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Hey All,
It's been a very long time with me grinding on this Loser update non-stop. What I thought would be a simple refactor, turned into me rebuilding about 85% of the games systems, and then spending the many months just bringing the game back to a playable state. That being said, the game is now very much close to that playable state and will be released sometime this week. I'm sorry for the radio silence, but when I get stressed out, I tend to become hyper focused and just work through the problem, and I've been in a hyper focused state for almost 6 months straight now, and am finally able to take a breathe and step back enough to show what I've been cooking this whole time.
Change Log v0.12.00
What's New ?
- New Charlie Archtype: Dateable Widow
- Jesse Archtype Update: Alterna-Goth
- New Location: Charlies Bathroom
- Focus Start Expansion: Good Brother
- New Skill: Performance
- New Skill: Persuasion
- New Tags: Voyerism, Inappropriate
- New Feature: Dark Web Access
- New Item: Bottle of Pills
- New Function: Interaction Interest Tracker
- New Function: Topic Retainment
- Perk Updates
- New Perks
- New Function: Computer Wallpaper
- New Function: Status
- New Feature: Adaptive Loading Screen
- New Topic Features
- Continued Party Update
- Character Page Update
- Skill Screen Update
- Updated Tutorial
- UI Overhaul
- Loads of New Topics
- Massive Scene Refactor
What's it mean?
New Charlie Archtype: Dateable Widow
Jesse Archtype Update: Alterna-Goth
Charlie has recieved a new AT. This is a Cornerstone AT (meaning there will be different directions to branch out from eventually) and a big part of the AT is her giving a house key to Nathan. With the house now being fully accessable most of the time, That meant I had to go back and Update Jesse's AT for all the new additional hours, so Jesse's Alterna-goth AT almost doubled in content as well.
New Location: Charlies Bathroom
Once you have the key to Charlies house, you'll have full access to the bathroom whenever you want, rather than being limited by the context of the scene.
Focus Start Expansion: Good Brother
I've added some exclusive content to the Good Brother game start. Currently Becky has a large chunk of added content to her starting AT (Younger Sister), while Gina has a little bit of content added to her first three AT's. I plan to add a little more to this start in the future as I intend for Focus Starts to allow the player to either quickly progress the focused characters to major Cornerstone ATs by skipping some transitional ATs, or by giving alternative ATs that bypass certain hurdles. Next update, I'll be adding some Good Son exclusive content.
New Skill: Performance
A new skill called Performance has been added that represents a characters ability to perform in front of an audience or crowd. The following Tags have been added to reflect this new skill:
Performing,
Acting, and
Singing. Some topics have retroactively received performance tags.
New Skill: Persuasion
A new skill called Persuasion has been added that represents a characters ability to charm, manipulate, or intimidate their way into the outcome they desire. The following Tags have been added to reflect this new skill:
Persuasive,
Manipulative, and
Intimidation. Some topics have retroactively received persuasion tags.
New Tags: Voyerism, Inappropriate
Voyerism is a new tag that has been added to the perverted skill. There aren't many topics with this tag yet, but there will be more to come in the future.
Inappropriate is a new tag that has been added to the disorder skill. There aren't many topics with this tag yet, but there will be more to come in the future.
New Feature: Dark Web Access
The first Dark Web Shop has been added to the game. It's called Nylon Path and requires a special router to be installed in order to access it. You can purchase this router from OldEgg once you have the Dark Web Access perk. Once purchased, you'll need to install it. Nylon Path is a dark web marketplace for drugs and alcohol. More Dark Web Options will be added in future updates.
Since Nylon Path is a user driven market, sometimes items will be Out of Stock, so you may have to try back next week. Sometimes Hot Deals will show up which will sell a case of an item (X6) for a very low price. More items and dark web exclusive items will be added to Nylon Path in future updates. I've also granted the Dealer Start early access to Nylon Path, though all other future Dark Web sites will be prohibited without the Dark Web Access Perk.New access to limited topics via Dark Web Shop.
New Item: Bottle of Pills
A new item you can purchase from Nylon Path is a bottle of pills, which will be a random assortment of reds, blues, and pinks. If you don't have the Prescription Drugs Perk, or the Party Animal Starting Perk, you might also end up with a few placebos in the bottle of pills as well. I added this as a way for the Dealer Start to actually restock, though it's not very reliable until you have the perks to know what to look for.
New Function: Interaction Interest Tracker
I've added a small popup screen you can use to see what a characters Interests and Bans are while in a conversation. Mousing over each Interest and Ban will now display the Tags and Description in the Tooltip.
New Function: Topic Retainment
A new Function has been added that gives Nathan a small chance to retain Topics with specific tags when he uses them. After a 6+ hour sleep, any retained topics will be returned to your inventory. Once Nathan has a perk that grants the ability to retain topics, a lightbulb Icon will appear on his portrait, and clicking it will show the list of tags that Nathan might retain, as well as any topics he currently is retaining.
Perk Updates
With the addition of Topic Retainment, I updated some of the weaker skills in the game, such as Seduction, and Fashion and gave them some Topic Retainment tags. The fashion perks grant retainments based on what styles your currently wearing to keep it more inline with Fashion. More clothing options with different combinations of style tags will be coming in the next update to give you more options.
New Perks
Besides the three new Retainment Perks, I've added a few other perks to boost skills that I felt needed it. So Selfishness, Healthy, and Fitness have all got a new Perk, although the new healthy perk is more of a Healthy lifestyle boost, since it requires the lifestyle.
New Function: Computer Wallpaper
While working on Gina's Good Brother content, I came up with a prank Gina would play on Nathan where she changed his computer wallpaper, and then I thought, why not add that in as a real option...so I did. Now Everytime you do a photoshoot with someone, at least one of the pictures will be added as an option for wallpaper. I also gave the option for you to toggle if you want to see your desk and monitor, or just the Monitor when sitting at the computer. I have retroactively granted wallpapers for AT's that are no longer accessible if you're playing from a Save file.
