Hello everyone!
It's been a week since the preview release, so I'm making this post to keep you all updated with what I'm working on. I think it'll be easiest to summarise the main points in a list, so here's what I've completed for the public release so far:
- Lilaya's kitty lingerie: I've added a small voyeur scene where you can spy on Rose and Lilaya being lewd while Lilaya wears the kitty lingerie which she summons from Lyssieth's wardrobe (so this scene is unlocked after upgrading your dressing room with Lyssieth's wardrobe). The kitty lingerie was originally added by DSG quite a while ago, but hasn't been used in any unique content until now.
- 'Filly' Naming: I've seen more than a few people commenting on how the 'filly' naming during Natalya's content is off-putting, so I've decided to change these 'filly' references to 'mule'. I used 'filly' as I wanted a horse-related term which would be demeaning, and I didn't consider that some players could interpret it as a 'questionable age' reference (which was certainly not my intent). I know that there will be some of you who are annoyed by this change, so if you prefer the 'filly' naming, then I've made it so all references to mule switch back to filly if you swap a sticker value on the choker which Natalya gives you (which now defaults to reading 'mule' instead of 'filly').
- Items: I've added a few new pieces of jewellery with gender symbols on them (male, female, and herm). I've also added some similar gender-themed tattoos, and I added a couple of stickers to the new latex hood to allow you to remove the eye and mouth holes.
- Randomly enchanted clothing: The randomly-enchanted clothing which you can discover in alleyways hasn't been changed in a very long time (I think that they're the same as when they were originally added some time around v0.1). As such, the negative enchantment which could be placed on them was always either a slight debuff to one attribute, or two slight debuffs to two different attributes, with a random-strength seal on it. When I was testing an unrelated bug fix, this suddenly jumped out at me as being incredibly boring, and so I got horrendously side-tracked from fixing bugs to address this instead. As such, I've added a new system to generate random enchantments on clothing. I've also expanded the clothing which you can find in alleyways from being just 'common' rarity items to also include 'uncommon', 'rare', and 'epic' rarity items (the chance of finding common items is 80%, with 20% of the time drawing a random uncommon, rare, or epic item). To populate this new system, I've added a variety of transformation themes from which random enchantments will be drawn, as well as some more (admittedly far less fun) attribute drain effects, for a total of over 30 new cursed enchantment effects. This system is fully compatible with modding, so if you want to add your own effects then I've made a fully-commented example in the mods folder.
- Tooltips: While working on the enchanted clothing system above, I noticed a lot of formatting issues with clothing tooltips (which were also present in weapon, item, and tattoo tooltips). I spent a while moving the tooltip elements around until I arrived at a point where I was happy with them. From now on, tooltips should no longer get cut off if an item has loads of enchantments, and thanks to a slightly wider size and a rearranging of the effects and description panels, they should be a lot more readable. Working with CSS to get the formatting right was a bit of a nightmare, and it took me most of two days to get it right...
- Other small things: I've got a dozen bugs fixed and made some other minor changes, but the bulk of the bug-fixing is yet to be completed.
- Artwork: I'm also commissioning some more artwork, and tomorrow I'll make a poll here on SubscribeStar to ask you which character you'd like to see art of next (from FriendlyAlienFriend this time, and there will be more Pusspuss artwork very soon).
I've been working hard on the above since releasing 0.4.10.9 a week ago, and I feel like I've made some good improvements to the game. Hopefully the random enchantment system will make it a little more exciting to try on unidentified items found in alleyways!
I really need to focus now on fixing bugs, but before that I desperately need to get some Pull Requests merged from github. The process of merging those PRs will probably take me a couple of days, and then after that I'm going to start working my way through through bug reports. I'll take a few days to get as many fixed as I possibly can, and then after that I'll make the public release of v0.4.11. I've promised myself not to give release dates from now on, as that was contributing significantly to my anxiety, but I can say that I'll at the very least be making a progress news post by the end of this next week, so I'll see you again soon!
