Usk Productions Blog

Game jam progress is coming along, but very slowly.

So far, there's a basic gameplay loop where you can wander around the cruise ship, participate in a few activities, and talk to passengers.

Everything you do costs time and energy. You have a limited amount of energy per day, and you have to be in bed by 9 PM. You can eat to replenish energy (right now there's only energy drinks, but eventually you'll be able to eat at the dining room or buffet), and I'm planning to have room quality upgrades that let you get a better night's sleep so that you can stay up later.

The main thing I've been focusing on so far are the passengers themselves. I've spent a ton of time building art assets that can be mixed and matched and color-adjusted to create a pretty big variety of designs. In the starting set of bodies there are 3 different thin shapes and a plus-size option. There's also an unlockable series of increasingly-large bodies for people interested in fatter characters. There won't be an actual focus on weight gain, but there will be ways to upgrade the cruise line so that heavier passengers are attracted to the ship. Passengers come in 4 different skin colors.

As for style, each body type gets 3 different hair styles, and 3 options each for outfit tops and bottoms. There are only 2 top and bottom options available right away; you will have to unlock a more relaxed dress-code to get the 3rd option. Eventually you can also unlock nude passengers. Hair comes in 4 different colors, and outfit pieces come in 7 different colors.

Sex scene art also matches the passenger's hair style, hair color, and skin tone, but the same body shape is reused for all of the thin passenger types; they're close enough that it looks okay. Once I get to doing sex-scene art for the heavier passengers, I'll probably lump the 4 body types into 2 sets that share art.

Passengers are more than just art, though. They move around the ship from location to location, and each one has a couple "favorite rooms" that they spend a lot of time in.

They also remember their 5 most impactful interactions with you, positive or negative. A memory's level of impact is modified by the passenger's opinions; e.g. talking to a passenger is normally a 20-point memory, but it's worth 40 points if the passenger is chatty. Passengers also remember how long it's been since you've interacted with them, and will get annoyed if you bother them too much unless they're highly attracted to you.

Memories fade over time to make room for new memories. When a memory fades, or when a new memory isn't impactful enough to make the top 5, it goes into an "older memories" bucket at 1/4th of its original impact.

Behind the scenes, positive and negative memories are tracked in separate tallies, and there's also a distinction between memories where the passenger interacted with you versus memories where the passenger only saw you doing something. So far these distinctions aren't used, but in the future it will make it possible to tell the difference between someone you have a mixed relationship with versus someone you have no relationship with, even if both of them have 0 net memory impact.

• A crowd of passengers showing all the basic body types plus the first unlockable larger body.
• A male-POV drawing of missionary-position sex with narration underneath.
• The current incarnation of the passenger interaction dialog, including a memories panel showing previous interactions.

I've been putting off working on the "VIP personas" system. The idea is that passengers will be fairly generic when you first meet them, but once you've reached a certain level of relationship with one, she'll be assigned a unique persona with its own storyline and custom art, and her stats will be saved between cruises. I'm still debating how deep I want to go with this. I guess I should buckle down and try to write a few personas to see how they go.