[v1.9 week 4] Final polish

• Early release (to Analysts+) will be Monday 30 November.  (We'll be doing some final polishing over the weekend and during the day on Monday.)
• That'll be followed by a general release on Monday 14 December.

• The writing of this 1.9 is complete. Feedback from Monday’s beta test of the new sex scene was very helpful (thanks Operators), and I've been able to improve the pacing based on it.  I’ve also been able to get a head start on writing scenes for next month’s release, which feels greta!
• Victoria’s done some great work on the avatar art, creating a range of bikini lines, tattoos and piercings you’ll be able to customise your agent with. She’s currently working on some cool outfits for your agent to wear in 1.9.
• Lara and Hyneman have been busy on coding, adding a stunning new XXL avatar size option, and fixing some bugs and making behind-the-scenes improvements to the codebase. We’re currently building UI menus for bikini lines, tattoos & piercings, which will also be useful in future versions for things like clothes shopping. 

[v1.9 week 2] So, we're ahead of schedule...

• New scenes. We added a new story sequence with four broad paths (sports star, geek girl, alpha female and rock chick), each with unique avatar art and their own unique mini-quest.
• Dice roller. We added a dice roller to make action (and, in the future, sex) scenes more fun and engaging.
• Speed of delivery. Female Agent’s biggest problem has always been slow delivery of story content. This was a test and a demonstration of how fast we can work using the new MFAGA plan: everything you see past the character creator was produced in the last three weeks. I hope you’re as excited by the possibilities of this new tempo of operations as I am.

• illustrator Victoria, who worked her ass off this month to create lots of different avatar shapes, haircuts and clothes; 
• her assistant Jeff for very quickly processing the Illustrator layers into game art; 
• coders Hyneman and Lara, who made everything work; 
• writer esclavage for drafting the Prom Queen and Cosplay mini-quests; 
• and none of this would be possible without the support of this game’s magnificent patrons! Your financial support made it possible to produce the update within the timeframe.

SYH asked: does selecting the Resting Bitch Face quirk change the avatar’s face?

Enrico asked: in the demo the character’s age and nationality is fixed – will this change in the game? And are the Kinks/Quirks lists final?

Joris Janssen asked: would it be possible to add a face closeup so we can see the details better?

Cereburn asked: would it be possible to get a darker background, to avoid eye strain?

Raging Angel asked: is this now the full appearance, or will you be adding in more choices (like body type and freckles)?

Nathaniel asked: can you make it clearer in the menus what’s been selected?

• Fixed access problems to the website, and also fixed a DNS configuration problem with the image server that was making it run slowly (which should speed up the game for everyone)
• Worked on writing; we streamlined some existing scenes* (in line with the MFAGA plan), and also did preliminary work on the new improved Bangkok! 😮  
• Fully documented the basic game mechanics, so coders and writers will be able to work directly on scenes without needing to ask me questions about how experience points or skills actually work
• Based on this documentation, designed a new, cleaner system of "variables" that will make the code faster to work with in future
• Redesigned the UI menu so it's more user friendly and has everything we need
• Did something really cool with dice rolls (which we use a lot in sex and action scenes), which makes them both faster to code and more engaging for the player
• Created and tested a cool new technical feature that makes the avatar load blazingly fast.  This is the kind of feature nobody asks for – including me, it was cooked up between Lara and Mihail – but experiencing the game with no avatar lag makes you wonder how you lived without it.
• Plus a bunch of other little things, including our lovely illustrator Victoria taking a few days off to work on her suntan 👙

• We refactored the source code, so it's no longer one single text file with 138,000 lines of code, and is instead structured in a way that's easier for us to use.
• We invented and tested a new "storyboarding" technique, which will make it easier for team & community writers to contribute scenes to the story.  Yesterday esclavage wrote a test scene and said: "storyboarding is working out so much better...it's never been easier to write.  The biggest breakthrough to me is the Slide Headers -> now I reference them as an anchor point to talk to other writers and the coders."  (More detail on this new system soon.)
• We finalised details on some game mechanics that were vague and undefined in the last version of the game (and therefore caused general dev drag, because half-implemented mechanics can't easily be used).  Specifically we revised Attributes & Skills, and designed a new Quirks system that simplifies so much.
• Now we're working more like a team, internal documentation has become crucial, so we set up a detailed project plan on monday.com and also ditched the clunky, hardly-used STONEGHOST internal dev docs system and implemented a new, simple dev wiki.
• We put the new wiki on the game's long-neglected website, and added a few pages to the site.  It's mostly placeholder, but we did install a working FAQ to which you guys can contribute questions which won't get lost (like Patreon comments can).  Please visit and help us build the FAQ by sending us questions!
• Plus a bunch of other stuff but this post is already too long, sheesh is anybody still reading this