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’.