I'm starting this month off with some more work on the commented replay system.  An obvious missing feature (which only occurred to me after it was too late to implement it by R62) is the ability to export the full set of instructions to a .txt file.  This would be useful not only for players wanting to look ahead at what the plan is, but also for writers to be able to double-check their previous comments without needing to go through the entire playthrough themselves.

A somewhat less certain feature is re-adding the ability to automatically proceed through a commented playthrough with a single keypress.  In the previous implementation, you could just press the spacebar to perform the next move in the battle, regardless of what that move was.  But this raises the risk of a reader accidentally double-tapping the button and missing a comment.

In any case, this also seems like a good time to add a "back to start of day" button to go along with the "back to start of battle" one.  The commented replay system is already set up to return to the commentary track when using the Retry button during battle, even if the player went off-track earlier in that same battle.  This way, even if a player accidentally takes an action which isn't part of the commented playthrough, they don't have to load their last save.

Once all of this is done, it'll be time to return to writing more flavor content for custom sex scenes.  The goal for this month is to improve how orgasms are handled, since right now they can be pretty disjointed with whatever actions are performed on the same turn.  I also want to take a look at some balance reworks for the gameplay, but whether any of that actually makes it into the release depends on whether the changes I have in mind turn out well during playtesting.

This update represents a very significant step forward, though it might take some time before the benefits reach the playerbase as a whole.  After being unusable for a long time, the commented replay system is finally back and better than ever!  With this, experienced players will be able to use in-game tools to save every step of their run, both to compete against each other and to share tips and strategies with newer players.  Now that the game is nearing maturity, it's high time to get polishing features like these worked out.

In repairing the commentary system, I've also worked out a couple of bugs which had been making it more difficult for players to share Chosen teams with each other as well.  The "Export" feature in the Data menu is used to take the current Chosen team (in its Day 1 uncorrupted state) and store it as a .par file which may be easily sent to another player so that they can keep their .sav file without needing to lose all their other progress.  If the playthrough contains commentary (via the Commentary: Write option in the Options menu), then this will also be stored with the .par file.  Presently, this only works for Classic and Challenge mode, but players will soon be able to share entire Campaign mode seeds with each other using this same system.

On the content front, this update contains another system with a lot of future potential in the form of more humanoid Demon Commander customization content commissioned by Kalloi.  When sending a Punisher-type humanoid Commander against the Chosen, the player can now choose to use a "Seductive" approach or a "Humiliating" approach.  Against Chosen suffering from Total Vulnerability Break, this will give you some much more flavorful descriptions than the current default battle text.  Going forward from here, it will be possible to add more approaches and more situations where those approaches give you some more interesting variant flavor.

In the coming month, I'll be continuing to expand the commentary system, as well as take care of some much-needed system reworks and adjustments based on player feedback about the midgame of campaign mode.  And once all of those are finished, it will be time to start looking ahead to the final species and final bosses of Reign's route.

Click here to download.  Mirror.

The last couple of days been spent doing some sex scene CG practice with Cultivation Spiral.  If it goes over well, then it's a sign that we might be able to start putting some in Corrupted Saviors as well.  I've been doing a lot of thinking about how to integrate that sort of thing into the game in a way that doesn't detract from the text-based erotica, and I have some ideas I want to try out.  In the beginning, having some sex CGs that trigger when you defeat the static boss characters in specific ways should serve as a neat extra reward.  And in the long term, making visuals that work for generic Chosen by mixing layered images together seems doable.

But for now, it's back to work on the commented replay system.  As expected, it's been tricky to untangle the early code there and make something that works for all the extra gameplay options which are in the game now.  Rather than just expanding the old system to account for the new actions which are possible in-combat and between combats, I'm replacing the whole system with a better one in order to future-proof against other gameplay additions that are coming later.

I still haven't achieved the goal of "commented replay is functional in single play runs" which I mentioned last week, but I think I'm on track to reach it by the end of the month.

The new humanoid Demon Commander body flavor is done, and so it's time to move on to the other half of the coming update.  That means that I'm going to be working on fixing the commented replay system.  This is something I've been dreading ever since it became clear that it would be necessary, since it'll be challenging to do and it adds neither gameplay elements nor sexual content to the game.  But it's still very much worth doing, because it'll make it much easier for experienced players to write tutorials and share strategies.

The main requirement for the commentary system to be repaired is that the same set of gameplay actions taken on the same random seed must always produce the same results.  This was straightforward back when single play mode was the only mode and there weren't as many content toggles.  But campaign mode adds many more actions that can be taken (like Forsaken management and city choices), and content toggles add yet more variables that need to be accounted for (like whether the player is using the MULTIPLY DAMAGE body traits option, or whether a Forsaken impregnated during a custom sex scene will have her offspring return as an enemy in a later city).

On top of just making the results consistent, there are also design questions which need to be answered about how exactly the random outcomes should be seeded.  When the player is presented with two city choices, should the Core/Significant/Minor Vulnerability arrangement among the Chosen be the same between the two?  If so, how should that be reconciled with the possible reappearance of an escaped Chosen whose species appears in one city but not the other?  If the appearance of items and Chosen personalities is less dependent on the player's choices, then it becomes easier for players to say stuff like "Check out this seed, you can get the Prism to show up in Loop 11" and try different approaches with the same resources.  But many of the systems in the game (like Bait Forsaken and Forsaken offspring) weren't designed with this kind of consistency in mind.

My firm goal for this month is to have the commentary system functional for, at the very least, single play mode.  It will probably take longer to do the same for campaign mode, but that can come over the next couple of releases alongside other new flavor content and minor reworks of mechanics that players have reported as being annoying.

The coming release will have two major additions.  The first is a flavor addition which represents the culmination of the recent focus on humanoid Demon Commanders: specifically, the ability to decide what kind of personal approach you want to use when corrupting the Chosen in battle.  This is a large commission from Kalloi which addresses the other side of "customizing" your experience with Corrupted Saviors; rather than just customizing the heroines themselves, it will also let you customize the player's side of things, deciding how exactly you want your avatar within the game world to behave.

The initial introduction of this system will be fairly modest in scope.  When designing a humanoid Demon Lord Commander body, you'll have a couple of options to select in order to decide how you'll treat the Chosen, and the choice will only impact Punisher Commanders inflicting or exploiting the target's Total Vulnerability Break.  But once the framework is in place, it'll be possible in principle to have all sorts of unique flavor which triggers in specific circumstances.  The tentative plan is to add sex variants triggered by Defiler and Suppressor activation that depend on the used humanoid body's traits (like wings and tails and such) in the coming months.

When no special variant is activated, the current "fighting each other" flavor will remain as the default flavor.  This should help fix the current issue where the combat flavor between the Demon Lord and the Chosen doesn't incorporate the Chosen's Vulnerability Breaks in the same way that the monstrous Demon Lord capture flavor does.

The second main focus of the update will be repairing the in-game commented replay feature, which is currently broken.  I'll talk more about that next week, since hopefully by then I'll be starting work on it.

This is a small bugfix which resolves an issue where Despair would sometimes be triggered incorrectly from group downtime actions.
Click here to download.  Mirror.