This month's release has a single focus: expanding the "Favorite" Forsaken position so that the one in that position can actually talk about more than just her assessment of whether the currently-selected Commander is strong enough.  Whenever you don't have a Commander selected, your Favorite Forsaken will now instead speak on one of many new potential subjects.

The number of topics is quite high, including subjects like how her Vulnerabilities were broken (or, if they were left intact, her opinions regarding breaking them on other Chosen), her feelings about other Forsaken, her thoughts about the other Chosen species, about the boss Chosen, her thoughts on her former partners, and more.  For each of those subjects, the number of variants depending on her personality, her corruption, and her experiences is also quite high.  My hope is that this will help each Forsaken feel more unique, since even two Forsaken with the same initial personality can turn out quite differently depending on how you corrupt them and how you treat them after they become Forsaken.  Forsaken who have any traits relevant to the attitude system (currently just futanari Forsaken and Forsaken who have developed a stance toward orgasm denial training) also have some unique lines appropriate to their attitude.

I normally don't like to focus an update on just one feature like this, but the number of variants that needed to be written was very high, and this is the kind of feature that needs to be implemented all at once, rather than across multiple updates.  I was still able to fit in a couple of bugfixes and minor improvements, and a decent chunk of the month also went into preparing for the introduction of the next species: Mechanical Chosen.

Mechanical Chosen are one of the two endgame Chosen species, encompassing everything from Chosen who wear power armor all the way to outright robotic Chosen.  Their powers will test the player's ability to respond to a wide variety of challenges, and their difficulty is (of course) yet another step above Devil and Angel Chosen.  Next month's update is going to be a big one, so I hope you all look forward to it!

Click here to download.  Mirror.

Just a quick progress update before I return to work on the next release: writing up all the smalltalk variants is going well.  In fact, I'm a bit ahead of schedule.  I'm currently deciding what to do with the extra time, assuming I finish well before the end of the month.  One option is to just keep adding more smalltalk subjects until I run out of time.  Another is to just do more prelimiary work on the coming Mechanical Chosen species (they have some relatively complicated mechanics, so I'm leaning toward this one).

A third option is to move up my future plans to integrate the smalltalk system into custom sex scenes, so that Forsaken will be able to chat a bit before things start getting hot and heavy, or during natural lulls in the action.  This probably won't come up much in the short term, but it'll lay the groundwork for Chosen and Forsaken to chat with each other once appropriate smalltalk variants have been added - useful for when you're spying on how pure Chosen interact while hanging out, or to add some meat to "just going on a date together" type scenes which can work within the custom sex scene framework.  I'll just have to be careful to make sure that the smalltalk only triggers when nothing more urgent is going on - it'd be a bit silly for Chosen to start talking about their life stories and ethical philosophy while you're knocking on the door to their womb.

For now, I'll just finish the current set of scheduled content and take a look at the options again once that's done.

This past week has been spent doing steady work on the Forsaken smalltalk system.  It can be pretty monotonous to come up with appropriate dialogue lines for every situation/personality/corruption combination for each subject the Forsaken can bring up, so I've also been doing some preparatory work on Mechanical Chosen.  But I want to save all the gameplay and flavor previews related to Mechanical Chosen for next month, so I won't go into detail on that subject just yet.

Presently, the plan is for Forsaken to be able to talk about their own feelings regarding each of their corruption parameters (Hostility, Deviancy, Obedience, and Disgrace), each of their T2 Breaks (virginity and such), each potential T4 Break (including their feelings about whichever Forsaken inflicted it on them, when applicable), their thoughts on their former partners (whether they've fallen as well or they're still Chosen or they're deceased), their Distortion, their species, their combat style, and whichever of the Boss Chosen they're most interested in (with variants depending on whether that Boss Chosen already been defeated).  Of course, the Boss Chosen themselves should also have a few unique lines, too.

This is one of those systems which can't ever be definitively "complete," because you could always imagine something else that your Favorite Forsaken might talk about.  Another subject or two might even make it into the next release, depending on how much time I have left over after the preparations for Mechanical Chosen are complete.  Even as I type this, it occurs to me that it'd make sense for Attitudes (like futanari Chosen's feelings about their own bodies) to get their own smalltalk lines too - the Attitude system didn't yet exist back when I first started working on this feature.  So, I can only hope that the initial release of this feature will still be enough to make the game a little more immersive!

This month is planned to be the last one before jumping back into extending campaign mode (which will start with the introduction of mechanical Chosen).  The main focus will be the initial implementation of the "smalltalk" system which has been half-coded but commented out for quite awhile now.  This system is meant to add more flavor to the Forsaken you put in your Favorite position.

Right now, when you set one of the Forsaken as your Favorite, the main effect is just to replace the usual Commander analysis (telling you whether the Commander you've built is likely to be strong enough to do anything useful at the current stage in the game) with an equivalent message from your Forsaken, spoken according to her personality and corruption.  I want to expand this so that your Favorite Forsaken will talk to you about many more subjects, reminding you of all the details of her initial fall and maybe commenting on the current state of your campaign run and offering her own thoughts about the world of Corrupted Saviors.  It'll require adding a large number of different "topics" so that they don't repeat themselves too often, but I think it'll let your Favorite show off a lot more personality than before.

Eventually, I'd like to expand this system so that all characters (both Forsaken and Chosen) will be able to bring up all the topics with characters other than the Demon Lord.  Then, the system could be activated during custom sex scenes where the Demon Lord isn't present, making it a lot more interesting to do things like spy on the Chosen interacting with each other and see what they talk about when they don't know they're being watched.  But first, I want to get the system to a basic level of functionality for Forsaken alone.

This fixes an issue that was making it impossible to switch Commanders on save files which weren't set to write commentary.
Click here to download.  Mirror.

The main focus of this month's update was to finish the commented replay system.  It should now be fully functional, allowing players to share the exact sequence of moves for their runs in all scenarios and campaign mode!  I also fixed some minor bugs with the system while doing my usual playtest.  For an example of how this system can be used, it might be illuminating to check out SuperSkippy's walkthrough, which has been linked in the resources.txt file.  Even experienced players might be able to learn a thing or two by following along and seeing how a Chosen team can be quickly dismantled.

Although sexual content wasn't the focus of this release, there are still a few new additions to custom sex scenes which might be fun to play around with.  The orgasm system has been completely overhauled so that rather than just being something that happens during the 'damage' phase of the subject's turn, it now has duration and persistent effects.  Characters will usually use alternative dialogue when cumming, and they'll also comment when experiencing a particularly intense continuous orgasm.  Likelihood of continuous orgasm depends on the subject's Deviancy, her PLEA level, and the number of orgasms already experienced in the current scene.  Ruined orgasms get their own dialogue too.

A minor but very entertaining component of this system is that custom sex scene participants will have their speech distorted depending on whether they're continuously orgasming and on the intensity of that orgasm.  Characters using a "speech" type action (like dirty talk) will still say what they meant to say instead of using the orgasm dialogue, but their speech will be a bit messed up by the pleasure.  At very high PLEA levels, they can get pretty incoherent.

Much of the month was spent working on the "smalltalk" system which is meant to let your Favorite Forsaken comment on her history and (depending on Obedience level) provide helpful advice or taunting provocations related to the other species, the bosses, and the general state of the world in your campaign run.  But trying to finish this up alongside all the other stuff this month ended up being a bit over-ambitious.  This feature should be the last one I want to tackle before moving forward to the introduction of Mechanical Chosen, so I'll be continuing to work on it in the coming month!

Click here to download.  Mirror.