Big Gameplay Update

After some prototyping and back and forth, I’ve made the fundamentals of To Sew a Field of Stars gameplay easier to interpret, more digestible, and probably much more interesting. The tutorial is a bit more developed, with a broken up introduction serving a bit better to contextualize each character as they’re introduced in gameplay, though this is one area I’m certain I’ll revisit soon.

As an erotic game, my intentions are for To Sew a Field of Stars to require rare peaks of mental effort with much longer, more relaxed troughs between. I strongly believe that eroge are still games, and should function as games, so I feel that this kind of division is a good way to give the player some interesting decisions while still giving them plenty of time to relax and appreciate everything else that makes an erotic work attractive. Unfortunately, version 0 of TSFS was too opaque, and also demanding of micro management for players that understood it, that it didn’t leave me much space to add mechanical layers as the story progressed without overwhelming the player.

To some extent, a little bit of friction and mystery is appealing to me in games, but it was better to dial it back here. To that end, I cribbed from some of my future plans and included very rudimentary automation. A large portion of your mechanical interactions via your characters will now come in the form of telling them to prioritise one of four types of task, perhaps pointing them in a general area of your map, and then letting them go off on their own to work. I did my best to make sure they didn’t act TOO stupid, but let me know if they’re being particularly silly ;^).

I’ve also done some extensive rebalancing and reworking of various systems, and I think the result is much closer to what I’d feel happy working off of as a foundation. Besides those main changes, there’s sketches for the standing sprites that will show in some scenes now, and I’ve done some tinkering to hopefully get the web version loading faster.

Now to get back to writing the main story and a package of random events, and developing some systems for when your wives begin to make milk. I think that in particular will be pretty fun. Thanks to everyone that’s played the game and sent me feedback so far!