Now that we've entered the month whose release will bring the Reason boss fight, it feels more appropriate to give a proper preview of her personality and appearance.  She's already shown up a few times in the previous boss stories and the item descriptions, and players who have read those parts will recall that she had a sort of "mad scientist" air about her - pretty appropriate for the boss of the Mechanical Chosen.

However, unlike most mad scientist characters in fiction, Reason cares a lot about morality.  In fact, she believes that moral laws, just like physical laws, can be investigated and determined objectively through experimentation.  Her worldview is based on the idea that the material world is all that exists, and therefore our ideas about what should and shouldn't be done must all ultimately come from our observations about how the material world works.

This might seem like a pretty radical viewpoint in a world where magical powers are real and belief dictates reality, but the scientific method still applies even to a place like that.  When the same action is taken, then the same result should occur.  And if a different result occurs, then there must be some difference in the conditions of the experiment.  It's a lot harder to reproduce experimental results when the researcher's mental state is always a factor in the experiment, but it's still fundamentally possible.

This worldview naturally lends itself to a determined, forward-thinking personality.  Reason doesn't have Victory's idealism or optimism, but she does have confidence in her ability to overcome any obstacle with enough time and effort.  The desire to make the world better, combined with a realistic outlook that acknowledges the evil within the world, was what made her get along so well with Judgment.  And once Judgment falls, Reason will acknowledge the Demon Lord as a problem that must be solved at any cost.

Normally, this is where I'd post the full-body preview of Reason's character design, but I realized this morning that I made a serious mistake by not including a labcoat in her transformation.  I'm still in the middle of fixing that, so for the time being, I can at least show off her work-in-progress portrait.  Astute players might notice the similarity with the "Reason Brainscan" subspecies of Mechanical Chosen.  I've known roughly how I wanted Reason to look for awhile.

This is a small bundle of bugfixes which didn't make their way into the main release.
Click here to download.  Mirror.

This is just a small release to hold everyone over while I work on implementing Reason's boss fight, but it does have a couple of features which might prove enjoyable.  The first is the introduction of a new position to custom sex scenes.  In addition to being "on top of someone," "below someone," and "on her back," it's now also possible for custom sex scene participants to be "bent over."  This position is basically used as an invitation to penetration, and Forsaken with high Deviancy and Obedience (or who are especially enamored with everyone present in the scene) will use it to make it easier for you to give them what they want.

The other new addition is something the game hasn't received for quite awhile: a completely new face in the default portrait pack!  Ever since the introduction of the first advanced species, the number of basic human faces in the default portrait pack has remained at 16, and the only new addition has been advanced-species-variants of those faces.  But as Corrupted Saviors starts to near completion, I want to start filling out all the duplicate faces so that players are less likely to see repeats.  The new face is currently shared between Triumph and Stigma, and the portrait pack also includes their advanced species versions (Catgirl, Vampire, Succubus, Seraph, and Night Elemental).

Aside from a couple of bugfixes and minor improvements, the rest of the work this month went into working on Reason's boss fight so that I could be sure that it'd be finished next month.  If I overprepared, then there might be some time to squeeze in some of the extra content that otherwise would've been done this month, but I wouldn't bet on it.  The gimmick of Reason's fight is a pretty crazy one, and finishing the implementation and playtesting will take some work.  I look forward to showing it off!

Click here to download.  Mirror.

Just a short progress report this time, but I'm pretty confident that I've laid enough of the groundwork for Reason's boss fight that I'll be able to finish it for next month's release.  I plan on using the rest of the month to make a little bit of content for the current month's release, just so that it's not completely empty.  To start off, I'm adding a completely new face to the default portrait pack.  Now that all of the advanced species are done, I can make the human version and all the other species' versions in quick succession, so it makes sense to start adding more variety now.  After that, I'm going to be looking at my backlog of "maybe eventually" ideas and see if I can squeeze a couple of those in too.

Currently, my main focus is on preparing the boss fight against Reason.  It won't be ready this month, so the coming release is going to be a pretty small one.  There's no getting around this.  Adding boss fights requires a lot of work in the best of times, and Reason's boss fight will be an especially tricky one to implement.

The mechanics of Reason's boss fight are something I've been looking forward to for a long time, but I don't want to spoil them too much.  The moment where you first see her use her unique ability should be something special.  But at the same time, I don't want players to be completely blindsided.

So, rather than explaining them completely, I'll just paste the coming in-game text for her boss ability trait from her profile right here.  This should hopefully give players something to look forward to (and maybe help you understand just why it's a trait that will take quite a bit of work to implement).

Absolute Understanding:
All events since [Reason's arrival day] are simply Reason's simulation of how the battle against the Demons could develop.  Everything done within this simulation will not affect the real world.

This fixes some incorrect behavior with Angel Chosen's Ego Murder ability, as well as a potential crash when converting a single play save into a campaign mode save.

Click here to download.  Mirror.