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The Purpose of the Business Cycle
🕑 Added 2021-11-15 10:26:55 +0000 UTCThe focus for the v0.47 release is a rework of the way serums are priced and sold. There's nothing in the new system that adds any new porn content, so it might not be clear why it's worth the time and effort to refine compared to adding new content. I thought I'd take a few minutes and explain why it's worth the work and how it's existence enhances the overall experience. The reasoning breaks down into two major considerations: Pacing and Control.
Let's start with pacing. Pacing is the rate at which new content is given to the player, and the order in which that content is given. When it's done right good pacing fades into the background and feels natural. In an ideal world the player gets new powers, options, etc. right as they are getting comfortable and bored with what they already have. It is also important to avoid flooding the player with new content that they don't have time to properly understand. In Lab Rats 2 the content I'm metering out comes in the form of new sexy encounters, new partners, and new reactions to old situations
Anticipation is a major facet of good pacing. If content is presented in a logical and consistent way the player is able to predict and look forward to what is coming next. This is why games like Call of Duty let you see perks you haven't unlocked yet, and why action RPGS's like Diablo spawn loot that is too high level for you sometimes. In a porn game anticipation is even more important - when done properly it preps the player ready for both a narrative and literal climax. The key to this is that content needs to be predictable for the player - content delivered at completely random times in completely random contexts looses much of it's appeal.
Pacing is the prime reason there's a business side to LR2 at all. It introduces a non-sex task the player needs to take care of between corrupting girls. The new business system tries to build on anticipation by encouraging you to design new (and corrupting) serums to fill contracts. This naturally encourages the player to think of other uses for extra doses they will end up with. The new system will also give me more reliable control for what stage of the game certain serum traits are introduced, which means I can control the pacing more precisely. That means I can be sure that when you have a high Sluttiness boosting serum you've already seen most (but ideally not all) of the low Sluttiness encounters. The serum then acts as a way to skip past that content, but it doesn't feel like you're missing out on anything.
The second major consideration is control. Control refers to player agency and presenting them with different options to move through the content in the game. Slay the Spire is a good example of a game that provides the player control (in the form of picking a path up the spire and designing a deck) while still presenting them with the same fundamental content. In LR2 money acts as one of the major ways a player picks what bits of content they want to interact with. You need money for dates, to hire choice employees, and to fund the creation of new serum doses. By making money a limited resource the player has to think about which bits of the game they want to invest in (notice how this plays into building anticipation as well!)
The new business system aims to make cash more uniformly limiting at all points of the game (instead of cripplingly limiting at the start, and a non-issue at the end) by adding flat operating costs to higher tier labs. Higher tier labs are more profitable if you are producing the correct types of serum to meet your contracts, have enough staff to fill out your roster, etc. This encourages the player to move through the economic stages of the game at a steady pace, without railroading them into a single path of progression. Because Clarity is an important resource for producing new serum designs corruption is also innately tied to the economy of the game - those same serum designs let you corrupt girls more easily!
That's the theory at least, I still have to put it into practice! I'll be back in a few day with an update about how work on the new system is going!
Comments
The Lo/Sl/Ob Idea sounds great. Love it.
Vren
They now have different pre-req traits. Breast Enhancement requires the Weight Gain Promoter trait, Breast Reduction requires the Weight Loss Promoter trait first.
DREWSKY
dumb question for the day did the breast reduction serum get removed or am i just not seeing it because i thought both breast serums were next to each other but im only seeing the enlarge serum ??? please let me know if im blind LOL
Adam Król
bug report lily hang ower the serum dont work
There is a bug with the event which stops you from actually buying the phone. I explain the fix in a response to the "where to buy phone for lily?" comment for the 0.46.1 release but some of the fix is a little involved unfortunately and can cause additional issues if not handled right. Like the Iris girl in the quest not having a home and a couple other things.
markjr
ive been there but it doesn't have a command prompt to purchase the phone.
Nona
I haven't seen it, but looking at the code you're supposed to go to the electronics store.
markjr
i have a question for people. so i got the random even quest to but lily a phone but where do i go to buy it or how do i progress that event thread
Vren, just wanted to say I appreciate all the thought and hard work you put into the game. Happy holidays and all that.
markjr
i would love to see a sort feature so that once your later in the game and have all sorts of traits unlocked you can sort them alphabetically or by type (i.e. production type, suggestions type e.t.c.)
