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As has become an annual tradition, here’s a summary of the progress the LifePlay project has made in the last year and some broad plans about what’s coming in 2021.
In 2020, the game received 26 updates, averaging one update every two weeks as promised. These consisted of 4 v2.x updates, 5 v3.0 Overhaul updates and 17 v3.x updates. Some of the most important developments in 2020 were:
- The AI and Interactions Overhaul: this completely transformed the gameplay from basically just “staring at a city map then getting constantly interrupted by visual novel bits” to a full 3d lifesim experience where characters actually live, move between locations and do activities in the world and can be interacted with proactively, instead of relying on so much on RNG to trigger scenes like before. Not only were a lot of new systems coded during the overhaul, it also added tons of new 3d interiors and activity animations to bring the LifePlay world to life.
- Kink of the Month: was introduced as a way to decide on the fetish content to focus on for the month. The patrons vote to choose which kink, then the community participates in a Discord brainstorm to give ideas on what exactly to add about the chosen kink.
- Adult Scene Gameplay Expansion: adult scenes are no longer just ‘pick some animations and watch inconsequentially’, the new adult scene gameplay introduces orga sm, energy and preferences for different adult acts to make it more engaging and meaningful.
- City Map Visual and Performance Enhancement: the city map is no longer just a collection of ugly grey boxes that take ages to load, it now have actual 3d buildings with colors and is now much faster to load.
- Performance Improvements: even though the gameplay is now full 3d, the performance is arguably better than before due to various performance improvements implemented during 2020, most importantly multi-threading, which allows checking scenes, updating AI, loading 3d interiors and generating characters to happen mostly in the background and limit lags to a minimum
- Sound: LifePlay is no longer a silent game. From sound effect and moaning for adult scenes to UI sound, the addition of sound really made the gameplay more lively and enjoyable.
- Adult Scene Expressions: as important as the sound effects, the fact that characters now make realistic facial expressions linked to arousal and orga sm level make the experience much ‘hotter’.
- Patrons’ Commissions: In 2020, commissions were introduced to make patrons’ rewards more transparent, allowing patrons to directly request specific scenes, animations and maps to be made for the month’s second update.
So what developments can you expect to see in 2021:
- The first three months of the year will see 6 Kink of the Month updates back to back, which allow some of less popular fetishes to get worked on and a lot of ideas from the community to be used.
- The five updates during April and May will be dedicated to v4.0 Variety and Polish Overhaul, which is explained in detail
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. The TLDR about the overhaul is: Variety = more diverse and distinguishable character customizations (incl proper ethnic & age differences) + much bigger selection of clothes + NPCs dressing according to their location and job + more daily activity and furniture animations + high attractiveness NPCs actually look hot. Polish = minimize clipping issues (body poking through clothes, dick poking through partner's stomach, skirt not following legs when sitting down, etc) + no more vagina deform when too many morphs are used + smoother gameplay due to clothes taking less time to load, bug fixes, UI enhancements and optimizations.
- The last 7 months of the year will have one Kink of the Month update each as usual, continuing to add even more fetish content to the game. Then, over a couple of updates, 3d exteriors will be added for different location types or even for traveling between locations, they not only complete the 3d experience, but make for interesting places (with very different lighting and shadows) to make love too! The rest of the updates (i.e. non-KOTM) will be a mixture of adding new assets (clothes, hairstyles, adult animations, activity animations, etc), giving some love to less popular kinks that don’t have much luck with the KOTM polls, UI and gameplay improvements suggested by the community and of course bug fixes and further performance optimizations.
- Of course, patrons’ commissions will continue to be available as reward for patrons for every month of 2021, including during the overhaul.
These are the broad plans for 2021, I will of course continue to publish specific plans for each update that comes next.
Thank you so much for continuing to support the project, whether financially via Patreon or via modding, bug reporting or promoting the game. Let's look forward to another year full of new progress for LifePlay.
