New stuff:

• Since I added the meter animations, I feel like they’ve been stealing attention from the text. I’ve been experimenting with ways to draw the player’s eye back to the writing. I settled on fading it in after the meter animations finish and enlarging it slightly.
• Split fetishwear off from sex toys in the sanctum so that the menus are less cluttered.
• Displaying *NEW* indicators on tomes and tabs when new transformations are unlocked.
• Added a button for discarding tomes.
• Made the highlight on tapped links persist until the next page loads so that players using Fleshcult from the iOS home screen get more feedback.

Bug fixes:

• Fixed a rare bug that prevented saved games from loading.
• Prevent people from pressing Transform button without a selected transformation.
• Fixed changing names/reordering minions so that they redirect back to the right page.

That rounds out all my planned UI work and I’ll be going back to working on content for v0.91 – v0.95. Let me know if I’ve missed anything that’s particularly sloppy or cumbersome.

New stuff:

• Cast Loosen is now Loosening Lotion, a piece of equipment you can get in the sex toy catalogue.
• It fits into a toolbelt slot, of which there are now two instead of one. If you buy loosening lotion for one slot, you’re basically back to the way things were, but there’s more freedom to mix and match. Enabling multiple slots of the same type required surprisingly widespread changes to the slot system, which is why this release took such a long time.
• If you’ve already bought equipment or had a transformation, you can revert back to it without spending mana.

Balancing tweaks:

• Slightly reduced mana prices on some mid game items.
• Reduced mana cost of loosening.
• Raised lust increase rate of vibrator.
• Acupuncture needles now only give a 66% increase in sensation.

UI tweaks:

• If the encounter meters are too wide for your display, they’re now automatically scrolled to a position where you can see the animations.
• New icon by Lavah! (pictured)
• If you start the game from a home screen icon on iOS, Safari’s UI is hidden to save screen real estate.
• New character screen is way less ugly.
• Improved legibility of status effects and meter numbers on mobile.

The main addition in this release is the ability to rename the main character and the minions. You can also set whether they use male or female pronouns. I’m continuing to improve the UI on small displays, and I should be done with that after batch of tweaks.

Other fixes:

• Fixed missing Reject buttons.
• Fixed skip tabs in encounter on mobile.
• Made the credits, new account, building and surface missions screens easier to use on narrow displays.
• Made it easier to tap options when selecting a merge type or side effect on a touchscreen.

This is just a little patch that I’ve put out early to hopefully fix a nasty save game loading bug (“Internal Server Error” 100% of the time for certain unlucky accounts).

Other bits:

• You don’t need to click on a lab or sanctum transformation in order to see the effects. Hovering over them with the mouse will give you a preview.
• Slightly more keyboard navigation available on the end of encounter screens. I’ll revisit adding more keyboard navigation once I’ve added character renaming. I make sure it interacts with text boxes OK.
• Spent a while looking for the cause of increased server timeouts over the past 2 weeks. Still don’t know what’s causing them.
• Fixed up my fuzz testing utility so that it works after the recent UI changes. It’s a script I run on my dev machine that clicks links randomly at high speed. Ran it for quite a while and it bumbled its way all the way to the endgame, but the timeout never showed up.

Added:

• Lavah finished off the Sanctum background painting! It’s looking really slick.
• Reformatted Lair header, Lab, Diary and Sanctum screens for mobile.
• Redesigned transformation selection so that it’s a grid of transformations rather than a table. Separated the details for each into a detail pane allowing for longer descriptions.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed error when using a piece of equipment that has no applicable body parts.
• Fixed error when entering encounter with a mortal left in chastity for a long time.
• Possible fix for meter animations not beginning on slow or unreliable net connections. Let me know in the comments if this is still happening.
• Made IE compatibility mode icon go away.

This release I started out with a more ambitious plan to do a Civ-style tree view for the minion transformations along with a Civ-style work queue. It’s funny though, Civ lets you queue buildings and set multi-step research targets, but it doesn’t let you queue multi-step research targets. This is what I’d need to be able to mix beasts and concubines in the apprentices’ work queue. I started towards that, but it was getting too complex for the limited time I have left, so I canned it in favour of a straightforward reformat for mobile.

