The design work for the Mechanical Forsaken construction system is all done, and now all that's left is to finish coding all the individual effects.  In the process of implementing all the menus and such, I've had to do some thinking about how to present the 7 parts and 28 possible constructions in a way that isn't overwhelming to the player.  After some playing around with it, I've found some solutions that I think work pretty well.

Constructions are grouped according to their function, and most of the functions also follow a pattern for which parts they use.  These groups are the 7 "inhibitors" (two of the same part, grant a global buff to all Forsaken), the 6 "converters" (any part plus a Corrupt Capacitor, generates parts every loop), the 5 "nexuses" (any other part plus a Noxious Node, grants Mechanical Forsaken a huge buff against one specific species), the 6 "consumers" (any of the remaining parts plus a Malice Modulator or a couple of other combinations, consumes other parts for various effects), and the 4 "reinforcers" (some miscellaneous combinations that passively give buffs to Mechanical Forsaken).

I'm also adding a new cheat which will give the player a bunch of parts to play with.  Players who want to experiment with the system will probably also want to cheat themselves a Mechanical Forsaken, too, since most of the buildings only give their buffs to Mechanical Forsaken.  Mechanical Forsaken start out extremely weak, but each construction's buff stacks multiplicatively with other construction buffs, so it can be pretty fun to combine them all together.

Currently, I'm testing out some of the effects of the constructions granted by Mechanical Forsaken parts.  I haven't finalized the full list of construction effects yet, but most of the effects (like bonus damage or generation of further parts) are simple enough for balance and bug-potential purposes.  Those are already finished.

Some of the effects are more complicated.  Back when I added items to the game, I made a big list of potentially interesting gameplay effects, then crossed off some of the ones that I decided weren't a good fit for the system due to various reasons.  In some cases, the reason for crossing them off was basically "Rather than a binary effect for having the item or not having it, it makes more sense for this to be the kind of effect that you can multiply by a scalar value somehow."  I've been going back to that list to see whether I can adapt any of the cancelled ideas as effects which get multiplied by how many of the relevant construction you've built.  So, that's been fun.

In my playtesting, I've been using the buildings against Mechanical Chosen, in order to also use it as an opportunity to test out some of the Operations which didn't show up during my playtesting last month.  I might end up doing some rebalancing there as well.  It's tricky to find exactly which numbers are appropriate for a lategame enemy like this, since you can have such a wide variety of tools at your disposal by the time you reach them around Loop 20 (or earlier or later depending on your route) in campaign mode.

This week, I've jumped straight into working on Mechanical Forsaken.  Rather than the individual dependent-upon-Distortion buffs which every other Forsaken species gets, Mechanical Forsaken are all part of a unified "construction" system.  Once you're able to play through it yourselves, you should be able to see why it needed to be split out into its own release.

Mechanical Forsaken each have the ability to produce a "component" depending on which Distortion was used to defeat them.  For example, Mechanical Forsaken defeated with Despair will produce one Dark Diode at the start of each loop (in addition to granting the usual effects of spared Forasken).  Each Distortion has its own component (which also starts with the same letter as the name of the Distortion).  As for Mechanical Forsaken defeated without any Distortion, they'll produce a large number of Corrupt Capacitors when spared or sacrificed.

These components can then be combined in order to create constructions.  The general pattern will be that you can use two components of the same type in order to create a construction which provides some general universal buff to all of your Forsaken.  This means that if you only unlock Mechanical Forsaken very late in campaign mode, you can use them to get a bit stronger while continuing to rely on the Forsaken you used to reach that point in the first place.

But by combining different kinds of components together (by facing multiple Mechanical Chosen and beating them with different Distortions), you'll be able to get a variety of different effects, some of which will allow you to use your Mechanical Forsaken as much more than just a "component factory," and some of which will grow stronger and stronger over time.  The earlier you unlock Mechanical Chosen, the more time you'll have to let these effects snowball to the point that they can carry your run.  And for players who like to endlessly get stronger and stronger, playing past the planned final battle in Loop 35 will give you plenty of time to build some impressive constructions.

Counting the "2 of the same component" constructions, there are 28 different ways to combine the 7 components (1 for each Distortion, plus the Corrupt Capacitor for non-Distorted Forsaken).  I want each of them to be a tempting option for players deep in campaign mode.

With this release, we're once again pushing deeper into the gameplay features which will be needed in order to finish campaign mode.  And as the first step on that push, Mechanical Chosen have now been added to the game!  Mechanical Chosen have a pretty diverse set of abilities, and Mechanical Forsaken will introduce several more, so I ended up opting to focus purely on the Chosen side of things for this update.  The Mechanical Clash scenario has been added to single play mode, but facing Mechanical Chosen in campaign mode (and making use of their Forsaken counterparts) will have to wait for next month.

The theme of the Mechanical Chosen is that they represent human ingenuity and proactivity.  As such, they don't need to wait until the final battle before trying to destroy the Demon Lord.  Mechanical Chosen conduct "Operations" which count down, day-by-day, to the destruction of the Demonic hive (which means game over).  Furthermore, each Operation grants powerful bonuses to the Mechanical Chosen or to her team as a whole.  Operations can be disrupted by breaking the Mechanical Chosen's Vulnerabilities, but if you aren't careful, you might end up in a situation where the buff granted by the current Operation prevents you from progressing her corruption in the way you had planned.  More than any other species up to this point, Mechanical Chosen require you to plan ahead, so you should read up on what their Operations do and decide which ones you want to trigger!

