Hi all, as per our good discussions regarding the balance of stories and game development updates, I wanted to start making more of an effort to communicate the progress of developing X-Change Life! This does not yet have a playtest associated with it - it is purely to talk about what I (and others) have been working on in the base game over the last few weeks.

So yes, the car. Why do we need a car? Where we're going, we don't need roads...

Well, I have always wanted to add a car to X-Change Life (hence it has always been on the roadmap), which when you acquire it acts as the "opening up" moment where you get to explore more of the city, rather than the same few time slots. 

This will serve a few purposes: 
- Giving locations more space to breathe - I can add more locations without just cramming them all into the mall!
- Modders will be able to add new stuff and locations much more easily, without risking breaking / overwriting existing location stuff, they will jsut be able to "drop a pin" on the map effectively!
- Driving itself is a very relaxing thing in the game, drawing on the game's 80s inspirations and Miami Vice concept of the "night drive", or perhaps better the "Outrun" concept of driving for pleasure - driving aimlessly through the city will be able to restore your identity. It will give your character a chance to decompress, think about the stuff they've been doing, as well as eventually to go on dates, etc etc. 
- The car itself is not going to be sexy, rather it is just going to be gameplay glue, and a gate that the player has to earn towards. Eventually I did want to make an in-game radio station with all the recent goings-on, as well as custom X-Change themed songs and stuff, where you can just drive and listen to the radio... but that probably won't be for a while.

There will be a driving minigame, but it won't be required, since it is hard to get it working nicely on mobile devices. (See the video on this post for the latest demo clip of the driving game)

What will happen when you drive:
- You'll gain identity (identity icons will pop up as little powerups on the road)
- You'll have the opportunity to go and do things with other NPCs (such as Hollis)
- You'll unlock locations, which can later be driven to and visited / used by other scenes

I honestly haven't worked out all the mechanics of this. I am hoping to be much more zeroed in on it by the end of the week. My main goal is to make you FEEL the city-ness of Summer City, and to have another thing you can DO, either by yourself or with others.

I know this is a little funny, but I always wanted to make a scene that was a bukkake contest for winning a car. I have had that posted I shared last time hanging around since over a year ago, and always wanted to have this endurance-round type "boss fight" sex scene where you win something really big and important.

Basically, there is a contest held weekly by a local prison (to boost morale! Why does a prison NEED to boost morale? I don't know!). Essentially, this is going to be a difficult, mechanically-driven scene where you have to swallow a LOT of loads, and it is going to be pretty hard to win hopefully. 

You will be able to sign up for the contest at Paradise Mall, once you meet some entrance criteria (you will need to have a full sub-set of X-Change trading cards, like, all the Breeder cards, or all the Girl-on-Girl cards, etc). 

They will give you an InstaGirl Basic for the scene, and it will be pretty tough!

Anyhow, I have always really wanted to make a bukkake scene that was centered around a lot of swallowing and some mechanics around that. It might not be everyone's cup of... tea. But it will be one way to acquire the car. Of course, the other way is to just buy it for $10k, which as has been pointed out, is not really that much money in X-Change Life. 

The sex scene is still a bit under wraps - I will share more soon, should be done in another 2 weeks.

But it involves 50 unique new prisoner npcs, who are ALL very excited to see you! ;) 

But yeah this scene will not be for everyone. It will be really kinky, kinda dark, very cum-oriented. But I am positive that for certain flavors of degenerates such as myself, you are gonna really love it, even if you lose!

On the note of saving up 10k for a car (yes I know real cars are more expensive than that, there are in-universe reasons for this), I am making some efforts to ensure money is a bit more valuable. Because I want 10k to feel like it is an achievement to get to, and for that milestone of being able to buy the car to feel good, and because money is frankly too easy to earn in-game, I have been making adjustments to the sales minigame to make the sales monetary amounts smaller.

Subscribers have been telling me that it is possible to earn 5-10k in one week of working (if you have high stats) - which for the prices of things in game is just a bit too high.

The way I have been doing this is actually cutting the price of of the various pills - especially InstaGirl pills, since those have been easy cash cows for a while, according to Subscribers. And in addition, I have lowered the price tolerance of clients as well, so that they will see cheaper pills as still expensive.

Also, I have cut back some of the "easy win" elements of InstaGirl - these will not necessarily be slam dunk sales anymore. They are great for being safe, but for arguments like "this is really well-suited for your company", the bonuses to the sales chance have been cut in half.

However, I've also made demos MUCH more worthwhile - especially dangerous ones. In fact, the more dangerous a demo is, the higher the demo commission bonus gets. I am hoping that demos will thus be a bigger part in your lucrative sales career, but I am hoping to make it so that saving up for the car takes a bit of effort to do. 

I know there will still be min-maxers who can absolutely crush their sales and stuff, but I don't really mind that. I just want the general rule of thumb to be that money is a bit harder to come by, and thus more valuable. 

The wise and illustrious togashikokujin (yes, same person who made the Mod Loader!) has completed a major upgrade to XCL's save system, migrating from Harlowe's native localStorage to IndexedDB. This might sound like technical gibberish, but it's actually a huge improvement that's been in the works for weeks and will benefit everyone who plays the game.

In simple terms, the old save system had a strict size limit enforced by your browser that we were hitting more and more frequently, especially for players who use lots of mods. This was causing game-breaking problems where saves would silently fail, corrupted saves would appear, or the game would just crash when trying to save/load a game with lots of content.

IndexedDB is a more modern browser storage system that gives us:

This change represents dozens of hours of work and careful testing across multiple browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and Opera) to ensure it works smoothly for the vast majority of players. HOWEVER - it's still very possible you will encounter issues in making the jump, transitioning from localStorage to IndexedDB. Please let us know on Discord if you encounter any problems, when 0.22 is released.

To get this working, togashikokujin had to:

This infrastructure improvement gives us a lot more breathing room for future features. With effectively unlimited save storage, we can:

Anyhow I just wanted to make a huge shoutout to togashikokujin for taking on this challenging task, and to everyone who helped test across different browsers and configurations. This kind of infrastructure work isn't glamorous, but it's essential for the long-term health of the game... similar to apologetic's overhaul of the Harlowe engine for XCL, Goctionni's original save system, HiEv's Harlowe export/import written for us... we stand on the shoulders of technical giants! I have learned javascript throughout developing X-Change Life, but stuff touching browser states and saved games is something I am really nervous to touch, since simple little mistakes could ruin peoples' progress!

Anyhow, I think that's enough for this week's dev log. 

This week, I'll be continuing to progress:
1. The car minigame and mechanics
2. The car contest bukkake scene

As soon as one of these are playable, I will be posting the playtest for subscribers - so stay tuned!