Update 48: Spring(?) Cleaning
Oops. It’s been a while. Happy new year.
In October, we decided to push back our update, and the reasons will be explained below. We did not expect things to take this long to resolve. If you don’t especially care about the reasons why, or how we plan to address the future, please feel free to scroll down to the patch notes – it’s a very bugfix and cleanup focused update.
Before the explanations begin, we would like to apologize for the delay as it’s not something that’s previously ever happened in the development of VS – when I started this project, I did not want to be one of many developers giving sob stories to justify incessant delays, and while we managed to stay away from that for years, it finally caught up.
What Happened
Part 1: First, the issues relating to VS.
This has been said a few times so far, but when I started working on VS nearly 5 years ago, it was a small personal project designed to be developed by one person with complete disregard for the long term. I built the original 0.1 in a matter of roughly 3 weeks, then released.
I started out with a 2-week release cycle, attempting to create a marketable and promotable version every release. This was clearly unsustainable, and quickly was changed to a monthly cycle, but I still strived to create features that would justify returning to the game for most players. Years of this and being a solo dev created a completely absurd amount of bugs, unoptimized monstrosities, and unimaginable uncommented spaghetti visual scripting code. VS became my personal mental maze of different features connecting to each other, and I honestly figured I was so deep that nobody could ever help me with it.
Over the years, while we’ve been able to clean some of it up through various reworks and optimizations, at its core, it remains the same project. There’s only so much that can be done to resolve that while also providing the playerbase with notable updates that justify their continued subscriptions. This is a common issue for most Patreon-based projects in general, but with VS, a lot of circumstances converged to put us in a really bad position. This is why we’ve had issues with mobile crashes for years - even if the game may not look especially intensive, it has an extreme amount of code.
Things became slower and slower over time after 2023 when we decided to add the most extreme customization ever put in a JOI project. By the time 2024 arrived, we had a major problem that we were just coping with as we quickly moved towards burnout.
Part 2: Personal Issues
Over the span of 5 years, I’ve personally gone through a lot of life challenges that did not cause hiccups in VS’s development. I didn’t want to give excuses, and I took pride in my ability to keep working through anything. This year decided to be a lot harsher on the team.
House floods, four lawsuits relating to moves and property, identity theft, cherished pet deaths, family terminal illness, business partnerships falling apart, malicious rumors being spread… The list goes on, and it has primarily been stacked in the later part of 2024. It hasn’t exactly been our favorite year.
We’ve given some amount of detail about all this throughout conversations in the VS Discord, but it would be far too lengthy to explain here. Instead, I’d like to bring up a subject that isn’t frequently discussed in this industry – working on porn during hard times.
Part 3: Burnout
Now, obviously, designing and making porn games is a job – there are very fun elements, and we’ve shared plenty of late night laughter at ideas and concepts that would be impossible at a regular office job.
The flipside of this is that when it’s time to design something horny… well, you have to be capable of at least thinking about things from a certain perspective. Over time, this ability fades as the project becomes routine, but never more than when you’re simultaneously handling things like loss and extreme personal stress.
We both have healthy personal lives, and I believe it’s a part of our job to remain a part of our local BDSM community, go to events and such to get ideas and be in the right state of mind to design this game for our players. In the later part of this year, it hasn’t been much help.
While I wouldn’t say we are fully burnt out on the game – we definitely still get bursts of design inspiration, ideas, and fun working on it, we are still not in our prime when it comes to VS. It’s very close to feature complete (to be honest, it’s feature-creeped as hell). This is kind of inevitable after 5 years, but luckily we retain our passion for working on porn games & adult-related things and we’re not about to move on from that.
Part 4: Other Projects & Challenges
We have worked on a variety of other projects to help this burnout – other game projects, designing physical products (we’re hoping to make more announcements about that soon, it’s been a lot of iteration), and we’ve also started our own brand of BDSM events. Our goal is to leverage our success with VS into something bigger, and we’ve faced both challenging defeats and happy successes striving for that.
The most notable challenge has been our attempts to create more JOI games – VS is a hard project to beat, and we’ve been market leaders for a long while now. It’s impossible to match the customization VS offers, so we’re exploring new ways to approach instructions and gamifying masturbation in ways we haven’t seen elsewhere. It’s taking a lot of different design attempts, but we’ve learned a lot of lessons.
In the last few months of this year, we’ve tried to introduce the concept of multiplayer to VS. Couples & more has been a market we haven’t been able to approach, and our ambition is not limited to producing a gamified equivalent of a real BDSM relationship – we actually want to create games that improve BDSM and allow people to experiment and experience new things. The best thing about VS is how many people have been allowed to explore their sexuality further as a result of simply toggling on some instructions.
Unfortunately, regardless of what we tried, it wasn’t possible to make VS a *good* multiplayer experience. We achieved something that was usable, but we were not satisfied with it – especially after watching the beta version get used at a BDSM event. People seemed extremely interested, and VS had by far the most interest of the whole event, but it simply wasn’t up to par to our design expectations.
After many iterations, much of our work did not make it into the game. When it comes to multiplayer, we’ve now moved on to integrating multiplayer in our new attempts to create JOI instruction formats based on our experience with VS – hopefully far more efficient and web-client compatible to ensure people don’t need good phones and we can provide support for more devices, including IOS.
Future Plans
Our future plans are shifting a bit – some will be happy to hear it, some may not appreciate the news, but we genuinely believe it’s for the good of our work.
