Hello! It's a long ass read, but I think it's worth it!

If you've played an old version of Love Inn, you basically had 3 stats: two for the ryokan, and one for limit of actions. It didn't offer much choice; my idea before I stopped to get my degree, was to add like one or two stats with related actions, but I'm going a bit further now. I've been playing Persona 4 Golden (first Persona), Tokimeki Memorial 1&2, and Princess Maker 2, and they are SO good. All of them had static time slots with actions (like old Love Inn) but to me they were very satisfying (unlike old Love Inn), and offered plenty of options of things to do in a day, which I think is key, so I decided to expand the original stats.
As of now, there's [Energy, Knowledge, Athletics, Appearance, Combat, Spirituality, Ryokan Cleanliness, Ryokan Maintenance, Reputation, and Stress]. You can guess most, if you do a lot of bad things and are caught, your reputation will decrease.

They will be more integrated into the game with animations and cuts, this was just a preview as I was trying to get a feel of it. So each action occurs 3 times, and it can either fail or succeed. The chance for failure is very small atm, but the more stress you have accumulated, the bigger the chance of fail.
Each action affects a different amount of stats, and even in failure, stats might go up. The idea is not to have it too grindy, but still not be a walk in the park to have all the characters, so if you want to date a sporty character, you'll have to train a bit. If you don't care about your looks, the girls who do care won't go out with you. I've been moving away from a linear gameplay experience. You take care of the ryokan and you, and more content will open up.

There're a couple more details about this I want to share, but I'll leave that for next devlog, since it will be more developed with visuals and such.

A small break to show you why the combat stat exists: Ayumi, the kendo girl. Some time ago I shared the one on the left on Discord, but it was too derivative from Motoko, from Love Hina, and it didn't feel right, so I changed her so the inspiration wasn't THAT obvious.

About the time system. The thing I wanted to do the most since I came back to the game was to have characters move around, instead of the static encounters that I had in the old version. At first I did a time system with time passing, so characters could be at X place, at Y time. I've been back and forth on the idea of time passing (imagine Stardew Valley), it allowed me to have the NPCs be more dynamic, instead of them waiting at the same spot during that time period.
But it kind of blocked me about gameplay, I didn't reach anything satisfying and that fitted the mood. Games with a moving clock have extra loops so you can have a time sink, Travellers Rest -> Managing the bar real time, can close or open whenever you want. Stardew -> Mines. Rune Factory -> Dungeons. And any idea that came up just deviate the original idea too much.

For example of the above, this is just an old prototype for when I developed a weight based navigation system (so I didn't have to bake in real time the navigation space for the AI every time an obstacle changed), for when I was considering a more Rune Factory type gameplay loop. Again, only early concept, just trying some things months ago.

My conclusion was to merge the time passing within the time slots, as to take advantage of all the work I've done on the systems, and so I actually have the characters move around. Now there's an internal clock that starts with each time slot, and once it reaches a number determined on the schedules, the characters can move to another location. Let's say Aya, it's the morning: she's at her room, then she'll go have breakfast (once the kitchen is repaired, if not next), then move to the bus stop for college. Why I'm so obsessed with characters walking around? I just think it's really hot if a character can pass by your room for example when you are with another character.

There's also the game "Summer Vacation! Scramble", an eroge from the new team formed from old Illusion games (top eroge inspo). Characters also move around during time slots, and what's REALLY interesting to me, is that they can chime in and interrupt conversations! This has been a thing in their games for a while, but it didn't click with me until I played this game. It's so rare for characters to interrupt dialogues in games. Obviously it has to be non-important dialogue, or it could be frustrating, and not happen all the time like in that game, but yeah, for now I'm not stopping time (since you are not at risk of losing the day, since it's a time slot), will consider something similar.

Another break, now with small redesign of Sayaka! I shared her before here, the ex-gyaru (that didn't look like it) Didn't have time to finish the pixel, so here's this with both Ayumi and her.

And the bad news to me, is that recently I upgraded to a new 1TB M2 SSD so I wouldn't think about disks for a while, since my other two started to slow down (old)... Well, on the 25th the new SSD died unexpectedly (allegedly it was the SSD, will look into it in depth today with a friend). But everyday I save everything with github, so everything is in the cloud (except a shit ton of references that sadly will probably be lost) and I'm working almost normally since, lost some days, but no data.

A couple of small additions I don't know where to put: there's a toggle now to run always without needing to press shift, also made pop-up bubble dialogues for small comments...

Next month I'll probably open Patreon if everything goes well. Now I'm actually convinced of almost every aspect of the game and feel very confident. There won't be playable releases, as I feel I advance a lot better now, and don't want Patreon to become the true model for the game. I'd rather have a mediocre Steam release than a very successful Patreon, but there's really no good alternative atm, Early Access on Steam is still too premature. It will just be a donation box, so I'll lower tiers, only having like a 1.5€ and 4.5€.

Total amount pledged will still count the same as before, your preferred name and a key the moment you hit the price point of the Steam game price (almost surely 15€), when the game releases.

This is more of a thank you for supporting me, than an exchange. If you want to just buy the game one day, please just wait until the game is done, since I can't make promises about the future.
If you want to support the game, but don't want / can't Patreon, I totally get it, encouragement and engagement makes a world of difference to me.

See you May 1st! Thanks for reading!