No one likes that guy, lol. The one villain in all COG with no simps.
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You, good fellow, just jinxed it
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So… I was testing a money system that I was really proud of, spent the whole day tweaking it until it finally worked. On CSIDE it was running perfectly, but for some reason it’s not working on cogdemos. I have no idea how to fix it yet, and of course, I didn’t keep a backup of the older stats file… so yeah, hehe.
Because of that, the show stats button won’t be working for a little while. The rest of the game should still run without issues, though. On the bright side, the next update is probably going to be the biggest one so far and will wrap up chapter 2 for the independent route.
Also, I wanted to ask something real quick to the people who play as non-binary characters. How would you prefer I handle titles? Right now, I’ve got king for male, queen for female, and was thinking of using ruler for non-binary. But later on, there are also emperor and empress, which carry a different connotation in my story, so I wasn’t sure how to adapt that for non-binary characters.
For now, I’ve settled on giving non-binary characters the option to choose whether they’d rather be called king or queen. But is there’s something that you feel would work better? Sorry if this comes across as kind of a dumb question lol, it’s just that Portuguese doesn’t really have gender-neutral pronouns, so I sometimes get a bit lost with how to handle them. But I’m learning!
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“Monarch” is the most common gender-neutral term for king/queen but “sovereign” would probably make more sense for formal address. More grandeur.
Trouble with emperor and empress is that they’re from Latin by way of French, which both have the same issue as Portuguese. So “-or” is masculine and “-ess” is feminine, traditionally. That said, “-ex” is sometimes used as a gender-neutral conjugation in words with those suffixes. “Emperex” was one suggestion I saw. We also sometimes use “-or” for gender neutral terms that used to have strictly masculine connotations and didn’t have a female counterpart. “Doctor” is gender-neutral for example; “doctress” isn’t a word. I’ve seen “Emperor” used as a gender-neutral term in some storied. Fire Emblem: Three Houses did that for example.
When in doubt, you can just throw all three options in and let people choose. Nonbinary is a spectrum, after all. Some do prefer gendered pronouns. Could just give the choice to everyone even, in case people want to play around with the terms. Some gnc (gender non-conforming) people like to mess around with that stuff and giving the choice to everyone may be easier to code.
Capitalism ruins everything /j.
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Oh, I see! Emperex actually sounds really good. I’m still not sure if I’ll go with monarch or sovereign, both sound pretty solid to me, I’ll test it out for a bit, see which one fits better. I think I’ll leave it as a choice then, so players can decide whether they want the masculine, feminine, or gender-neutral version. Thanks a lot for the explanation!
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Ey no trouble! Always happy to help.
Are we going to be choosing these titles soon or is this just preparation work for later?
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I don’t want to spoil anything yet, but it’s probably gonna happen pretty soon.
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Hey, is anyone else running into a loading error after the fight with the thallasi?
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Believe it or not, Doctress (doctrix) is a word (meaning female doctor). It is considered a bit archaic these days so you would never hear it exit my mouth, but older people (such as my grandparents) may slip up sometimes.
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Oh, that part isn’t implemented yet. It wasn’t supposed to show up, I only updated it to test the new money system I’ve been working on. That option will skip to the the big update I’ll be releasing soon. Sometimes the game might update randomly on COGDemos, but if the word count in the description doesn’t change, it just means I was testing or fixing something. I’ll let everyone know here once the actual update is out.
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Sorry about that! I was testing a few things, so now the game tries to send you to the next scene, but I haven’t uploaded that part yet. It’ll be included soon in the next update, though. For now, the demo ends right after that battle.
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Just wanted to post this here. It seems you didn’t close a line properly, which might be the root cause. Coding is tricky, I hope this helps and doesn’t confuse you more!
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Also, during my replay, I just got an idea. When we return to the burned down village after meeting Arael, there’s this… I think it’s a toy, Comrade thought it was a doll, but it’s just lying there. I think it could be nice if we got the option to pick it up and keep it. Like, as a symbol or something. For example, I headcanon my MC to have picked it up and kept it around as a symbol of the innocents she swore to protect.
In the same vein, you described the barracks for the others as empty. Wouldn’t it make more sense for Ruby, Walls, and the rest of the experimented upon to collect knicknacks from the battlefield? A cool rock, a glass shard, or setting they bought in the commercial district? It makes sense for the Warden not to, but I’d have assume the dragon/human urge of collecting mementos.
Just some suggestions! Please don’t feel pressured to include them
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I think the issue might be with how I set up the math for splitting the money into coins.
The idea was that 1 gold coin = 100 silver coins and 1 silver = 100 copper. But keeping those as three separate variables was too much of a hassle for literally any calculation, so I tried using a single money variable and just displaying it as coins for the player.
This is how I have it at the CSIDE, it works fine, but on cogdemos for some reason it doesn’t.
(set money is only there for testing purposes)
I’ll mess around with it some more to see if I can fix it. But thanks for pointing that out!
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Oh, I really like that idea, and it should be pretty easy to add. I’ll get it done for the next update. If I remember right, the toy was a tiny wooden horse with little wheels.
You’re right, I had originally written it as a contrast later to the MC and all the luxuries in their room, but it makes perfect sense for them to have collected mementos from the battlefield, especially since they’ve been going there since they were about fifteen. In fact, it actually might actually strengthen the idea I was going for: even if they own nothing but small keepsakes taken from the battlefield, those items will still feel personal and valuable. Meanwhile, the MC might be surrounded by luxuries, but everything still feels hollow. I’ll rework that part to include it!
And don’t worry, I actually really enjoy it when someone gives me suggestions like these. Little details like this often give me a fresh perspective, and they’re usually easy to weave in. Plus, I think they make the game stronger overall. Just because I didn’t expect players to want something doesn’t mean it isn’t worth adding, so feedback like this is always welcome. If you spot anything else that could be improved, please let me know!
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Yay! I’m glad you liked them! I’ll keep that in mind the next time I replay haha.
Actually, that reminds me. Sorry if you’ve answered this, but I did Arael’s friendship path (misclick I stuck with), is there a reason we just can’t tell her we’re leaving when we get the news? Like, we’ve spent enough time with her to make Zatus suspicious, I don’t think dissappearing into thin air would be good form no matter how panicked we are. She doesn’t need to join us like on the romance path, but it confused me that I couldn’t give her a heads up, was that intentional?
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Also, that’s way too much math for my brain to figure out right now, but it looks super cool! Having spending money/a country treasury will definitely be a nice addition!
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Oh, that must be a mistake on my part when connecting the scenes. There should be an option to explain what was happening so she stays friendly afterwards. I’ll check it as soon as I can. I did write a dialogue with her about this, so it’s probably just an issue with the commands.
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I sometimes get briefly irritated when fantasy games do everything in gold coins and then I remember how much of a pain it is to manage the different currencies. A money abstraction is a perfectly reasonable bit of artistic license.
Every dragon’s gotta have a hoard.
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