The bugfixes and interface changes are done, so I'm going to try to fill in some more vignettes before releasing at the end of the month.  I'm finding that writing one vignette makes for a good palate cleanser between working on other things, but trying to write several vignettes in sequence gets exhausting.  Instead of devoting entire updates to vignettes, I'll probably end up trying to write three or four new ones for each release alongside whatever other content is featured in the update.

The incorrect multiplier summary bug was a minor thing that was disproportionately tricky to fix, but I had some fun figuring out how to get the game to accurately report values outside the data type's usual range of 2^63 (which the game reports as 9.22E).  Now, even if new multipliers get added to the game later, the game should still be able to report them accurately (although new letters would have to be added for each factor of a thousand, and the rounding errors do stack up as you reach increasingly absurd values).

Now that the programming to include and view vignettes is done, I'm currently working on some requested bugfixes and QoL improvements.  Once those are completed, I'll be spending the remainder of the month populating the game with vignettes.  At first, they'll be pretty sparse.  Any given 50 day (or 35 day) playthrough will probably only see a vignette every few days.  Eventually, I'd like there to be enough vignettes that there are too many to fit into a single playthrough, and players can be surprised to see scenarios they didn't know existed.

Most vignettes will be triggered by a Chosen with one or more specific vulnerabilities currently being at a specific level of corruption.  Because the vignette system doesn't affect the gameplay balance, there's no need for all vulnerabilities to be equally represented.  I expect that Innocence (interest in sex) and Confidence (willingness to submit or take initiative) will come up most often.

Since starting the development of the game, I've gotten a lot of requests to include scenarios which would make sense as part of the heroines' corruption, but which don't really fit anywhere in the gameplay loop.  I still want to put the bulk of my development time toward the gameplay systems, but I think that vignettes can be used to still put those scenarios into the game.  More suggestions are always welcome.

I don't want to clutter the main blog with non-update posts, and I figure that the people who regularly watch this space are probably more interested in the development process than most, so I'll be posting here about whatever I'm working on for the next update.  The main feature of the update will be the vignette system, but because there's a very large number of vignettes planned (to the point that it eventually won't be possible to see them all in one playthrough), and because some of them might be hard to trigger, this seems like a good time to implement a scene viewer and allow players to watch scenes from previous playthroughs.

This has been a bit tricky, because the game originally never stored the text of a scene all at once.  Instead, it prints one snippet, then calculates which snippet is supposed to come next, then prints that one, and so on.  It still does that, but now it also saves a copy of all the text it prints into a buffer which can be saved as a distinct scene.  My hope is that this can also help smooth the transition to later improvements in how the interface displays text.

Aside from whatever vignettes get added in this update, the scene viewer also records the first meetings between the Chosen, the scenes after breaking core vulnerabilities, and the time-triggered scenes at the TV station, the resort, and the military base.  This also makes it much more convenient to play the game differently against the same team multiple times and see how it changes each event.

Release 19: Manipulation

This update adds the second tier of Forsaken training actions, which generally have lower Stamina costs, higher Motivation gains, and much greater Expertise rewards.  These actions will be the bread-and-butter of most training sessions, even after the later tiers get added.  The two main drawbacks to these actions are that they might be too intense for low-corruption Forsaken, and that using them during a playthrough requires purchasing upgrades (the same upgrades which also unlock Suppressor Commander types).  The latter requirement isn't very meaningful yet since there's no penalty for doing your training from the main menu, but it will be important for making the first tier of training actions more relevant during campaign mode.

Thanks to everyone for the feedback regarding where development should go next.  I'm going to dip into flavor text for one update in order to implement the vignette system (and ideally also a scene viewer) and put some more proper erotica into the game.  After that, I'm tentatively looking into alternative corruption paths.  I think this order works well since once the framework for vignettes is in, it should be easy to add a vignette or two to updates which otherwise don't have much erotic content, and slowly build up the number of viewable scenes that way.  The content of further-off updates still isn't set in stone, so feel free to continue to provide feedback regarding which features are needed most!

I've also opened up a tip jar which can be found on the site sidebar.  I won't be putting any of my releases behind paywalls, which means that I don't have anything concrete to give to people who donate.  This should be viewed purely as an option for people who are getting enough enjoyment out of the game that they feel it'd be worth paying for.

Click here to download.  Mirror.