Hello Vren! I would like to have a shout out with you :) What do you think about it? :)
I actually kind of like the idea of something to push us to use/make something with the other serum traits and I think this is okay for the more not directly related to sex ones, however I was hoping there would be something more directly related to messing with the girls that would encourage this as well. My thought was that the serums would be required in some way to get past certain taboos, or to be able to raise slutiness permanently successfully (similar to Lab Rats 1). Right now you can entirely skip using serums at all and still get a girl to max (or at least high, like 60 or so) slutiness relatively easily (how I've been tending to play myself since the early traits are of too little benefit compared to going for max money to support researching the better traits and growing the business). It just seems odd to me that the serums are so easy to leave out entirely from the sexy shenanigans right now and all girls are too easy to convince to become sex slaves with nothing but having sex a bunch (breaks the immersion a bit more than I was happy with). Another aspect of this is maybe make the personalities/opinions have a stronger affect on how hard it is to make a girl slutty/in love/obedient? Have some more variability there so the same strategy won't work across the board for every girl. It feels kind of boring to me when I can pull the same routine of how to grow the slutiness with only minor changes to maybe avoid bad opinions (but not a whole lot since it only affects arousal a little for the majority of cases), but I like puzzles and problem solving so maybe I'm looking for the wrong things from this kind of game :).
Victor
Reading the statement make me feel uneasy and for the first time reconsidering if i really would like to support such changes with money. I have still mixed feelings about clarity, it is neither logical nor makes it sense in a other way. I was also not sure if changing Haircolors is something to put in a serum and not to a normal Barber. Or changing stats by fucking and say to them become more intelligent ... I do understand why it is a good idea to have a pacing and i do agree that games with a good progression are more interessting than games with a worse progression. But i also think progression has not so much to do with timegating and grinding. A game should not be build to force you to do invest a lot of time in things that you are not interestet in. In my opinion Lab Rats should be a Porn Game with a bit of a managing system, not a grindy managment system with a bit of a porn part. We startet as someone who got out a university and startet his own company to get some girls and now we will be providing criminell organisations with mindaltering drugs and the girls become more and more something you don't won't to touch because it gets a grind awfully fast. I am simply not sure if you are implementing systems because you think they will be fun or because you think they are needed to get us to play longer without more content (And content in a porn game for me is a coherent overall story, and lots of story to characters that i would like to fuck.) maybe i am rambling to much, i expected to much from the last update, which i hoped would give me new interesting storyprogression but it was bugfilled, it was flooded with things i didn't care before (instagram ...) there was in my opinion nothing that has added something to the characters that make them more likeable or the game more smoothly. I will play the new version but if it is not more fun but more grindy, there is a high chance that i reevaluate if i want to support this course for the game with my money.
Steve Sombdy
Ive played a lot of porn games, and this is the one I've put the most time into by far. The game loop fun and sexy. I think you're right about setting money as the limiting factor. As it is now its exponential, when it should be linear. I think you need more explicit gates between the business tiers in addition to escalating costs. Research, policies, and especially staff size should be tied to tiers. Give the player a clear set of goals to reach the next tier, and limited resources (policy, staff, traits) with which to do it. Such as fill X contracts for specific quantities of specific random serum designs, research X percent of that tiers traits, and sell X total serums. Similarly, girl traits could be explicitly tiered too (0 - nothing, 1 -groping, 2 - oral, 3 - sex, 4 - anal), and serums would only be able to push the trait into the next higher tier temporarily, or their own tier permanently. So a tier one serum should be able to get a girl 'worked up' into tier 2 interactions with any overage above tier one disappearing with time. It could also allow you to get a girl to tier one, with some chunk of that sluttiness sticking around afterwards (depending on your new 'day-after' interactions). Other factors, such as happiness, incest, etc, could decrease their effective sex tier in all categories. I know it roughly works like this on the backend already, but making it explicit would simplify it conceptually for both you and players. I also think an eventual reworking of love vs obedience vs sluttiness is in order. I think they should unlock mostly the same sex acts, but with different twists. Higher love unlocks dates and pregnancy. Higher sluttiness would unlock public sex acts and open relationships. Higher obedience would allow controlling commands and sex with others/prostitution. Much of this is in place already, but a clear delineation would greatly benefit the game. My complaints are fairly minimal. I think trance aren't powerful enough with regards to increasing sluttiness/obedience/love - they should allow you to permanently push a girl fully into the next tier (up to the serum level). Meanwhile I would scrap adding likes/dislikes, everyone should have an opinion on everything, and there should be fewer of them. Many can be combined. A dislike of baggy clothes is a like of tight clothes, etc. I think you've been making a great game so far. I want to see what you create and not something steered by committee, and that includes my own suggestions. I hope you take them and everyone else's comments with a grain of salt, and make the game you want to see exist.
Killer300
So, my over all thoughts is that I think this update needs to be broken into pieces, so that people can react to say, Contracts, before barreling into the whole system at once. As it is, the system sounds incredibly complicated, and all those moving parts are just likely to cause problems, while also stretching out development time. More broadly, I think if you want to fix pacing, the biggest problem is Tier 0 takes way too long without a mod to speed you through it. This matters because it just makes the early game a slog, and potentially prevents new players from experiencing corruption stuff.
