Cool, I love the concept of the Dragon Court and the three personalities firing off (or at!) each other.
One small detail - if there is a penality applied to not holding court, so much so that people will be more inclined to duly uphold it each month, I could forsee it being a bit of a drag to constantly drag our fatass selves to court each and every time. I’d like to imagine that after a few successive court sessions that a motion could be made available to permanently ratify the decision to hold court (or, y’know, just make it an in-game option) meaning that each month the player will start in the royal courtroom as opposed to our bed chamber, ready to hold court.
If the servant could also provided the function of the vital statistics ledger, (or by hiring a scribe or a new fancy crystal ball for the courtroom etc) without us needing to waddle on back to our chambers, that would also be handy.
Basically, I’m imagining this to be peak city management efficiency for our dragons, where one doesn’t need to move.
Magic thrones that we can command the city from without needing to raise our scaly rears off from cushioned comfort? A lazy dragon can dream~
Are you considering adding any more weight related events outside of expanding and or refining the ones already in the game? (ie, Immobility, inability to exercise, endings etc)
@Ahrizinha Nope, the only way to change dragons will remain either choosing a successor when becoming a blob, or by losing a coup against one of them.
@violinpotato Yes, I am adding more minor weight gain events, and the blob ending as well as the blob cutscenes play out a little differently depending on the status of your servant if you hired her.
It won’t matter for this game, but I had a bit of an oversight with the lack of one of the codes. When it comes to importing your outcome into Heroes on a Budget, there is a code I didn’t think was necessary but actually is.
The code for if Serrin was in charge at the end of the game was never made. The code will be: 44444144 for those that don’t want to replay Draconic Expansion over again for it.
I forgot to make this code since her being in charge is the default scenario if you don’t put any of the codes in, but if you were to put in her weight level 7 code, it would create a scenario that is impossible to achieve (her being a blob as well as in charge).
I have since put this code into the game, and it will be present when I put out the next update.
Idk if anyone has asked this yet but I was wondering if you planned on adding any visual change to the townsfolk that give you free food if the Town’s weight gets very high.
so more as the city grows in wealth and weight, the npc sprites would update to fatter sizes up to blob sizes and the city thrives. Is that what you’re thinking?
I would think this would help show how the city grows from the player’s management
Since I’m out of practice, I actually struggled a bit now since I have forgotten the meta. So I have made a few changes that make the mid and early game a little bit easier. Mainly, Reila’s ability to buff happiness has been doubled like it’s supposed to be. Reason is that happiness is supposed to be worth x2 of control, since it goes on a scale of -100 - 100, where control goes from 0 - 100. It’s not the only happiness buff that’s been doubled either. Reila’s happiness perk when you play as her has also been doubled. Basically all things that impact both happiness and control at the same time, has doubled the effect on happiness.
This also means that the happiness debuff for Malin and the dragonling’s control abilities have gone up as well. Doubled for the dragonling, and by +5 for Malin (because she’s supposed to be more effeciant).
Markets now give +1 gold you personally every month for each level of market, as well as +1 to town wealth.
Tax rates are a thing now. Normal taxes are the same as you are used to (where you skim a bit off the top of the town wealth stockpile), High gives you up to +3 extra gold, and low takes -3 away from you. Tax rates currently are more of a reward for high control, as they don’t provide much in the way of penalties beyond not letting the town hold onto their wealth. As it stood, if Malin is out of the way or you are playing as her, control was a rather useless stat that really only changed how much you could shake the town down for.
Serrin produces +3 Town wealth now instead of +2
Control also doesn’t start to plummet starting from month 20 anymore. Control now starts going down faster the more attempts to take the town back that happen instead (-1 for each attempt). This way, control penalties don’t become a snowball effect, where now you need to please Malin to prevent a coup all the time once the mid game starts. However, it does make control potentially spiral out of control more quickly if you get attacked a lot.
Dragon Court Feasts now give a small opinion buff to both of the other dragons, so there’s an actual reason to choose this feast type now.
