Dev Diary #326: Another Year of Fresh Starts
Hello everyone, today marks a very special dev diary as it is time to celebrate Fresh Starts being another year older. Quite frankly, it's astounding the game is still going after all those years and I really want to, as always, thank everyone for their support. The 2025-2026 year was honestly a really interesting year as well, there's been a lot of changes in my life which has affected the development of the game; nominally my current extremely hectic work schedule, alongside the move which removed an entire month's worth of updates to the game. While the latter is pretty much solved until next year (and hopefully a few years more, I hate moving every year), the former remains an issue for the foreseeable future. This means that dev diaries and dev builds will shift around depending on when I have busy weekends or large streaks of work (like last week). There was also the big Age Verification scare over on Discord, which saw the launch of the Stoat server as a possible new alternative platform. However, as Discord roled out less intrusive age verification systems, I have decided to phase out that server fairly quickly, with the related code and assets being removed from the game in september. In more positive news, I think the state of the game is really nothing to complain about. 2026 was vastly aimed towards adding content to the game instead of mechanics and, as far as I'm concerned, it is a very successful endeavour. Of course there were some mechanics added, like for the post-game Mrs. Holt, but those were frankly minor compared to things added in previous years. There were also pretty major changes to the game interface, which really make the game feel a little less like "LordOfChange's first game" and more like "Definitely Not LordOfChange's First Game We Swear". I really want to keep going with this effort in the foreseeable future, if only for consistency's sake between the shops and inventories.
Finally, I have once again applied newly mastered coding knowledge (and just braincells firing at the right moment) to significantly reduce the file size, but also the codebase required to maintain in various parts of the game. This both means a smaller suspicious folder on both my and your devices, but also less of a headache when I work on future content in certain areas.
As for the content being added this week, it is quite frankly rather minor. I have decided to add some new item tags with new gameplay functionality; Gartered and Corsetted. Those tags are fairly interesting as they both have direct gameplay impact, much like the main item tag and "cumproof" fabric tags.
Corsetted makes the item lightly affect the body ratio calculations (currently half the impact of a proper corset), which can open up some options in clothing without having to put on a corset. While a corset can be worn at the same time as a corsetted item, this tag.
Gartered however comes with a very major transformation of a common item type, which is Lingerie. In the past, Lingerie would affect the Bra, Undies and Hosiery slot, now it only affect the Bra and Undies slots by default. This was an "about time" moment from me and I'm certain a lot of you will feel the same way about it as, well, there are no Lingerie items featuring stockings in their illustrations! However, what most of them showcase is garters! So I've added the Gartered tag, which will essentially make it so certain lingerie sets will remove the garters and vice versa. This will be confusing at first, I'm certain, but it is overall far more logical.
Of course, this also means a lot of minor adjustments elsewhere in the code, but it was a change I wanted to make for a while and, for lack of actual time to work on events, I figured it was time to slip it in!
Anyway, that's all I have for this week. See you all in a few days for the next dev diary!
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