...How it's Going

[This is Part 2 of a 2-part post. If you want to read the first part of this post, follow this link: https://stobros-studios.itch.io/strip-junken-sc/devlog/586641/how-it-started]

I began development for the new Strip Junken project around December 2022, three months after abandoning the old project. Although it was a start, I didn't go full-on until April of this year, when I really started developing the new project. I've already mentioned this in the other post about what I did for this project. When I decided to make Strip Junken into a dual-title game akin to Pokémon, Zelda: Oracles, and even Medarot, to name a few, I didn't just easily split the project into two; I basically made the main project into a third version, which includes all 12 girls from both Shiratori and Nightingale, and made sure the base game was working normally before I went on with making copies of the project and labeling them accordingly by their version names. And from that point on, I spent some time working on one version, adding new contents and fixing some issues that needed fixing, and then basically copying all of the alterations done to the other version. It was a bit of a hassle, especially at the time I was developing the demo versions of the game, where I posted a few broken versions before releasing proper working demos. (You can play the aforementioned demo if you want to try it out before buying the full version.)

As it turns out, I already made some test builds of the game to test out features of the full versions before I began working on the demos, just to be sure I'm on the right track. In other words, I already wrote those full-version codes and commented them out in favor of the codes made for the demos. Once the development for the demos was done, I had to take a month-long break before going back to work on the full versions, which I resumed as soon as July came to a close.

There were many alterations and rewrites that had to be done, and features had to be tested to ensure they were working normally; otherwise, change or drop those features. Even though there were some features that were working normally, like how the game mechanics work using arrays of strings stored in the asset data of each girl, I had to change it into something that I should've learned before—probability by the integers. Before, I just used multiple copies of the same three strings, but the disadvantage of this is that the other copies are read as the first, and the probability is reduced to 1:1:1. To resolve that issue, I appended a number at the end of one string, and in the code, I made sure that the string is read as one of the three hands. The new system works almost the same as before, and what's good is that it bypasses some methods, like if the string says rock-0, rock-1, or rock-2, it means that the girl will play rock on that round. Instead, a random number is generated, and if that lands on a specific percentage out of 100%, it lands on either paper, rock, or scissors, respectively.

The other interesting fact about the two versions was that the dialogue name tags sport different color schemes. And those color schemes were based on specific color variants of two Nintendo consoles, with Shiratori being the Nintendo 64 Funtastic Colors save for smoke black and Nightingale being the five Game Boy Color launch variants. The only exception to this were Koharu and Mireille (and the two secret girls), who sport unique color schemes for their name tags.

Another thing I have to mention is that back when I was testing out the game, I also had hard times getting a perfect win in hard mode, especially on some girls. I could either keep this feature or change it to make it easier for anyone to get a 100% completion rate. Speaking of completion rates, during the development, this too underwent so many changes, like how in the demo, I basically added up all the unlockable contents and added a few bits to round it off to 100% even, and I fully changed this in the full version, where the completion rate is corrected and instead of rounding it out to 100, I based it on the sum of all the contents. For example, 1/88 is 1.14%.

To conclude the post, I just want to say thanks for taking the time to read both parts, and please do share these games with anyone interested. I'd love to see more people buy my games as much as they've enjoyed playing the demo. Also, I'm very proud to announce an upcoming new game project called Strip Hi-Lo, which is basically a lot like Junken except with different girls (made with Kisekae, of course) and a different game mechanic. Development for the new game is still to be determined, so be sure to stay tuned to Stobros Studios for updates.

[End]