It’s been about two weeks since my last post. Haven’t made a lot of progress, and I’ve started falling back/lapsing on my annual goals. Hopefully this is a temporary setback, which will be rectified later in the year.

The heat man, the heat. I live in a part of the United States where the heat gets kind of unbearably hot for me starting around sometime in late April/early May, and which continues until about November nowadays.

So my parents visited, and we had some fun with some board games. Allegedly, more family should be visiting at the end of May. So during these forays and visits by my folks, the experimentation with different board games has brought a bit of interest on my part to gamify/develop more of the Nightmare Mod so that it contains more choice/variation which can hopefully bring some nuance/diversity to the gameplay of the players in the routes and choices they choose.

In that light, I’ll explain a bit of the progress I’ve been making on the mod.

The general system seems to kind of be there now. I haven’t quite figured out how to add character images to the various locations, but potentially with the way I’m rewriting it, I plan on triggering the events on location visits so as to excuse the player from a lot of the sandboxing event initiation clicks that saddog originally implemented.

Hopefully this locks the players more into a more constrained set of events, which I can then funnel into chokepoints depending on the decision-making they have done up to specific moments in the game. Thus, some events will be pretty important flags to hit, while others will aid in going down specific routes.

Apart from this analysis, I’ve also started down the route of modifying the tutorial section of the game. Currently, it’s a few small lines and images which basically posit to the player the choice to keep the characters pure/corrupt them/ntr them.

After the previous post and analyses on implementing the VtM 5e system, I’ve decided to make the three main female LI’s at the beginning “Touchstones” for the main character’s morality.

As such, the tutorial will set down four options for each character:

Nicole (the Mother):

• Humanist – “To get her out of this situation. At the rate things are going, she may be forced to harm others in self-defense.” (This corresponds to the creed- “Thou shalt not harm the innocent.” and when the choice appears to kill Davide using her, it will permanently damage her as a Touchstone.)
• Creed of Justice- “To get her out of the gang for now. We can always figure out what to do from there.” (This corresponds to “Without a cause, you are nothing.” With further complications between Acts 1-3, because inducting her into the actual gang operations and giving her a heavy role in Act 2 will be the equivalent of embracing her, which becomes a hit to Sam’s lust and control morality).
• Gothic/Romantic- “To help her take down the gang. I don’t like what I’ve seen of these guilty gangbangers. If I don’t help her take them down, they will always be a threat.” (Corresponding to “The guilty should suffer.” This is more Sam wanting to get even with the gang.)
• Street Code- “Her to just be my mom again. She’s family, and I’ll do my best to protect her.” (Corresponds to “Never kill outsiders.” because Nicole’s part of the “in” crowd with this choice, and the choice here is more potentially Nicole damaging her own value as a touchstone to Sam depending on choices she may be forced to make.)

Essentially the tenets of the chronicle are going to be the answers to the question of “What does the character need?” while his current answer is a mask to say “What does the character want?” when it comes to his mother.

Still coming up with the way to word the options for Cassandra and Alexis. But hey! that could be another post.