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What I’m up to

I’ve been doing some experimental stuff lately:

  • Giving the player character a lust meter of their own. This would increase when mortals in the sex encounters take actions that arouse the succubus/incubus. When it overflows, the player character cums and this removes some mana from the meter. It’d be cool if ingesting this tainted seed had some kind of corrupting effect on the mortal, but at the moment it just increases the capacity of the horror meter.

    I feel that the mortals in the sex encounters are way too passive and it hurts their believability. The last few weeks I’ve been racking my brains for new actions that mortals can take, but having them do more sex acts without any game mechanical effect is essentially just flavour text. At the same time I don’t think this is adding enough to the game yet to justify the extra complexity of another meter.

  • I’ve been taking a look at the innards of Andrew Plotkin’s Mutagen. It’s a random sentence generator that manages to avoid some of the Madlibsy qualities of generators that simply use a template sentence with gaps to fill in. There are lots of places in the game I might use something like this, though attempting this much granularity results in spending more time formalising English grammar than writing.
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Release v0.63

New stuff:

  • When starting a new game, there are a couple of options to include mortals that are male-to-female transsexuals and female-to-male transsexuals. (Though currently the only mortals that fit these categories are randomly generated characters)
  • A bunch of new body part descriptions from Porpentine.
  • A couple of new equipment items, a crystal glass strap-on to make sure our femme quotient is keeping pace with our butch quotient, and latex gloves (as opposed to the opera gloves).
  • The fingering messages now drop some hints about how much the orifice has been loosened.
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April project account balance

Fenoxo’s success with Trials in Tainted Space has attracted a lot of traffic to OffBeatr, and in turn more traffic to Fleshcult. Thanks to the generosity of all the new users, donations have been doing even better than last month. This month the project account balance is largely unchanged, in spite of the fact I’ve been paying myself and contractors.

Details below:

Continue reading →

Posted in biz
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Release v0.62

This one’s pretty minor, mostly just want to get the live server back on to the latest revision after the rollback yesterday.

  • Added some cock descriptions.
  • Rephrased expired trial page to be clearer, hopefully.
  • Fixed some editor bugs.
  • Fixed error from trying to pay pied piper without enough mana.
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Stale link detection

One of the larger causes of seeing Internal Server Errors is clicking links in pages that are out of date. e.g. Open two tabs, reject a prospective minion in one, and then try to visit them in the other. Today I briefly deployed code that gave a better error message in that case (“Stale link clicked. Try to avoid opening multiple Fleshcult tabs or using the back button”). I pulled it shortly after, because it was getting tripped really frequently.

I’m curious what the situations are where players want to click links on pages that aren’t the latest page that the server has sent back. The only thing I can think of is double clicking an action during an encounter, so that it’ll run twice without having to wait through two page loads.

In any case, I don’t think I’ll try stale link detection again until I’ve got an AJAX UI going.

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Release v0.61

This release has internal changes so that people with older saved games can see the new anal moves I added in v0.60. You’ll still need the anal tome for them to appear. If you don’t like the idea of rimjobs or the player character receiving anal, don’t pick that tome. 🙂

Internally, I’ve changed actions so that instead of being created once when you get a new body part, they’re created from scratch whenever you enter an encounter. This should make backward compatibility easier.

I’m considering making it so that giving anal requires the tome as well. At the moment being a top is standard issue, but being a bottom is an extra. Maybe it’d be better for the people who are grossed out by buttsex if both were opt-in.

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Release v0.60

New stuff:

  • New action for receiving anal that’s revealed if you have the new anal-themed tome.
  • New action for giving rimjobs if you have the new anal-themed tome.
  • Neither of the new actions are visible to people with saved games created prior to this release, for reasons I’ll get into below.
  • Fixed a bug where the fuck action would give a lust bonus based on the capacity of the orifice rather than how much you’re filling it.
  • A bunch of changes to remove text from the source code and move it out into data where the editor can see it.

I made a real hash of handling backward compatibility for this release:

  1. Moving the text into data caused crashes for people loading up saved games that had vibrators, tentacles, clamps, needles or lactating nipples. I should have that all fixed now.
  2. A couple of folks who tried to load up a saved game during my frantic version rollback and patching might’ve seen an erroneous message about incompatible profiles. Ignore it. As far as I know your saved game should be OK now.
  3. I hit a snag trying to figure out a way to retrofit new actions into old body parts inside old savegames. It’s not an impossibility though. I hope to have it going in the next release.

Please let me know if you’re seeing bugs I haven’t mentioned here.

EDIT: Patched another crash that was affecting both old and new games. The symptom was that you’d hit a certain point in an encounter, and it’d crash whenever you tried to pick an option.

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Release v0.58

I got a staging server working and I’ll be splitting my time 50/50 between sexy new features and working on the editor in the coming week. This release is mainly to make sure none of the stuff I’ve reorganised is going to break on the production server.

Other tweaks:

  • Changing your e-mail address requires following an activation link sent to the new address, to make sure you don’t lock yourself out of your account with a typo.
  • Only the beast upgrades that are appropriate for the minion’s gender are shown.
  • Reduced width of encounter action buttons so that a wider range of display resolutions get a two-column layout.
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Fleshcult outage

My database cache provider is currently having an outage. No ETA on a fix yet, but they’re replacing the machine. Again. They replaced the box I was on back in January too.

EDIT: It’s back up again. They haven’t mentioned anything about data loss, so hopefully everything is still there. In any case, the database behind the cache has your saved game as of the last time you completed an encounter. As far as I know, losing the encounter in progress would be the worst-case scenario.