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Since the beginning, I know that the game mechanics is going to be the prominent component of the game. And I also have a programming background with Python. I was so focused with Summer Sweepers, I ended up making the first prototype.

The player only gets to control the main character "Nestor". Like Summer Sweepers, you can move the character, use item, and assign command to the characters in the same tile. And other party members will move on their own with its  rule-based AI. In my game, you can attack an enemy with separate command. And there is no longer a minesweeper mechanics. The entire map will be visible since the beginning of the stage.  

I also introduced a very interesting NSFW mechanics called "camping". The idea is that if you can't finish the mission by the end of the game day, you will camp out instead of returning to the base. If any female characters ends up next to Kota (another male party member), this will trigger NSFW events. Of course, if you want to go for "pure" mode, you must prevent this from happening. There is also a potential of MFF 3some as well. I'll write separate post for the camping mechanics. But the following sketch was the initial concept design.

Unfortunately, it took me too long, and the AI was somewhat buggy. I believe I got it to work in term of mechanics. But incorporating the game with art assets was a complete nightmare. Writing the game engine from scratch was not the best idea. So I took a hiatus on the mechanics of the game and starts on the art. 

I came back to work on the game mechanics again in the middle of 2022. This time, I'm more skilled at OOP and Software design pattern. So I rewrite the entire game mechanics including the save file system, perk mechanics, etc. I ended up ditching the grid-based and went for the text-based instead because it was going to a demo anyway. This is what I got.

To be honest,  it worked quite well. The AI acts as I intended based on Lewdness status. As you can see, each character will decide on their own what to do in each turn. If Kota (originally called Taki) performs the same action as another person, you can ignore, spy, or intervene based energy points that you have.

Around the beginning of 2023, I stumbled upon Netoria, a grid-based strategy game with exceptional graphics. I asked the developer for some tips and they pointed me to "SRPG". Although they warned me that it's not the best, I wanted to give it a try. Here is what it looks like.

The default assets aren't that bad. But I ended up drawing  many of new ones. I noticed right away that what I was missing was the "event-based" mechanism for the game. In coding term, this is known as callbacks. For example, if all monsters in the map are eliminated, open a gate. This seems like a simple thing to imagine, but it can be somewhat challenging, especial when you have variations of events. 

SRPG does this quite well. I can assign various type of events to customized callbacks. This allows the game to be more dynamics and potentially more nonlinear. 

Another nice thing is the animation editor, which I intentionally omit when using pygame. Animation is pain in the neck if you write an engine from the scratch like I did. (Yes I was a fool back then). But all you have to do for SRPG is to provide the game your "graphics" assets, which must have the correct size. If the graphics is going to be animated, each frame can be put together in a single PNG file. You just have to put them in a grid. Here is an example.

The above picture is an example of "motion" graphics for a battle scene. If your character travels in a map, it uses "charchip" which looks more like this.

SRPG automatically generates animation in run-time for you. This is quite convenient.  One more thing is the map. One can define passable regions and even more complex terrain.

I haven't figure out how to incorporate the "camping" mechanics, but I believe the atomic functionalities of SRPG will be sufficient as building blocks. 

I think SRPG will definitely be the main engine for the demo. However, if this game  gain tractions, I might change it to unity.