Hi! Today's post is about what's currently in development for "Life with the Tribe", as well as what unfortunately had to be dropped.

The new build isn't ready yet, but work continues while Frazunk is helping with animations for Demonnete Playtime. Here's an example of something he made:

So what's changing in Life with the Tribe?

First, the thing everyone's been asking for for ages — you can now properly close the game and adjust settings during gameplay (settings menu, return to title, and quit game):

This is a simple part, but it was needed for a long time. You may also notice two new settings options that weren't there before — these are for the full version of the game (or the patched version). The first option switches all characters from the West version to the original ones, while the second removes censorship from the Asian version.

But as I mentioned, the new changes aren't just to the game's backend code. I've also improved the look of the main character a bit:

I'm also going through all the animations I have and making small fixes to each one. Some, like the sex scene with the shopkeeper girl, might be changed entirely, since it's very hard to carry that animation over to the West version.

Why bother with all this? There's a reason — I want to bring the look of the base game closer to the look of the content I'm planning to add as DLC. Some changes are fairly easy to add, so this won't be like with Demonnete, where the animations and game details are much more complex.

Alongside these changes, I'm also working on improving some of the mini-games, fishing in particular. Fishing is a pretty weak part of my game, so even for the base game I'll be improving both the quest tied to getting the fishing rod and the mini-game itself. Right now I'm planning to lock getting the rod behind a purchase, and also raise the price of fish.

Since I brought up prices and purchasing, let me talk about that too. Honestly, the whole buying/selling part of the game isn't balanced at all — once you buy the important items (like the shears for cutting sheep wool, and the robot girl's limbs), the whole point of the economy basically disappears. That's obviously due to the current amount of content in the game, so for the base game I won't change anything except making prices more balanced. But in the DLC I'm planning to add more situations where you need to buy and sell things. For example, I'm planning to add gifts/consumables for the tribe's women. You might've noticed there's a heart icon in the settings menu — that will show the women's affection toward the main character, because even if you've fuck them, that doesn't mean they instantly fall in love with you. What exactly unlocks affection you'll find out once I finish updating the base game.

That's what's currently in development — but what got dropped? There's a lot here, and unfortunately some of it was interesting as a concept, but too hard to pull off within the game's limits.

The most interesting one was a tribe life simulation. I genuinely tried to develop this — making the tribe feel more alive, adding walking/movement animations for every NPC, giving them tasks, daily schedules, and so on. It would've made the game more interesting, but the problem was that implementing this on top of an already-built game was way too difficult and would've drastically changed how the game plays. Right now the game is simple: you talk — get a quest — complete it — get a reward, that's it. But once everyone starts walking around doing their own things, it looks cool, but the core of the game stays exactly the same. Aside from immersion, it wouldn't have added anything, so this idea got dropped and reworked into something that fits the game better — more on that later.

Another one was shared poses. I thought about adapting every pose in the game to fit each NPC. It's a cool idea, but it would require a huge number of animations, since every NPC differs from the others in height and body size. Honestly this just balloons the amount of animation work, and maybe once the DLC is ready I'll consider it — but only as final content for this game, since adding new poses down the line would be way too much work (it's not 3D where you can just rotate the model however you want).

I also dropped the idea of changing the dialogue. Right now the dialogue is often unclear to a lot of people, since the dialogue bubble itself is pretty small, and so are the icons shown in it. I sketched a couple of examples with a bigger dialogue bubble, but honestly it didn't really solve the problem. Overall, how quest information is presented could be a real issue in the DLC, so I want to add notes to the player menu that show a mini-portrait of whoever gave the quest along with its objective. It won't have text, of course, but I think it'll help players understand what they need to do.

Development is continuing, and I know it's been a while since the last build. That's on me, and I'm sorry for that, but I'll keep working until I'm satisfied with the result. Because if I don't like what I made myself, how could you like it, right?