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June project account balance

May’s over already and I have to admit, I haven’t been able to show much visible progress. A lot of the stuff surrounding angels turned out to be a bit of a dead end, but minion merging is looking like a good addition, so hopefully I’ll do better in June.

The big traffic surge from Offbeatr due to TiTS is over, and yet contributions are continuing to roll in steadily. The total funds remaining are a smidge lower than last month ($7k -> $6.2k), but it’s doing a lot better than I’d anticipated. Once again I just really want to thank everybody for their generosity.

Details below:

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Release v0.68

New stuff:

  • Added monks and nuns to the game. But they don’t do anything special and there are no guardian angels. I’ve postponed that stuff until the game has a few prerequisites that I think will help make angels fun.
  • Added some foreshadowing to the early game so that new players know the Baron is looking for them and invasions come as less of a shock.
  • A smidge more writing from Porpentine.
  • More diagnostics for failing to load a save game. According to the logs has happened a handful of times, and I don’t have a lead on why yet.
  • Balance tweaks to help succubus players. Details in this forum thread.
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The sacrilege update

Since my last update I’ve been working on adding angels, monks and nuns to the game and it’s taking longer than I expected. How to work angels into the game puzzled me for a wee while because angels always work for someone – there’s no such thing as a freelance angel. I started thinking about deities (plural, monotheism is boring) and I did invent a couple of gods to add to the pantheon, but then I realised it’d be an awesome surprise to have guardian angels instead.

The basic idea is that immediately before you recruit a monk or a nun, their angel intervenes. Angels are supposed to be chaste and virtuous so they’re bound in chastity equipment. You can’t seduce an angel directly (corrupting one takes some persistence), but if you arouse them enough they get really uncomfortable in their bindings and have to leave, which lets you have your wicked way with the monk/nun.

Trouble is that it’s not fun yet, so I’m going to have to shitcan something in this formula. Chastity limits your options during a sex scene to an excessive degree*, and the whole interruption thing feels a little punitive.

* Though it’d be great as an end to a scene. If you know you’re going to lose the encounter, you could put a mortal in chastity which would give you a bonus to lust the next time you visit.

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Release v0.67

This release is to primarily to install a few upgrades to the frameworks and libraries I’m using.

Other stuff:
– Tome of Hermaphrodites now lifts restriction on mutating beasts with transformations that don’t match their gender.
– A couple of extra transformations for masculine chests. These go in the breast slot.

Next release should have some new characters.

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May project account balance

As I said in the last update, all the excitement generated by Fenoxo’s Trials in Tainted Space Offbeatr has rustled up a lot of donations for Fleshcult, but I’m starting to see that tail off dramatically in the last couple of weeks (Though there’s a nice spike today as everybody checks in to watch the countdown). It’s renewed the sense that I can’t run development indefinitely, and that there’s an end date I need to hit. Looks like it’ll be in August. I’ve been saying July previously, but I haven’t made as much progress in April as I’d hoped.

Details below.

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Using pickle for game saving, 7 months on

This post isn’t much use for anyone but programmers: it’s about the save format I’ve chosen, and a big overview of how it’s been working out for me.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, rather than packing my data into a special format for saving, I just feed my game objects directly into python pickle. Most Python folks regard this with horror!

The drawbacks haven’t exactly been the ones that everyone warns about. Most people I’ve talked to consider that doing this makes it infeasible to change the data format while retaining backward compatibility. In fact, it was pretty quick to set up a data migration system that overrides bits of pickle deserialisation and runs special migration scripts based on a version number stored inside the object.

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Release v0.66

My first deploy of this one briefly broke backward compatibility, but it should be fixed now. If you saw a message about an incompatible profile, it should load fine now, but let me know if it doesn’t.

New stuff:

  • Rewrote chunks of the system that does mortal actions.
  • Can now share message text between player and NPC actions without it mixing up the characters.
  • Can now make messages conditional on what the other character did in the turn, and also dependent on which body parts were involved in both the player and NPC actions.
  • Used this to do a couple of orgasm descriptions that are specific to penetration.
  • Broke character descriptions into paragraphs.
  • Wrote a couple more body part descriptions.

Fixes:

  • Otaku women now have boobs that match their descriptions
  • Text for mortals asking questions was hardly ever getting shown. This is seems to be a bug that’s been in the code for a really long time.

Known problems:

  • Saved games in the midst of an encounter might see some weird messages referring to body parts that only exist on their partner’s body, but that’ll sort itself out when you enter the next encounter.
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Release v0.65

In this release I’ve added:

  • A bunch of new transformations for concubines.
  • Folding sections on Laboratory screen so that it doesn’t get crazy long.
  • More variety in encounter messages.
  • Now all concubine transformations take the same amount of work to do. The work required ramps up as you apply more and more transformations to one concubine. Previously it depended on which transformation it was, with the entry level transformations quicker than the higher tiers. This created an incentive to take all the entry level ones. Now there’s no penalty for picking whatever you fancy.
  • Fixed a bug where when you’re picking a minion to replace, minions with zero upgrades were shown as having one upgrade.

Known bugs:

  • If you’ve got an existing profile and there’s a concubine transformation in progress, the progress bar might show weird values temporarily because the length of time required has changed. Subsequent transformations should be fine.
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Release v0.64

This release I’ve introduced the ability for some mortals to arouse the succubus/incubus beyond normal and bring them to orgasm. When this is starting to happen, a new lust meter is shown for the succubus/incubus. Orgasm drains your mana, but the effects of mingling mana during a simultaneous orgasm can help win a mortal’s trust. Quite of the bit of the text associated with this is a first draft. I’ll be improving it and adding more variations down the line.

  • I’ve added a new mortal character: porn star. They have the above ability, and all the other high level mortals with beast bonuses do too. They appear at cynical difficulty.
  • Fixed a bug where piercings weren’t showing up in character descriptions.