new presentation case before we move forward with this?

Re: New Beta - 1.2+ - Create Your Own Minions

#12 by Franka - Aug 21 2015

Only that if the results depend on the relationship, it would be kind of nice to be able to call up the relationship overview. Not that I was able to fail it in my few attempts (other than by not attending).

Re: New Beta - 1.2+ - Create Your Own Minions

#13 by Darksilverhawk - Aug 21 2015

The fact that the presentation is listed as a social check when it isn't checking social at all is a bit confusing.

Edit: Social. Social is the stat I am thinking of.

Re: New Beta - 1.2+ - Create Your Own Minions

#14 by hanako - Aug 21 2015

IIRC there is a social check, it's just less important and will almost always succeed.

It might be better to drop the social check though and have it just be about the girls, I suppose.

Re: New Beta - 1.2+ - Create Your Own Minions

#15 by Kalmaroff - Sep 6 2015

For custom mode, is the specified directory (/Users/____/Library/RenPy/BlackCloset/custom/) for adding our own pictures intended to work for Mac users as well? Currently playing on a Mac, not quite having success finding the location for the images to go in though.

Re: New Beta - 1.2+ - Create Your Own Minions

#16 by Spiky Caterpillar - Sep 6 2015

Thanks, I'll look into it.

(The custom directory is *intended* to work, but it's possible there's a mistake in the code. Searching the computer for directories named 'custom' may help.)

Re: New Beta - 1.2+ - Create Your Own Minions

#17 by hanako - Sep 6 2015

When you try to load images from a file, does the screen you get show the starter characters (elsa, elodie, and blond girl) that are supposed to be in the custom directory?

If they do show up, then there should be a custom directory holding those files somewhere on your computer. If you don't see any files in the display at all, then something's wrong.

Re: New Beta - 1.2+ - Create Your Own Minions

#18 by Darksilverhawk - Sep 7 2015

On the topic of the custom folder, I would also like to bring it to your attention that it ended up in Users\_____\AppData\Roaming\RenPy\BlackCloset after an upgrade from the demo for this Windows 7 user (and I believe it did the same thing on my 8.1/10 machine but I'd have to double check). It's not a problem for me since I have AppData unhidden, but it might be a problem for the less computer savvy.

Re: New Beta - 1.2+ - Create Your Own Minions

#19 by hanako - Sep 7 2015

Yeah, it is unfortunately likely to end up in a slightly difficult location for computer-confused people to reach. For technical reasons we can't use the actual game folder, because this can cause permissions havoc on Windows due to all their protections around Program Files, so we have to go under the documents-and-settings hierarchy somewhere and "with the saved games" seemed like a reasonable approach.