Rogue-Like Update 03/24/2020 (cheating) (Patreon)

So, I've gotten a lot of messages over the past build saying something along the lines of "console commands don't work." Well, they never have. At least not in the native public releases. But Renpy is fairly easy to mess with, and those who wanted access to console commands could probably seek them out, and I don't think it's even possible for me to make that impossible. I figured this was as good a time as any to gauge the patrons' interest in cheat commands, and to give my thoughts on the matter.

I'm not morally opposed to cheat codes or anything, I mean I was using Game Shark a ton back in the day, but I do think it's a good idea for the game to separate "cheating" from "normal play," so that players feel some pressure to "earn things the right way." I feel like if the urge to cheat is too strong, then I've done something wrong in balancing out the game (and I understand that the money balance in the game can be hard to feel right). I feel like the fun of unlocking new options is a driving force in the game, and also that earning things at the expected pace keeps things from piling up in strange ways.

That said, if the community wants it, I am open to the idea of leaving the dev console open by default, accessed by hitting shift-d, or of building a basic "cheat menu" from which players can select various options. I already have one that I use for my own testing purposes, but I don't include it in the release versions (it's a little messy so I'd want to clean it up a bit). A basic cheat menu would let you adjust money values, core stat values, maybe toggle certain unlocks, adjust clothing more automatically, etc.

I do want to stress that this could impact bug testing. If people are messing with cheats, adding clothing that they hadn't earned, getting stats to a certain level too soon, that sort of thing, it might cause some errors that could never be found if they were playing the game in proper order. That's fine, but I would need to know, if you report that a bug occurred, I might need to know that something was tweaked. Of course this isn't all bad, since I could also ask you to type in certain commands that could help me narrow down an issue easier. It just takes a little of the magic out of the process.

That said, for those that can access the console commands, any old codes you know should still work, they are just a bit different now. Any commands that were "P_Something" will now be "Player.Something", any that were "R_Something" or any of the other girls will now be "RogueX.Something" or "EmmaX.Something".

And no, I won't be making the cheats only available to higher-tier patrons, because then pirates would get that build anyway, and then only the lower-tier patrons who were playing things honest would get screwed, and that doesn't help anyone.