New stuff:

• I’m starting to get commissions in from a new artist, Lavah! Her first contribution is finishing off the title painting (it’s based on a sketch by RJ Palmer). Hope you like it.
• Animated meters. I’ve broken the animation into stages so that you can see the different contributions to the end state. Also, when you lose an encounter, you can see what happened to the horror meter.
• A new character in Old Town: The Goth.
• Redesigned the title page.
• On mobile devices, when you’re in an encounter it defaults to scrolling past the header.
• Typo fixes.

Known bugs:

• Sometimes when a meter animates away from zero, it pops to the end position.
• Animation isn’t supported on IE 8 or 9. You’ll see things jump instead.

As always, let me know if you’re seeing glitches with the new stuff.

I’ve redesigned the encounter menus:

• It has 1, 2 and 3-column responsive layouts so that it’s comfortable to use on anything between a desktop and a phone in portrait orientation.
• To save screen real estate, the description for an action is now hidden in a tooltip (tap to see it on a touchscreen). If you’re seeing an action for the first time, it’s also displayed within the button.
• Buttons are somewhat sexier; not quite so brown.
• If you’ve got a small display, a row of skip tabs appears. It allows you to skip to different parts of the move list without scrolling.
• You can select menu options from the keyboard.
• Some moves allow you to select which body part they apply to.
• A couple of typo fixes. Replaced a few mentions of ‘anus’ with ‘ass’ to make it less clinical.

Known bugs:

• If you’re playing an old saved game, you might see descriptions for the all actions appearing during the first encounter after the upgrade. The descriptions are only supposed to show up for new actions and It’ll go back to normal in your second encounter.
• If you’re on IE8 you get skip tabs no matter how big your screen is. (IE8 doesn’t support media queries)

So far I’ve tested on Windows Firefox 23, IE 8-10, Chrome, a Galaxy S3 running Android 4.1.2 (Samsung stock), a Nook HD+ (also stock), and an iPhone 3G running iOS 4.2. Let me know if I’ve missed any weirdness on your set-up.

This release took way, way too long. Partly it was me being blindsided by web standards snafus (Touch screen browsers send hover events? Whaaaat? IE8 puts the event object where!? Etc. etc.), partly it was the sheer variety of things to test, and partly it was feature creep. I want to do the meters next, but I think I’m going to have to skip some of my zanier ideas*.

* (Like the Lust meter fluctuating according to a heartbeat. If you were to time your button press just right, you’d get a slightly larger increase. Or slightly smaller, if that’s what you’re going for)

Build notes:
– New character: The Demon Hunter. DWLGaming led the design of this as a pledge reward. Big thanks for his help and generosity.
– Fixed duplication in titty fuck message.
– More variations in male orgasm.
– Editor fixes.

I’ve spent some time hunting for the game load bug unsuccessfully. Like I said earlier, if you get a “There was a problem loading your game” message, please let me know what the circumstances are.

Next up, I’ll be experimenting with hierarchical menus inside the sex scenes, with an aim to finding out whether being able to target your actions adds anything to the game.

New in this release:

• The cost of a trap is now determined by how many you already have installed, so you can pick the kind that interests you without being disadvantaged.
• Extra variations on fisting for very loose orifices.
• Titty fucking has been redesigned so that it gives a mana bonus if it results in an orgasm.
• Fixes for missing paragraph breaks in body descriptions.
• Typo fixes.

Also, if you’re suffering from “There was a problem loading your game” errors, could you let me know the circumstances? (when the game was originally started, what happened immediately before the error)  I’ve been seeing a handful of these crop up in the error logs, but I don’t have enough information to track the bug down.

In this build I’ve made a bunch of changes to the way that sex scene messages are collated internally. They’re no longer presented strictly in the order that they occur. For example, a character’s musings go into an end paragraph rather than being interleaved between all kinds of distracting sex acts. I can now apply formatting to messages. I’ve used it to italicise game mechanical messages (as opposed to narrative ones).

This one was a pain in the ass to test. Please let me know if you notice that any kinds of messages have disappeared, or if it’s composing paragraphs in a strange way.

Other changes:

• Fixed bat wings showing up in the beast transformation menu as simply ‘wings’.