Preparing for Causality 2.0

The dev of COBD is taking a break right now, so it's very possible that he'll respond to me soon. Though I'll keep looking for other titles, just in case. Actually deciding on another title can take a long time, so that next announcement may come in 1-2 months. ...Or in a few hours if I get a response right after I post this update, which would be quite annoying tbh.

I could've also opted to just upgrade the OIALT mod to 2.0 as my next project, but after I hyped up this update that would be kinda lame.

There's also an itch page for COBD where you can download the first 4 chapters, though it's way out of date. The game has been completed months ago.

I don't receive a lot of feedback, but when I do I often get a different perspective on my work, which helps me improve! If you're not sure what to comment on, here's some design decisions from OIALT that I'm insecure about:

• Disabling Causality warnings during the game show and the finale
• Not providing any guidance for puzzles and mini games
• Sometimes delaying the Causality warning for a little bit to sync it up with the gain or loss of affection points

Since I want my Causality mods standardized (see below), it is more or less necessary to revisit the OIALT one as well. Ideally, both the next release and the OIALT update will come out at the same time, but there's no way that I can guarantee to finish both in time.

The leading vision for Causality mods has been and will be that they soothe fomo while incurring as little immersion break as possible. I will keep a close watch to ensure that none of the new features go against that vision.

I'm really excited to get back into creating Causality mods! Though the project has gotten quite ambitious now, I hope that I've not bitten off more than I can chew.

Most notably, this means that "Affection too low" warnings will be replaced by either "Losing path" or "Optional lewd lost" warnings. Related to that were "positive warnings", which essentilly retracted a negative warning from before, those will be removed as well. The only reason the "positive warnings" existed was due to the limitations of calculating everything by hand, which made it necessary to overcompensate. Though soon an algorithm will take care of that, so no need to keep them around.

In general, explaining why a Causality warning popped up can be complicated and since I'm supposed to keep that complexity away from you, I instead ask you to trust me. Rest assured that I'm taking lots of measures to ensure that my mod's warnings (or lack thereof) are reliable.

But sometimes the consequences themselves can be complex too, even when not trying to explain why they will happen. The simplest example: "There's a way to stay on Judie's path and there's a way to stay on Lauren's path, but you can't have both anymore". To simplify a scenario like this, I will use regular warnings, but with asterisks* on them. When you see an asterisk, that means "there's more to this, it's complicated, don't worry about it, just act as if this is true, ok?". So in the example from before you would see a "Losing path: Judie*" and a "Losing path: Lauren*" warning, both with an asterisk.

Ideally, you should also be able to click on a warning that popped up and say "I don't care about this girl/flavor". Sexual flavors mostly pertain to anal sex, group sex, and in COBD's case, a little bit of futa.

Something that I'm worried about is that when let's say someone changes their settings to avoid futa, what they might not realize is that the game will remain unchanged, apart from Causality warnings that steer them away from that flavor. Avoiding futa does not purge that flavor from the game, you might still get offers for it. Changing the game itself isn't really in my scope and games usually handle controversial flavors quite well, so I hope an in-mod heads up will suffice to set everyone's expectations straight.

As for endings, I think I handled it pretty well for OIALT: There were two good endings and you got a warning when you were about to lose the best one or both of them. This option will remain the default, but if you want to achieve a specific ending, there will be an additional option for that.

You can imagine this similar to OIALT's character overview screen, but with all the information Causality is able to obtain. So if you're about to lose a path or a lewd, it will show up on this screen. Same for sexual flavors! And if you changed the settings to avoid/ignore something, the screen will account for that as well.

Welcome to 2025, where you no longer have to look up an obscure warning in a txt document. A feature like this is always nice to have, but it's also additional work for the developer (me). Though with some of the new features I'd say it's almost required to have it now. With it I can use pictures to explain things, that'll come in handy.

This would also help those who struggle with a puzzle or minigame, but it's mainly for players who already know the game quite well. Walkthrough mode will of course respect your settings and hence can guide you towards certain endings or lewd interactions, same as regular Causality would.

What I'd ultimately like to avoid is people going back to manually playing by a walkthrough after they've already seen a lot of the game and now want to achieve something specific. Causality 2.0 will be a powerful guidance mod and I understand that at some point you might want it to guide you more actively.

I want to create some recognizable design elements that can be adapted to the vastly different UIs that different AVNs can have. An analogy I like to use is visiting a McDonalds in a foreign country: It's a bit of familiarity in an unfamiliar place. All this also applies to how the mod pages will be designed; I want something uniform that also highlights what makes this game special compared to the others.

I wanted to have a program/algorithm like this from the very start, but getting that project started would've been a bigger effort than just doing everything by hand. Automation is always an investment. But with all the new features and me planning to keep doing Causality mods, it's wise to do now.

And I want to emphasize that I'm not talking about generative AI here. AI is impressive at creative stuff, but this task requires maths and logic and AI is not (yet) reliable enough for that. I'll make UI elements by hand too, so no need to worry about this turning into "AI slop".