Greetings. It's me.
I got my hardware last week, installed and (almost) configured (almost) everything I need - everything is finally running smoothly. The only downside is that I might miss performance drops that would be obvious on my older, "office" hardware. And that hardware is still failing, so I can't even use it for testing. Still, it served me well and it's the reason some players can "enjoy" the game at 1000+ FPS. I say "enjoy" because it would sometimes eat 100% of PC resources ♿️
Other than that, I'm all set.
Every animation planned for this update that I started working on before the hardware (or software, I still have no idea) disaster is now done and imported. Right now I'm finishing and polishing the "extra" things I started last week. At the same time I'm passively testing passive traits (tree nodes, curses and blessings) - there are so many of them, I don't know if I will ever be 100% confident they're all functioning properly.
I'm glad the scope didn't expand much, but I'd really prefer no scope creep at all for this update. I'm talking about the randomized items, AI (Aster's Intelligence i.e behavior) and ML (Mentor's Lessons, same "intelligence") improvements. These lean mostly toward gameplay since I couldn't work on visuals at the time.
There are many ideas for expanding these systems later, including Dates and other Town activities, both from the community and from my own "notes". For now, I'm building the foundation so future expansions will be faster and cleaner. While implementing the skilltree nodes I ran into several limitations and inconveniences that I created in earlier code, so part of the work is getting rid of those before it's released to players.
It might also be the time to add some "dirty talk" animations. The idea is that interactions could begin with lewd talking instead of touching, maybe even in bright light if certain requirements are met - so a fully virgin, even verbal virgin, run stays possible. Things like unlocking nodes in Aster's tree or gaining certain curses would affect that. It still works (fits) even without any animations, but I don't really like that players might miss it when it is only delivered through Delve log and slight stat changes. While writing this I remembered that dialogue bubbles for Delves already exist and are waiting for me to use them... ♿️...
I'd much rather talk more about the game or show new game content than talk about my computer adventures, but fixing and stabilizing my system came first. Let's hope I won't need to touch anything there until at least, I don't know, full release? Or a sequel full release? It's exhausting. And not fun, not in such amounts.
I apologize for the delays. I'm pushing hard and will try my best to release the update next week.
That's all for today. Thank you for your support and patience. Until next time!