Since Vector joined the team, I (SuccuDev) have generally focused on the design, brainstorming, and the rapid iteration of new features. With the state VS is currently in and the technical debt we’ve accumulated, it’s time for me to slow down and stop creating more issues for us to handle.
There are many elements of VS that do not meet my new design expectations after these years of experience. As the original designer of the game, my goal will be to reality check us – is this feature really ok? Did we do too much here, did we focus too little on that? What should be cut, what should be expanded? What feedback is the most important, and what feedback will only be used by 0.01% of players?
Vector was always a more thorough and cleaner coder than I was, so as far as VS is concerned, he will generally be taking the lead on refining what needs to be done. I will still be available to work on whatever is needed, but things have to change before the project becomes such a mess it can no longer be worked on.
On my end, I will simultaneously be working on design & prototyping for this new format of JOI instructions and gamified BDSM. I am very excited about my latest developments, and I hope I’ll be able to present them to you soon. Lessons learned from VS will be applied in this new project in ways we simply cannot add to VS itself this late in development.
The most notable pain points to address are setup, pacing, instruction realism, ensuring we create a *consistently* good experience, and supporting multiplayer for players who have relationships while simultaneously providing a fun time for solo players.
VS itself will continue to get iteration with a large focus on getting to a 1.0 version. Below is a list of our most important points to address to reach this:
- Improve voice acting
- Fix all the menus that were left behind
- Improve setup flow, it should not take hours to customize the game to your liking.
- Significantly improve performance & minor bugs that were overlooked for speed.
- Clean up parts of the game that haven’t been changed in years, get everything up to our current design standard.
- Resolve the shitshow of our Bluetooth toy implementation to make sure it’s more approachable on the entry level while retaining interesting BDSM complexity.
A missing point here is iteration on art – while we hope to find a solution, it’s extremely hard to expand upon the game’s art in an efficient way due to how the project was initially created. It’s also very challenging to find an artist that we could trust enough to rely on for the long term, so if we do eventually find a solution, it will come last to ensure we are not left mid-development with incomplete art – a frequent and unfortunate fate for many NSFW projects.
In conclusion, I hope this write-up was thorough enough to justify our 4-month delay. We are unsure what the new release schedule will be for now, but we’ll keep you updated.
Below are the patch notes for this optimization & bugfix focused update – we hope many players will once again be able to play the game as a result of this work. If you have any further questions, we’re always available on the discord and just one ping away.
Version 48:
Major Core Optimizations and Restructuring
• Many years of coding errors have been fixed
• Many vestigial objects have been removed
• The session loading sequence has been altered
Together these changes result in both reducing the amount of overall ram used by the game and in smoothing out the memory spikes that occur during session load. This reduced memory stress should alleviate the crashes during session loading that many mobile devices have been experiencing, particularly Samsung devices. We were able to successfully load a session on a Samsung Galaxy A24 4GB, and even have it survive tabbing out and back in (though I would still not suggest doing so frequently on lower end devices).
• The core task data repositories have been remade
Where the old spaghetti structures could need to loop hundreds of thousands of times, the new structures can fully process within hundreds of loops. This speeds up a significant part of the loading time at the start of the session, and eliminates a large quantity of data that is no longer used by the game.
• The core task picking structures have been rebuilt
• The Wait Timed Task now acts as a final fallback for all task types and will only be chosen when no other task is possible due to the current player state (this does not affect the Tedium toggle, which can still be chosen as it normally would)
The new structures run in a fraction of the time that the old ones took and should no longer contain a memory leak. Players should no longer see multiple second delays where she is stuck trying to pick a task under restrictive conditions. At its worst, certain player states could cause the old structures to chew through megabytes of ram per second or even crash the session completely.
• The way that each task’s rate of occurrence is determined has been completely reworked
The rate of all tasks across the board are different than they previously were, and player set task rate modifications now have a greater effect. Challenge Focuses are now more reliably chosen for the majority of tasks during challenge sessions
• Player statuses are now given by a variable timer instead of being part of the pool of random task choices
This should result in them being more evenly spread out throughout the session. Making her furious will cause her to immediately attempt to give a Punishment status
• The Strip event is now handled on its own now rather than taking the place of a reward task
• Extending the session during Her Choice is now handled on its own rather than taking the place of a reward task
After years of intertwining feature additions piling on to it, the calculation of each task’s rate of occurrence had become a bloated, obfuscated mess. In some cases, the rate of certain tasks could end up so low that even having the player multiply that by 5 would have negligible effect. Player adjustment will now have a more pronounced effect, and tasks that were unnecessarily rare should be more commonplace. The most notable instance of this is a significant increase in the Boob Bounce and Hip Dance showing up.
• The core task code has been aggressively pruned
This results in reduced size and increased processing speed for Tasks, Timed Tasks and Metronome Tasks. Alongside this, some bug fixes and re-tuning have led to the following changes:
• The text after Timed Task switches and mini-events (mini-metronome ect.) should now be more variable instead of choosing the same instruction multiple times in a row
• Metronome tasks that ask you to count down from a number no longer have one isolated finger wag at the end of them every time
• The speed of Metronome Tasks is now variable between tasks rather than a constant value
• The total counts for Metronome Tasks are now more variable
. You can connect a mic via xtoys and she will then be able to hear you within toy events. She will not be able to punish you if you make noise during silent event or reward you for repeating the phrase if you don't have anything she can use along with that. Perhaps you can get creative there and add some stuff to xtoxs (metronome sound, whip sound for spanking or some videos) which you can use for punish/reward?
