0.4.0 Release

My life has been quite eventful for the past 2 months, so I haven't been able to work much. Luckily, I had put quite a decent amount of work on 0.4.0 prior to this. I am releasing what I have done so far to keep you updated, but this isn't the full version of what I want 0.4 to be. I am working on freeing some time on my schedule to work on the game in a more regular fashion.

Also, some people found the Google links sketchy and felt safer with itch.io links, so you can find the new update on my new page: https://itamus.itch.io/mending-society

The changelog is already there.

One of the biggest change is that condoms and birth control have been replaced with a ring of birth control. The previous condoms and birth control weren't that medieval-fantastic immersive, were too complex while the game doesn't need that much focus on that mechanic. The new ring of birth control is more intuitive, shows up on characters (so you know which characters is on birth control instantly). You can't remove it during sex scenes for the moment.

0.3.1 bugfixes and vote results for 0.4

The results are in for 0.4. With 3 votes for it (3 on subscribestar, 0 on patreon) and 0 against, the next update will focus on relationships (wifes, husbands, marriages, girlfriends, boyfriends, mistresses).

There were a few bugs on 0.3.0 that have been patched, so the fixes are being released as to not spoil your experience while waiting for 0.4. It also has a few features I wanted to keep for 0.4, but it doesn't hurt to release them now (famous last words) so there you go.

I am also slowly working on an itch.io page in case you don't trust my links, so it should be ready for 0.4.

Changelog

A change of course for the game monetization

Hello for everyone still subscribed. I have been lacking in communication for the past 4 months (0.3 was released a month ago for context though) while I had said I would communicate with supporters every 2 weeks. I don't have an excuse for it other than a vague social anxiety and deadlines dread. So I want to apologize again for my silence.

But then I remembered I was doing that game first and foremost because I wanted that game to exist, and stopped worrying about possible backlash and lost subscribers. Monetization of the game is really a secondary thing for me, so don't worry, I will keep developing the game even if there are no other subscribers left.

I will remove the content polls for the next update so that I can work on the game as much as I want. Since people have paid money for the last months, there will be a supporter poll for that one though. The 3 choices will be: college update (vastly expanding the college and its features, as a way to corrupt students and therefore modify society), theater update (basically TV for medieval-fantasy setting, as a way to corrupt the general population) or the relationship update (wife/girlfriend/mistress/infidelity/marriage/open relationships).

Learning from that mistake, I will update the 5 euros subscription to reflect that change. Supporters will still have access to supporters-only posts.

Thank you AI

0.3 brought a ton of quality backgrounds. Those backgrounds were taken from a free for commercial-use collection of backgrounds found on itch.io (same for the music). Those backgrounds were most likely generated by AI. This means that the initial supporter goal is no longer relevant and will be removed.

This doesn't affect the quality character sprites I want to pay an artist for, since AI isn't smart enough yet to make images that would be used in a paperdoll system (a paperdoll system is a system that puts images on top of each other to make a "composite" image, like body, eyes, clothes, body effects and others).

What Mending Society is truly about

Since I am removing polls, there is little reason to stay subscribed, so I need to be transparent about the long-term goals of the game. It's very ambitious so this is why I have been quiet about it, but hopefully, by downloading 0.3, you can see that it's possible.

First, I wanted to make the impregnation game that I wanted and couldn't find on the Internet. A game with much less limitations and defects.
Second, I am quite annoyed that most video games gravitate around either violence, competition, confrontation, or hostility, either against other players or AI. Of course, there are many games (like city builder games) that don't do that, but I still wanted to break out of the mold, and reuse the sex and social relations as a gameplay design. In a way, the impregnation gameplay loop in the game mirrors many "kill" gameplay loops in shooters, with mechanics to achieve it, and rewards for accomplishing it.

So I simplified the game I wanted down to 3 concepts:
- very high freedom of interactions with little to no scripted events
- arousement come not only from physical attraction, but also from context, and especially social context. In order for the game to work, it also needs world-building. The more detailed the world is, the more varied context in which sex scenes happen. What I mean is, it's arousing to have sex with a beautiful woman, but it's more taboo/arousing if it's the intern you just recruited while also being married. And that requires a game with businesses and marriage. The social and sex systems, while they could look separated, are actually designed to work with each other.
- sandbox adventure: the idea is that there is no scripted path for the player to take with other characters, and that instead characters will be dynamically created and they will be able to remember what they have done with the player. Instead of going from event 1 to event 2 then event 3, the adventures the player has with the characters should be able to go in any direction in order for every player to have a different and unique adventure.

For the first point: to a large extent, this was already achieved in 0.1 by building a demographic system in which there no fundamental difference between character (you can have sex with any character, and the only difference is the way the player experience it). 0.3 brought female characters which increased the ways the player can interact with the game. Here, the objective in the future is more to maintain that level of freedom while adding more features.

For the second point: 0.1 added personalities and 0.2 brought businesses. Long term, I have a lot of ideas to improve the world-building and its details. Things like additional layers of personalities (sexual preferences, social behaviours), a political system the player will be able to interact with to implement laws (long term, there will be several cities and each city will have a different system to toy with), more races with different traits (amazons that can only have girls, maybe a vampire that needs to drink blood, nymph that are emotionally empathic through touch).

For the third point: I have recently (a few months ago) figured out how it would work in practice: player will meet characters through "introduction events" (tiers zero of events). Those characters will be added to a list of Acquaintances that are considered known by the player character. Each character will have their history of interaction with the player tracked and recorded. Then another layer of events will recruit characters from that list if they meet the conditions.
An example: the player impregnates a woman Anastasia, that Anastasia gives birth. Then an event that has to involve a woman that had a child from the player will recruit Anastasia, and, boom, the player will see Anastasia coming back to the player, for the anniversary of the first time they met, or something like that.
The end-game of that development is to have the player meets a student, have a child with her, which could trigger an event where he meets her father, and knowing the father could trigger another event that would lead the player to meet the father's sister (the student aunt in that case). And then continue on with the sister wife because she happened to be lesbian. And so on. And so on.
0.4 will bring the first "introduction events". In fact, I have already coded the acquaintance system, you just have to wait for 0.4 to see it.

On top of it all, I have a file with all the ideas I have yet to put in the game in bullet points. There are 150 lines of ideas. Development at the moment is more a question of time-budget, and balancing between what the game needs right now, what people expect to see soon, and the long-term plan.

Mending Society 0.3.0: pot-pourri update, quests, female player characters, and so much more

First, I want to apologize for having gone silent for 3 months. I will probably do a different post later on to explain what I am going to change for supporters. But I didn't come empty handed: as an apology, I have worked a lot more than planned and added a lot of features on top of everything I had promised for 0.3.0, including female player characters. There is roughly the equivalent of 2 updates in that one (arguably even 3).

A bug in saves in 0.2.1 mean they won't work in 0.3.0 (I did an oopsie and aliased dynamic values with values in init blocks for people who know how renpy works). There was so much change and code refactoring between the 2 updates I had decided to not make saves compatible anyways. That would have been an insane amount of work: something like 75% of the code was rewritten in some way).

A massive performance upgrade in world generation and skipping years mean Android version now have much better performance, and the same parameters than the PC version. Basically, performance issues with the game are gone.