Killer300
I really think Vren needs to put this update out in pieces, so as to get a reaction from the broader community before barreling forwards. I'm specifically thinking of contracts, which because they create lump sum payments, could actually fix the game's early progression, which is far, FAR too slow. More broadly, having burned out in my most recent play through, I think the game's progression suffers from this: For a game about corruption, it doesn't feel like you can really get the corruption train rolling until like, Tier 2. Tier 0 your drugs are too weak to do anything, and in Tier 1, your Sluttiness Drug's drawback actively works against the corruption the player wants to accomplish. You can get clarity in Tier 1 more easily, but the cost of said clarity, depending on how you gain it, actively works against what the player wants to accomplish in terms of corruption. I think the reasons for this are that the player's supply of clarity is... ridiculously tight until Tier 1, and then in Tier 1, you have to spend your clarity constantly to get through all the research. That, and unlike the mod, we don't have something like nanobots which can alter a bunch of personality traits at once. The last I highlight because, having played the mod, I was reminded of how insanely fast having an alternative to spending clarity for say, changing a girl's fetishes can be. I'm not saying Vren should implement the Nanobots, but... I think we need more serums that corrupt girls in ways besides sluttiness, Obedience* and such. I say this because I think leads to the game being really tedious in places is that the current system means you are essentially grinding clarity, and otherwise get burned out on the game's sex system, which is never a good sign. *Obedience in the current game, by the way, is infuriating to get through serums. It doesn't break the game because of how easily a player can get it through sex acts, however, I suspect it does make the game far, far more tedious because there isn't a way(until Tier 3, and there it comes with a massive price), to rapidly increase obedience permanently.
I was convinced of the idea of these changes being potentially good for the game thanks to Nona and Keith Lewis, though I will still suggest exercising caution with the implementation. The amount of push back you're receiving will make or break this game.
In my eyes a good sex game is "a good game that just so happens to have sex in it", considering this game is "back to business" the business side of things needs to be robust and interesting. My concerns stem from the potential to overload the player base with complicated ideas and strange UI which is something that has turned me off of other games working in the same space.
Nona
This all sounds good. It will be nice to have the business side be a bit more interesting and it really does sound like this can help with pacing, which currently feels a bit wonky. A smoother progression curve will make for a much nicer experience even if we have to take a little time getting used to how the new system works.
I think the pacing could be better controlled via changes to the research system. I see the business system as a filter to the porn, not pacing control. I really think you are on the wrong track here. I agree with many of these other posts. This sound like a lot of non-sex content for a sex game. I would prefer to see all the existing story lines flushed out and finished. The business side doesn't need to be more complicated, and frustrating.
Togashi Jack
My only hope that if Money is being made to be more of a limiter on pace of which players can access content that some of the other existing limiters be toned down. For instance, getting your head researcher and 3 other employees to 50 core sluttyness and 130 obedience is a GRIND, and kind of has been since Sluttyness increase was reworked
NakedSunFlower
Well, thank you all the same for sharing this theory, it sounds interesting, I'm sure it will look great in practice!
I usually only know from big publishers to ignore criticism so well. Sorry but I'm out.
Marintonka
I'm not sure the suggested changes will really change the overall pacing of the game on the sex aspects. For example the characters in MCs household rarely require any potions, simply talk with them for a couple of weeks and you can unlock sexual content "naturally", zero potions required.
DerpNibbles
I think I might encourage you to re read the frustrations posted on the previous thread. What you've posted here doesn't address those, it amplifies many of them.
Joe B
I am optimistic about these changes. I am excited about this revamp of the importance of the business aspect of the game, and hope it leads to more people being interested in the business side of the game. In addition, hopefully this leads to new content being available in the Office like using the Masturbation action, which is currently only accessible in the Player's Bedroom. In the beginning of the game when your Employee(s) are not very happy, loyal, corrupt or slutty, Masturbating in the Office might either have to be in secret or have the chance of getting into humiliating ridicule. Later on you might be able to use Office Masturbation to entice Employee(s) to be more slutty. And in the end game, straight up use it as a Clarity producing action that your Employee(s) won't think of as unusual, or even convince them to do it too.
Mark S
And to be clear- I do like the idea of a rework of the business system, and I'm sure others do as well. It's just the proposed reworked system that myself and others were uninterested in.
Mark S
That's all well and good, and I don't think anyone would disagree with this, but the new system you proposed sounded boring and frustrating. Instead of engaging with any of that critique on the last post, you've written us a treatise on Intro to Game Design and are expecting that to woo us, I guess? Please just re-read the criticisms you got on the last post and consider them, you have a large portion of your patrons who aren't interested in the capitalism simulator you're pitching. Deciding that you know better and doing it anyway seems like a bad move.
SomebodyElse
I always appreciate the time you take to keep us updated on your processes and why/what you're doing. I even agree on the pacing/control parts, as I've certainly found the early game can be frustrating for money. I think the issue is we're all horny bastards who want more content XD You've still got my support in this, I just worry that others might start to lose interest :/