New Function: Status
I've added a system simialr to character status effects for Nathan, so that taking pills, or boozeing it up with another character will grant a status effect for a limited period of time. Like all new systems, this one is currently minimal but will expanded on in the future.
New Feature: Adaptive Loading Screen
Specific screens take a bit longer to load than others, and since I don't like buttons being visible while they are configured, I've added a short loading screen to two worst culprits (Skill Screen and Party) rather than just increasing the loading time of all screens. It's a simple loading screen that pulls a random image from your list of saved wallpapers.
New Topic Features
The most obvious new topic feature is favors now have adaptive icons to properly show the characters current AT. The less obvious feature is some topics have hidden effects that only trigger when you use that topic in conversation with specific characters. For example: If you use the Good Brother Topic, with Diane, it acts like a normal topic with the
Honesty,
Friendly, and
Civility tags, but with Gina or Becky they'll get +5 relationship as well. There aren't many of these currently, but I do plan to add more in as development progresses. These additional effects are secret intentionally.
Continued Party Update
Last Update I expanded the party a bit with Tilley having reactive intros based on her current pose and status at the party, and I've begun converting Becky to the same standard. Currently it only affects Blonde Becky. I'll do her Purple Hair reactive intros in a future update, but there is a decent amount of new Becky content in the party.
Character Page Update
While fixing a bug on the character screen, I did a little sprucing up there. Now there are tooltips for everything in the Possible Archetypes section. This is the first step in cleaning up this screen, and making more of the information accessible through tooltips, so that I can eventually make room on the character screen for future features.
Skill Screen Update
I did some finishing touches on the Skill Screen, regarding the perks overlay. I seperated, skill perks & lifestyle perks, from stat boosts, and unlocks. I also added text to the skill and lifestyle perks to display where the perk is coming from. The perks are color coded, if the perk requires a skill, the color of the perk will be the color of the primary attribute of the skill (green physical, blue mental, pink social, white for generic). If the perk requires a Lifestyle it will show as tan, Stats will show yellow, and Stat Overflow perks will show light yellow. Research unlocks show as purple, Skill unlocks show as light Teal, Location unlocks show as red, and the Gamestart Perk will show as Aquamarine.
Updated Tutorial
With all of the changes regarding Inventory, and the new perk system, the tutorial was extremely out of date, so I spent a good amount of time remaking it and explaining how the game works with all the new systems in place.
Skeeter returns to be ignored by the majority of players once again in an updated tutorial.
UI Overhaul
This part took the longest and was not actually intended, but more of a side-effect of me trying to de-spaghetify my early code and make a flexible validator, and state engine. Once I had finished making the validator and state engine, I added them to the buttons and the scene player, but the conversion code I created to convert all the legacy code into the new system wasn't completely accurate which meant I had to review the configuration of every button and scene in the game by hand.
My primary goal was to unify the systems I used to affect the game state, or to validate the game state, but in doing so, I also (thankfully) standardized the Tooltips on buttons. Now if an action requires a topic, you lose it when you push the button, rather than at the end of the scene (if I remembered to add it that is.) Also the tooltips will give you a lot more feedback now. If you're short a topic, the topic cost will be red, same for stat, skill, lifestyle, and perk requirements. I also generalized gains, and split them off into the Alt Tooltip you can see by holding shift while hovering to remove some of the clutter.
I also cleaned up some of the more obnoxious aspects of the old UI. The big pop-up telling you that you got a new Topic will only occur in very specific instances now. Instead a smaller pop-up will appear on the left side of the screen like any other scrolling pop-up, except it will have the Topic icon next to it. I've made the UI much more constent across the board.
Loads of New Topics
With 8 new tags added to the game, you better believe there's a lot of new topics as well. There's well over 50 new topics if you're counting new Permanents, Transient, Items, and Gear.
Massive Scene Refactor
My desire to unify the game state validator came from how much of a pain in the ass it was to check all the different data types that comprised the game state, so I built a whole new system to track stats, and flags, for characters, locations, and the player. And rather than add to the spaghetti code and tack on an addition to what I was already using, I created a whole new system to validate game states. Unfortunately that meant I needed to convert a lot of the old systems into the new one, and that took a lot of effort and time, because both Scenes and Buttons had thier own methods of validation, and I had to convert those to the new method. So, every button and scene was remade in some way. While a lot of them were converted, a huge amount of them needed a bit of manual configuring to make them work.
Hence how late this update is. On the plus side, I started this update cycle at about 35% done with all my planned refactorings, and now I'm at something like 85%. So, I made huge strides in overhauling the engine. It just cost an unbelieveable amount of time, and stress.
What was cut?
I had initially planned to have a Diane, Charlie, Becky, and Gina AT in this update along with me adding in the Photo Studio Upgrade, but for starters Charlies AT took a lot longer than expected, due to me having to also make a crap load of scenes for Jesse (Almost a full AT's worth of new content). Then there was the refactoring...my initial plan to quickly consolidate the stats on characters unintentionally turned into me creating a new engine to change the game state and a new engine to validate the game state, and then me having to tinker with every button and scene in the game. I've spent the last 4 months just fixing buttons and scenes.
Needless to say, I ran out of time for any of the other planned stuff. I took time to add smaller new additions when I needed a break from reconfiguring buttons (such as the Dark Web), but all in all, this update was really a system focused update more so than a content focused update. I hadn't planned on that, but that's what happened. Needless to say, I will not be refactoring anything next update at all.
TLDR:
Update coming out this week after a final bug pass, and Typo check.
