Currently, I'm taking a brief break from adding flavor text in order to lay some groundwork for the coming Elemental Chosen species and ensure that both the Chosen and the Forsaken mechanics will fit into a single update.  Elemental Chosen are overall much simpler than Mechanical Chosen, so I think the odds are pretty good that I won't need 2 separate releases to fully implement the species this time.

I don't want to spoil too many details about Elemental Chosen right now, since I prefer to save that for the month of the release.  But because it's what I'm working on right now, I can talk about it a little.

In contrast to the flexibility which Mechanicals demand as Chosen and offer as Forsaken, Elemental Chosen and Forsaken are all about simple brute strength.  So, they're probably most similar to Animalistic Chosen and Forsaken, but elevated to an endgame level of power.  As with Mechanical Chosen, you'll be able to face them in Loop 16 at the earliest by beating Victory in Loop 10 and then Love in Loop 15.  And this boss sequence is generally a lot easier than beating Splendor in Loop 10 and then immediately Judgment in Loop 15 in order to unlock Mechanical Chosen.  But the simple brute strength of Elemental Chosen will leave much less room for creative counterplay, so you might not want to do that.

I'm also planning for every single Elemental Chosen subspecies to have a species-specific portrait, so despite the gameplay simplicity of the species, there will be a bit more work for me in that regard.  I'll keep you all updated on how it's going as we get closer to R69.

First off, a bugfix was released earlier today, and I don't want that to get buried by the status report here.  It fixes an issue that would definitely cause issues for a player trying to make heavy use of Mechanical Forsaken in a campaign mode run, so I'd recommend downloading it!

As for the status report itself, my goal for this month is to focus on flavor text improvements, particularly for custom sex scenes, and particularly related to Mechanical Chosen.  Mechanical Chosen subspecies fall into four rough categories: those who are human with technological enhancements, those who are built to replicate humans almost exactly, those who are basically "hard light" holograms, and those with fully robotic bodies.  I want to make all of them feel much more distinct from each other and from the more "biological" Chosen types.

Related to this, I also want to pave the way for nonstandard "body plans" (for lack of a better term).  The code which tracks participants of custom sex scenes was designed to be extremely flexible about stuff like the number of limbs and the possibility for inhuman appendages.  However, right now, all of the Chosen, Forsaken, and Demon Lord bodies still have the standard 2 arms, 2 legs, one of a small number of sex organ configurations, and so on.  It makes sense for cyborgs and robots to potentially be a little different, and eventually, it should also be possible for the Demon Lord to participate in sex scenes using a tentacled form.  We'll see how much progress in that direction I can make this month.

This fixes an issue which was causing Mechanical Forsaken to not generate Corrupt Capacitors, as well as some flavor text issues.
Click here to download.  Mirror.

This update integrates the newly-added Mechanical Chosen into campaign mode after Judgment has been defeated, adding their associated warp route and their functionality as Mechanical Forsaken once defeated!  In their initial state, Mechanical Forsaken are almost identical to the regular Forsaken you'd get from beating the Chosen of Loop 1.  They have the ability to Release targets before the natural end of the Capture, but they lack the damage buffs and other innate effects that usually make advanced species stronger.

However, Mechanical Forsaken have the ability to generate Mechanical Parts.  There are 7 types of Mechanical Part, corresponding to the 6 Distortions plus 1 type of part generated by Mechanical Forsaken who were defeated without a Distortion.  Once any Mechanical Parts have been generated, the "Other Minions" menu in Forsaken management will become the "Base" menu where you can combine any pair of Mechanical Parts to create Constructions.

The Constructions created from two of the same Mechanical Part grant small global buffs to all of your Forsaken.  However, the true power of the Construction system is unlocked by combining different kinds of Mechanical Part together.  Many Constructions grant buffs specifically to Mechanical Forasken, and these buffs all stack multiplicatively with each other, which means that heavy investment into the Construction system can let your Mechanical Forsaken reach damage values far beyond what's possible for other Forsaken.

In order to give players a chance to experiment with the system before trying to master it late in a campaign mode run, I've added a new "Parts" cheat for campaign and single play runs which gives you a bunch of Mechanical Parts to try building with.  If you want to see what they can do, I'd recommend also customizing one of your Forsaken in cheat mode in order to change her species to Mechanical so she can benefit from the buffs.

Aside from the usual bugfixes and tweaks, this update also adds some code contributed by Keldon which can load player-written mods from the options menu without needing to download an entirely separate version of the game.  Presently, it's not really practical to use since it doesn't have any supporting documentation or examples written, but I plan on fixing that soon.  Take this as a preview of what's to come.

Click here to download.  Mirror.

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.