Lab Rats 2 Design Document

The current plan is to let you move around and live wherever you want if you've got the cash or influence over a girl. There's no code in place to support this yet, but I don't foresee any problems implementing it.

Vren

Good eye, it's been fixed.

Vren

Will you be living home with your mum entire game or will you move up in the world? You could buy your own mansion and populate it with your girls and have some sort of playboy mansion.

Yes, they'll make an appearance. They will be some of the first characters I create, specifically as test characters.

Vren

Are the original 5 girls going to be returning?

Justa Badge

plz some one smart plz tell me how to make the console commands true so i can use the shift 0 thing

TeddyTheOrc

Very minor text bug: in script.rpy, you have "Unusually horney." as one of the girl descriptions; there is no e in that word.

Dubsington

Production of a medicine requires, after animal trials, clinical trials, phase 1 & 2. People that voluntarily sign up to try a potentially harmful treatment. This is to get FDA approval. Especially phase 2 is a major problem for anyone trying to create a new drug that is affordable. Phase 2 requires a trial on a large population. In real life companies offering the scale up, tend to bargain this for most of the pattents and they drive up the costs for the medicine.

p1cobyte

As an idea for a realistic approach: it might be better for you as a company to start producing generic drugs (with known manufacturing formulations). You can hire girls who aren't corrupted out of graduate school. Due to the known formulations it shouldn't be too hard while the girls learn the tools and machinery in industry. You can contract with pharmacies in the nation to supply them with your generic drugs (maybe using your serum to 'help' the business along). Another market would be farming (although organic farming is rising and there is a trend to reduce antibiotic use). You can manufacture serum in small batches on the side and slowly corrupt the lab. As you get a revenue flow you can then expand new labs which will produce generics while switching the corrupt one to produce serum (using small scale production methodology). Eventually once you get big enough you can research manufacturing scale up of your serum, and go on from there. _____ Corrupting some investors might be a simpler solution though. The route above I described would require something like years to be able to get to final scale up.

Mylen Ploa

It's something I'm thinking about, but I don't have any concrete coding put in place yet. Sex between other characters would likely end up being much more abstract than MC/girl sex. Threesomes are another thing that I'd like to support if possible.

Vren

The default new game will assume you made some progress with all the girls, enough to realize the potential of the serum, but didn't get them pregnant or turn them into your harem. I'd also like to include some way of importing a saved game from LR1, and having some stats carry over. Pregnancy will probably end up being ignored, but high influence scores in LR1 might translate to high starting sluttiness in LR2, while different training paths change their default obedience. The vast majority of characters in LR2 are going to be procedurally generated and unique though, so I'm not planning to spend a ton of time worrying about it.

Vren

Main concern: I hope the UI is something which is easy to navigate eg promotion: some way to automate this (can specify what thresholds to autopromote). random: maybe add ethics to employee trait. Eg even if an employee is happy some might have ethical opposition to certain things you do. Kind of combinable with obedience though. Other: Big dump of some second hand information on the chemical industry below: Recruiting chemists: Chemistry employees make up a small portion of costs. However finding talent might be hard depending on the country you are in. There are a variety of reasons: 1) Chemists with Masters or PhD's are relatively expensive to hire (100-200k/year). You can hire graduate students for less but they won't be able to handle large scale manufacturing scaleup. 2) Schools don't tend to teach what students need to know to work in industry 3) Some countries have high competition for students in STEM (non PhD) for cost reasons due to high numbers of companies 4) Other countries have insufficient talent pool of graduate students but a high labor pool of PhD and above. If you plan on hiring new graduates then realistically they would have to be trained by Nora or Stephanie on the job to be able to produce serum. Production scale up requires significant research, money, and knowledge different from discovering a drug in the lab. There are many contracting companies one can hire to do the scale up (cost in millions of dollars). These companies tend to offer the scale up done at a loss in return for agreeing to let them manufacture later. However this results in problems for exposure of course. If you wanted realism then the production would have to be small scale for much of the game's span. Unless you somehow gave serum to some investors (possible) to get funding for scale up. Most of the cost is in raw materials and equipment, so doing it yourself would still incur costs. Other consideration is that when you do scale up you often require custom built buildings to house large machines. Manufacturing is different from the labs in colleges or schools. _____ In terms of having employees stay longer the ease of convincing them depends on the location and role of the individual. Junior chemists who work in the lab tend to stay at the lab for long durations of time monitoring the machines. It wouldn't be hard to convince them to stay. _____ If you wanted to earn profits on lab production the serum should probably be sold and marketed as a natural supplement, since regulatory approval otherwise would take years before you can earn a profit. Whether or not you would want a patent on the serum would be interesting since a patent would require giving up the formulation which runs into the risk of being found out. Trade secrets might work better. Of course with natural supplements marketing your chemical might get investigated by consumer labs (eg consumer reports) so it might be a good idea to give free samples to NGOs before their suspicion becomes too large. _____ <a href="http://www.emhsoft.com/singularity/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://www.emhsoft.com/singularity/</a> is an interesting game to get some ideas from regarding building a 'rogue' empire of sorts. That game involves managing an AI (note: many UI flaws) but the obstacles one would face isn't that different. ________ Realism aside: on the topic of giving girls personality, how will interactions between girls be handled? Some games like Fire Emblem for support conversations have generic conversations between X and Y character. However this leads to a 'same same' feeling of the generic conversations that's boring since this generic method of conversations means the topics discussed must be very generic and not that interesting. This is because the lines spoken by X is picked randomly from a pool of lines for X and Y is chosen from a separate pool (thus there's no real conversation). The other option is eg child -&gt; parent prescripted conversation with no customization based on the actual character. Neither is really interesting. ____ Random events that could be added? -Accidents in lab -Reverse engineering attempt by rival (eg client loses serum) -Small day to day events to liven up the game. _______ The reason for random (and interesting) events, perhaps could be combined with interactions between employees, is so that the game doesn't get repetitive if the turn count becomes long and the game becomes 'solved'. (See Sunrider Academy, too much repetition). ______ Difficulties with how to make a game interesting after a player 'solves' it (eg do this on day X, then do Y, then do Z) is a general game design problem though. Random events should be interesting, plausible, and not designed to punish the player (eg Democracy series which hardcodes a crashing economy if you are doing too well).

