Recently, I've posted the first public release of Delivery Pilot - Dreams and Debts. I'm really happy with the response! I've gotten a ton of helpful feedback, and I thought about them a lot. Please continue to give me your thoughts! I really appreciate them!
Based on the feedback I've received, here are my current goals:
Clarity for players - What's the strategy? What are my options?
- Add morning scenes in the beginning of that game, that should succinctly explain ranks, how pay scales for missions, and hopefully give the player some direction and things to think about. Right now, I don't think what the player can do is being signaled well to the player.
- Add some labels for officers. Currently, there are 6 personalities that affect morale, pay and scenes. By giving them labels, it should help the player make more informed decisions.
Reduce difficulty - Right now it's impossible.
- Make officers have 100% chance of giving missions (unless their subordinates don't know the MC well). Currently, it's set to 60%. I thought it might be fun, but in practice it's pretty anti-fun.
- Add a bonus system. Each playthrough will have one or two big but situational, randomly rolled bonuses (can be re-rolled). For example, 50% more income for missions from Yellow stations.
- Minor tweaks, including making one of the officers pay a bit more (but also cause more morale loss).
Needs more lewd scenes.
- Add morning scenes, where unnamed NPCs will harass the MC if she isn't fully modest in her attire. The chance of this occurring will be based on how scandalous she looks.
- Unlock all her outfit pieces, as higher level obligations. To get these obligations, her relationship level with officers have to be higher.
- Add a dress-up/undress system. Something I really want to add is having the player go through the outfit steps that the MC has to go through, due to the her obligations the player has chosen. If it's deeply unpopular, I'll add a skip button.
- Add many more lewd scenes further down the track, maybe version 0.3 or later.
UI Improvements - Too much clicking.
- When the MC has a mission, entering the vessel can take the player directly to the cargo hold.
- When the Cargo hold is inspected, the return button could take the player directly to the cockpit.
- When leaving the cockpit in the evening with an ongoing mission, the player will be directly taken to the cargo hold.
- Look into adding more and on-brand sound effects and controls.
- Unfortunately, there's not much I can do here, right now. I could redo the UI, and I might do so some day. But, this will be a big job.
Other aspects that were disliked but are unlikely to change
- Cannot manually save and load. Unfortunately, this is not likely to change. It's a design choice I like and it would be too hard to switch now. What I can do instead is try to balance the game around this fact and the "Iron Woman" design.
- Too Grindy. Unfortunately, this is true. This also doesn't work well with an "Iron Woman" style game. In those kinds of games, you'd typically like to die fast and try again. However, this is meant to be a long experience. You don't have to do it in a single sitting. I hope that it's still fun for some people, to see how far they can go, even if they don't beat the game. That's why I've added the archive. I also hope to make the journey more fun with more lewd scenes in the future.