Also, I’m looking into ways to make getting control easier for the early game, since you usually are so busy trying to get the economy rolling, staffing guard posts is difficult.
working on the court system and policy making systems. Tax policy is one of the policies that can be set, described in the post above. Also added a Court Policy, where you can set it to: restrictive, open, or closed. Restricted is default (you hear 3 petitions per month if you hold court), closed means you only can hear 1 per month (also increases control by 2, and decreases happiness by 4), and open where you can hear 5 petitions per month (also does the opposite to happiness and control that “closed” does).
Petitions are events where you are presented with a problem by one of your subjects, and you get to make a choice as to how it should be resolved. These are random, and can have a mix of positive and negative effects based on luck, and your decisions. If you hold court you gain +2 control that month. Some events can be strictly negative, some can be strictly positive, but most will be a trade off.
so for balancing purposes, I’m going to put a poll. I don’t know if I just got really bad at the game or if this is a problem for everyone. This was the biggest problem for me when I played it.
How many times did you have coup attempts, and how often were you spending resources just to avoid them?
I never had to worry about coups
Coups were an issue occasionally
I have to spend a lot of time fighting coups off
----------Don’t pick this, this is just the poll devider------------
I never have any coups happen
I have 1-2 coups happen
I have 3-4 coups happen/I already lost before this point due to coups
I have 5+ coups happen/I already lost before this point due to coups
Reila in the early game and malin in the endgame since i had -70/-80 happiness in the early game and i was gaining 6/7 happiness in the mid-end game the harder to avoid was malin because i didn’t have enought food to give her
I really enjoyed this simulator!! The sprites are very cute, and the balancing act of city maintenance, while hard to get a grasp on at first (my first attempt was a disaster), is actually quite engaging. Not so hard as to be frustrating, but not so easy as to be boring or obvious. Getting happiness and control to 100 each took until about month 75 for me, and keeping Malin and Reila from revolting required regular feasts. They both blobbed out just after mid-game.
A few comments on gameplay: first, I found town weight to be wildly unpredictable relative to food supply. It would hold steady for several months, then suddenly plummet from 11 to the negative thirties if I stole food and let them go a little hungry for one month. There seems to be no reliable way to lower town weight in a non-dramatic fashion…
Secondly, for a game featuring weight gain, there seems to be little to no in-game benefit to fattening the main dragon. It increases opulence, but that can be accomplished by fattening the other dragons, or building statues or the mansion. Fattening yourself eventually causes the sprite slow-down in addition to lower defense. The slow-down is definitely cute and realistic, but once it occurred, I just ate everything in sight to get the blob ending, then reloaded an obese save, exercised down to fat, and finished the game at that weight.
Finally, I took notes on any bugs or typos I found while playing, and there weren’t very many, but in case they can be helpful, here’s the list. I was playing as Serrin.
At the obese weight level, Serrin did not slow down at all on my first playthrough. After she had become morbidly obese AND Reila blobbed out (which happened the same night) she slowed down, and when she slimmed back down to merely obese, the obese speed was present. On a subsequent playthrough, Reila blobbed out while Serrin was obese, and the obese speed penalty kicked in after the blob cutscene.
When holding a banquet for the townspeople, even after two dragons have blobbed out, the text mentions dragons in the plural as being present.
When Serrin (MC) is at blob size and at weight 100 – that is, when going to sleep will cause her to blob out – there is no image of her on the menu screen. Not sure if there is one for dialog.
Pathing in the mansion bedroom is bad. Clicking on the bed from the entrance or the magic ball causes the sprite to get stuck.
There were a few instances of a word missing in the text. They were usually easy to supply, and I only made note of one. In the 100-month ending, the ambassador says “I was by the king” instead of “I was told by the king.”
When using Reila’s power, she says she will “form a comity.” I think that’s not the right use of the word comity, and you may mean committee? Otherwise, “form comity” (without the ‘a’) might be right.
Thanks again for the engaging game! Good luck on Heroes on a Budget.
New update should be coming soon, hopefully before the gamejam. Update will finally implement the court system (basically random events), add policy making decisions (taxes, how many petitions you hear, health/weight management, and religious policies), adds more fetish flavor, some minor rebalancing, a ledger item to look at your stats anywhere and if there’s time, maybe a start on the magic system.