Mylen Ploa

Very much considered, here's the current plan: At the start of the game you'll have the option to play "classic", where you're the main character from Lab Rats 1. That means you still live at home with Lily and your mom and Nora, Stephanie, and Alexia are other characters scattered throughout the game. The other option would be "custom", where you customize a number of characters in the world. You might decide you have a few sisters, and that your old boss is someone completely different. This will all need some more coding to support it, and I have to put more thought into how it will be designed, but it's certainly something I want to address.

Vren

Yep, you'll be able to go home and interact with other characters besides those you work with.

Vren

In theory all of the stuff you sell has other medical applications, and investing in these applications can significantly boost the value of a serum when sold.

Vren

New drug testing is FAR more expensive than that my friend. You have to do disclosures as well and source materials can be controlled depending on the chemical. Also depending on how you source the raw chemicals there may be purity problems. There are also almost always problems scaling up manufacturing from small scale to large scale. Depending on the country this is set in these problems would have to be overcome before you can do human trials. There's also the question of regulation on human trials in developed countries. In countries with a laxer regulation regime good luck getting the raw uncontaminated chemicals to make your product.

Mylen Ploa

Looks like it is going to be a good game! I noticed the sex system description only seemed to discuss sex with the MC. Will there be a way to get the girls to have sex with each other as well?

Dubsington

The current plan for Lab Rats 2 sounds amazing. The only thing bugging me is, who are the customers?

Krag

Will you still be able to go home and to work each day, so that you can spend time with the family like in LR 1?

ShoopDaWhoop

Have you considered making the main character someone new, so we can have a new mom and sister(s) to seduce? The taboo relationships were a huge part of why I like the first game so much.

Kedokata

I love the sound of it, I can't wait!

WaxerRed

Will the fact you knocked the characters from LR1 carry on to LR2? Will you still be living with at home with your family?

Interesting reading. There are a couple of things which I don't fully agree with though: in particular, how you handle the lab. You sir wrote that the main character decides to create a "Company", does that mean he has some other investors to deal with everytime? Or is the player the only owner (provided he can extinguish the loan)? That would heavily influence how you behave with other people AND what you can do / not do, like, for example, if you can take 100$ from the lab for other expenses which are not meant to be recorded... If there is an administration board, it will be another matter... which I could ignore by simply taking care of all money business leaving unaware workers into creating serum (think about the movie "The Island" - 2005 - with Ewan McGregor and Scarlet Johansson: the people inside the lab work for something they don't understand at all, but still they obediently follow the orders).

Shalashaska

Absolutely. They will probably be some of the first character s I try and recreate in Daz. If I can do that, I'll be fairly satisfied with it's use as my rendering platform.

Vren

Yes, a decent chunk of the stuff mentioned in the design document is already coded up and just needs time spent generating content (dialogue, images, that sort of thing).

Vren

Couple ideas I had. HR can set up a batch of people to come in and test the new drug for 50 or 100 bucks. (They do it in real life, I just don't know the value that they make.) The PC would be able to choose all get the drug, none get the drug or select the people to get it, and if they come back more and more then the effects stack up until you can get them onto the team, or even just have them as someone you can call up and be all like, hey lets go bang. BUT this could only be done ONCE per new drug designed. One thing that would be cool is if there were some "Key" Personnel that you could get, people that need some kind of quest, or actions to unlock and then hire. Maybe even bring some police, or federal agents that you corrupt onto the team that way they can tell you how to avoid notice, or what would be the best ways to do things from a legal stand point.

Perversity

Are we getting a cameo from Lab Rats 1 characters in their new daz render?

Nicolas

Maybe have a lab rat position as a possible hire. Or you end up with a bimbofied worker who's only good for serum tests and knob polishing

Csducks

Are we still looking at the use of Renpy as the platform?

Demitiger