Nope, I've tried. It absolutely requires a penis - checked the code, and it's quite confusing... Ended up destroying two of her virginities before touching the code, her mouth's (915cm tail) and her hymen (0cm penis). She broke her mouth on her own, that wasn't supposed to happen (and even though throat effects weren't disabled, she somehow managed to fit the entire length without destroying her throat).
Changed the requirements from penis to finger, so I'm now effectively tearing her hymen and anal wall... with my fingers.
(The scene before the date just requires her to have a torn hymen, it doesn't actually matter if anyone broke it beforehand.)
Unless it got fixed, there's actually a couple ways to break Helena's virginity without meaning to, even without a penis. Tail penetration is the easiest way. I had one play through where Helena wouldn't stop taking matters (and my tail) into her own hands and claiming her virginity for me on the first sex scene.
Just be aware, you can 100% completely sequence break her entire quest chain doing that. Most of the time the game handles the sequence break fine... Most of the time. The other times your save breaks.
There's also some fun you can have with Scarlett, once you realize that the game doesn't actually do a complete reset on her. And, unless it's been fixed (again), some really game breaking stuff that'll absolutely ruin your save file.
I got really good at breaking save files in this game lol
I'm glad I entered the industry long after KLOC was phased out, because from what I've heard about those days, that's exactly the sort of thing devs would do. Excessive whitespace/newlines, needlessly unrolled loops, you name it.
One of my coworkers is a product of that era and he's never bothered to shed any of those bad habits. It's infurating. <_<
I meaaannnn, it's not like white space is costing me anything. And having the closing bracket at the end of a completely unrelated statement just makes it annoying. I like being able to spot them immediately...
To be fair, it's one of those things that sound good on the surface, but when you start considering the other nuances of coding (boilerplate, algorithmic complexity, optimization/cleanup, and refactors) it kinda falls apart.
I'd say the changes from 0.3.20 to 0.4.0 mostly fall into the cleanup and refactor categories, with some obligatory boilerplate (Java imports/properties) thrown in. There was some fields/Elis content added, but a majority of it dealt with making encounters moddable (as you pointed out earlier) and changing the hardcoded encounter text to fit with the new system.
At this point the general pattern of development strikes me more as disorganization than anything outright malicious. If I had to guess, she probably starts working on something, realizes that it would be better XYZ objects were stored externally, then goes off and makes an XML loader for XYZ. Then, after that's done and tested, the same exact thing happens when she gets to the fully-hardcoded ZYX object. Sure, at the end of the day you end up with a fully moddable sex game, but you also have a throng of people wondering why the hell the fields content is over a year late.
I think if Inno's communications reflected the actual state of development people would be less upset, and I don't think her followers on SubStar would mind the delays all that much.
Yeah, that seems to be the problem she's running into. And honestly, if she was just outright saying that, I wouldn't have a problem with any of this. As long as she doesn't immediately say "I'm not going to rework these systems, I'll get the update out first and then do it" which is
exactly what she did.
Honestly, that's why I keep commenting on workflow. Workflow is a really, really important concept. When designing my own game, workflow is one of the most important concept I'm keeping in mind. I want to be able to easily explain how to create content, and I want it to be easy enough to implement that someone with zero coding experience (like, straight up doesn't understand what an if statement is levels of coding experience) could write and add playable content. Because if I can manage that, then I can easily add content myself. Almost anyone could.
But, I guess I have two advantages going into all this. The first is that I'm someone who follows game development and have been since the era when text adventure games were common. And second, I've done a lot of writing for other games, not just the adult variety. I've seen a lot of ways to make game writing miserable.
Just starting the game... If I prefer to play female, is it better to straight start as female, or you can start as male and quickly (and without any gay content) transform into female?
Either way is pretty simple. Once you know you're way around, you can get to MTF transformation stuff really quickly, but as a new player it'll probably take a bit to find those methods.
I don't know if you want spoilers or anything. If you want specific instructions one of us should be able to give them to you.