Because so many of the Mechanical Chosen species were explicitly designed to be indistinguishable from humans at a casual glance, the number of new faces added to the default portrait pack is a bit smaller than usual.  (That said, the "inhuman"ness of the remaining ones is pretty striking - I got a lot of questions about what Mechanical Chosen would look like in the leadup to this update, and I hope those who were interested in this sort of thing will be happy with the result.)  In any case, this freed me up to go back and add more portraits to Animalistic Chosen.  The "songbird" Animalistic subspecies no longer just uses regular human portraits, so this should help people imagine how they're meant to look different despite their lack of animal ears.

This release also has a decent chunk of content commissioned by Kalloi!  The orgasm denial fetish vignette now has a continuation, and that continuation unlocks a new Forsaken tool, the Maid's Cage, which the subject can use to subject other Chosen to more of the same.  Furthermore, the orgasm denial fetish itself has also gotten a bit of new functionality, so that Chosen who have it maxed out will take extra PLEA from related actions in custom sex scenes, and the edged orgasm can end up so intense that it actually knocks them out.

In the coming month, I'm going to be working on the "minigame" that Mechanical Chosen will introduce when converted to Forsaken in campaign mode.  It'll be possible to start doing some pretty crazy things once you have Mechanical Chosen improving your hive.  Once this has been fully implemented, players who are interested in playing beyond the end of campaign mode should have some options that let them do so.

Click here to download.  Mirror.

I'm now done with implementing the gameplay elements of the Mechanical Chosen, so I'm currently playtesting them as I try to implement as much unique flavor for the species as possible.  There are many, many places where it would make sense for Mechanical Chosen to use different flavor text than human Chosen, and even quite a few places where one Mechanical Chosen subspecies should probably use different flavor than a different one (e.g. those with metallic robot bodies versus those who exist as holograms versus those which were designed to be as humanlike as possible).  All I can do is try to catch as many as possible for this release, and then maybe add variants whenever other spots that don't quite "fit" come up during play.

As far as the gameplay goes, I was initially worried that implementing all the different Operations would take too long, but it actually went pretty smoothly.  The only tricky part is making sure that they're all properly balanced difficulty-wise and that they're fun and interesting to play around (my initial plans to have them all be based around blocking or allowing different damage types ended up being pretty boring to play against, so I ended up getting a little more ambitious about giving them unique effects).  From a game design perspective, this is pretty similar to adding Tier 3 Break moves to the other species, with the differences being that there's many more of them, and that their strength depends on which part of the loop they're designed for.  Mechanical Chosen always start off with "Operation Secure a Route to the Demonic Hive", then move on to one of six level 1 Operations after that's disrupted, then move on to one of six more dangerous level 2 Operations, then to an extreme level 3 Operation which imposes some very difficult conditions upon the player.  Finally, after the level 3 Operation is disrupted, the Mechanical Chosen will be pretty much completely defeated, and will adopt a level 4 Operation which actually hurts the Chosen side (such as Operation Kill Everyone, which grants a bunch of bonus Evil Energy every day).  The Operation that's picked depends on which two Vulnerabilities were broken most recently, so players who particularly dislike any given Operation will be able to guarantee that Mechanical Chosen don't use it by picking which Vulnerabilities to break.

Meanwhile, Tier 3 Breaks serve a different purpose for Mechanical Chosen than for other Chosen.  Because the unique gameplay challenge normally provided by Tier 3 Breaks is instead provided by the Operation system, Mechanical Chosen instead basically just use the Tier 3 Break as a buffer before you can finally achieve a Total Break against them.  The Mechanical Chosen's Tier 3 Break action conditions are very simple, and they have no beneficial effects whatsoever.  For example, the Tier 3 Innocence Break action, Sensor Overload, triggers constantly once the Chosen have Lv 5 damage in any trauma, and all it does is increase her PLEA level.  This might make Mechanical Chosen sound weak, but you'll need to take full advantage of this weakness in order to overpower the huge buffs granted by their level 3 Operations.

Currently, I'm waist-deep in the now-familiar workflow of adding a new Chosen species.  I always start with the factors that are pretty much the same between all the species: updating the menus, defining the different subspecies, adding any new body part types which distinguish the new species from the existing ones, and coming up with appropriate transformation incantations and aliases for each subspecies-personality combination.  That last one actually requires some creativity, but I like to get the pure-flavor aspects of each species out of the way first so that I have as much time as possible to mull over the gameplay aspects and make sure they make sense.

Even within the flavor aspects, Mechanical Chosen present a few extra challenges due to the fact that they don't fit the established pattern of the advanced species just being regular humans who awakened or developed certain supernatural traits.  Most of the Mechanical species were never human in the first place, so their "civilian names" should reflect that (though they can still have "adoptive" family members and interact with the Forsaken Bait system).  I want to make sure that the flavor text distinguishes them from human Chosen whenever it would make sense to do so.

On top of that, the gameplay mechanics surrounding the Operation system are also more in-depth than those of most Chosen species, and their planned Forsaken mechanics are quite a bit more complicated as well, since I want to give Mechanical Forsaken a sort of "base building" ability that will allow players to become very, very strong in the postgame and endless mode.

What I might end up needing to do is implement the Mechanical Clash scenario this month, which will allow players to go up against Mechanical Chosen in single play mode, but leave the campaign mode Mechanical Forsaken implementation for next month.  For any players who want to face Mechanical Chosen in campaign mode as soon as possible, the best thing to do is to start a run and play up until beating Judgment, but don't generate the next city after her.  That way, once Mechanical Chosen are added to campaign mode, you'll be able to jump right into a battle against them.