I spent the last week adding an antagonist to the game, namely the Baron of Hell. Every turn an event card is drawn from a deck, much like a board game. Some of the cards advance the conflict between the protagonist and antagonist. Whether you succeed or fail in these encounters is a result of who you’ve recruited up till that point.

The plot arc isn’t completely finished yet. Still gotta make sure the game has enough variety to keep players entertained that far into it.

This week’s plan: making equipment items more distinct from shapeshifting effects, spell tomes.

I’ve finished my big change to the save format. Existing characters can’t be loaded any more, but it’s for a good cause: making sure I can add features without breaking existing characters in the future.

Bug fixes:

• Tease should never result in horror meter exceeding limit.
• Don’t show the warning that your apprentices are idle before you have any apprentices.
• Don’t show options on the minion recruitment menu that aren’t relevant yet.
• If you click through the age confirmation page, it should now remember that for a year.
• More flavour text on the shapeshifting menu.

Back in June, I recruited some testers off FetLife. Here’s what I’ve added since then:

• The player can be an incubus. The gender of other characters is also now selectable. I added some masculine clothing items too.
• New graphic design.
• Seduction now explicitly shows the likelihood of your success.
• A wider variety of descriptions.
• New minion types: the otaku and the antiques dealer.
• New player actions:
  • Administer vibrators, clamps and needles.
  • Lube, loosen, fist or ride your unwary partners.
  • Grow an ovipositor or lube tentacle.
  • Implant creatures.
  • Lactate.

This is a boring one. I’ve spent nearly a month working on a user account system. It has all the usual bits you’d expect, except that you can also play for a limited time without signing up for a full account. I want to let people get a taste of the game before I hit them with a form to fill out.

Next release is going to be a big internal change to make sure I can add features to the game without wiping peoples’ characters. During prototyping I was saving the game using Python’s Pickling system. It allowed me to experiment with different game ideas without rewriting a whole heap of save code, but it’s utterly under-equipped to handle loading a save from an older version of the code. I’ll be surveying some alternatives and trying out a half-wit idea I have to extend Pickle*.

After that, some actual game features, finally: Random equipment drops when you visit new locations outside the underworld.

* Keep a version number in the pickle for every object. Write a table of conversion functions from each version to the next. Hopefully most of these will boil down to running the new constructor to make sure there’s a complete set of attributes, then deserialising over the top of the result. There’s gotta be a reason why everyone regards object databases as sketchy bleeding edge technology, and I have a feeling I’m about to discover why. But who knows? Maybe it really will be as easy as it looks.