TLDR: Lots of progress is being made but the stuff I'm doing takes time and testing. Poll unrelated to the sims at the end.
Shashoobee (Happy New Year) Everyone!
(Is that cringe? Is simlish out of vogue now with the EA shit going on? Anyways, it doesn't matter...)
I realize it's been a quiet couple months, although I hope my various polls and inquiries make it evident that things are actively moving forward. I recognize that a lack of content makes it hard to want to continue to support, especially this time of year, so I'm very appreciative of everyone who has stuck around, as well as those who have had to take breaks.
I've been making a lot of progress on multiple mod updates, albeit in a scatter shot manner that makes things hard to summarize. Lots of mechanical and numbers testing. Lots of experimenting the vanilla weight gain mechanics for Gainers and Feeders. Lots of digging through the game files. All of this is basically to make sure that weight gain focused gameplay feels intuitive for regular game play and not to necesarily micromanage each and every aspect.
I've also been wrapping my head around wrangling this Club system to work cleanly and succinctly with my mods in a way that frankly EA hasn't even done with their own content. For instance, Small Business autonomy seems to lack on/off lot distinctions meaning sims will opt to do social interactions with half way across the map if the proper guardrails aren't put in place.
Then there's the interactions themselves. I've never felt completely satisfied with all of the dom/sub interactions/situations, so in generating club interaction lists, I've been testing and reworking these to make them not only mechanically interesting for the active sim, but so that they can also provide environmental flavor. This means exploring different interaction animations, adding flavorful dialogue in the notifcations (like with bromance) etc. etc. A lot of this is being done in gay archetypes but will extend to my other mods as well.
Finally two mods that were pivotal to my mods early on have finally robust enough updates that I feel comfortable incorporating them into my mods again. I've mentioned the AEP mod, but Nisa has also made prostitution in wicked perversions so much more immersive that I'm considering making it a requirement for at least gay archetypes again (feel free to sound off in the comments if you have strong feelings one way or another.) That being said, I've had to take some time away from active development to testing this updates to see how they fit into my mods.
All of this stuff that is moving full steam ahead but has a while yet to go. I may drop some small goodies here and there that come out of experimentation but no promises for a little bit.
One last thing, unrelated thing: this past week I've become obsessed (as I'm sure many of you have) with Heated Rivalry aka the Gay Hockey Show. It's sparked a lot of inspo to make more gay shit again (as if my mods aren't gay enough). I know I've been teasing some other game dev projects so I just wanted to see what ideas I have rolling around resonate most with y'all.
Keep in mind that right now these will all likely start life as RPG maker projects but may become something more.
So what sounds most interesting to you?