Hey All,
It's been a very long time with me grinding on this Loser update non-stop. What I thought would be a simple refactor, turned into me rebuilding about 85% of the games systems, and then spending the many months just bringing the game back to a playable state. That being said, the game is now very much close to that playable state and will be released sometime this week. I'm sorry for the radio silence, but when I get stressed out, I tend to become hyper focused and just work through the problem, and I've been in a hyper focused state for almost 6 months straight now, and am finally able to take a breathe and step back enough to show what I've been cooking this whole time. 

New Charlie Archtype: Dateable Widow
Jesse Archtype Update: Alterna-Goth
Charlie has recieved a new AT. This is a Cornerstone AT (meaning there will be different directions to branch out from eventually) and a big part of the AT is her giving a house key to Nathan. With the house now being fully accessable most of the time, That meant I had to go back and Update Jesse's AT for all the new additional hours, so Jesse's Alterna-goth AT almost doubled in content as well.

New Location: Charlies Bathroom
Once you have the key to Charlies house, you'll have full access to the bathroom whenever you want, rather than being limited by the context of the scene.

Focus Start Expansion: Good Brother
I've added some exclusive content to the Good Brother game start. Currently Becky has a large chunk of added content to her starting AT (Younger Sister), while Gina has a little bit of content added to her first three AT's. I plan to add a little more to this start in the future as I intend for Focus Starts to allow the player to either quickly progress the focused characters to major Cornerstone ATs by skipping some transitional ATs, or by giving alternative ATs that bypass certain hurdles. Next update, I'll be adding some Good Son exclusive content.

New Skill: Performance
A new skill called Performance has been added that represents a characters ability to perform in front of an audience or crowd. The following Tags have been added to reflect this new skill: Performing, Acting, and Singing. Some topics have retroactively received performance tags.

New Skill: Persuasion
A new skill called Persuasion has been added that represents a characters ability to charm, manipulate, or intimidate their way into the outcome they desire. The following Tags have been added to reflect this new skill: Persuasive, Manipulative, and Intimidation. Some topics have retroactively received persuasion tags.

New Tags: Voyerism, Inappropriate
Voyerism is a new tag that has been added to the perverted skill. There aren't many topics with this tag yet, but there will be more to come in the future.
Inappropriate is a new tag that has been added to the disorder skill. There aren't many topics with this tag yet, but there will be more to come in the future.

New Feature: Dark Web Access
The first Dark Web Shop has been added to the game. It's called Nylon Path and requires a special router to be installed in order to access it. You can purchase this router from OldEgg once you have the Dark Web Access perk. Once purchased, you'll need to install it. Nylon Path is a dark web marketplace for drugs and alcohol. More Dark Web Options will be added in future updates.

Since Nylon Path is a user driven market, sometimes items will be Out of Stock, so you may have to try back next week. Sometimes Hot Deals will show up which will sell a case of an item (X6) for a very low price. More items and dark web exclusive items will be added to Nylon Path in future updates. I've also granted the Dealer Start early access to Nylon Path, though all other future Dark Web sites will be prohibited without the Dark Web Access Perk.

New Item: Bottle of Pills
A new item you can purchase from Nylon Path is a bottle of pills, which will be a random assortment of reds, blues, and pinks. If you don't have the Prescription Drugs Perk, or the Party Animal Starting Perk, you might also end up with a few placebos in the bottle of pills as well. I added this as a way for the Dealer Start to actually restock, though it's not very reliable until you have the perks to know what to look for.

New Function: Interaction Interest Tracker
I've added a small popup screen you can use to see what a characters Interests and Bans are while in a conversation. Mousing over each Interest and Ban will now display the Tags and Description in the Tooltip.

New Function: Topic Retainment
A new Function has been added that gives Nathan a small chance to retain Topics with specific tags when he uses them. After a 6+ hour sleep, any retained topics will be returned to your inventory. Once Nathan has a perk that grants the ability to retain topics, a lightbulb Icon will appear on his portrait, and clicking it will show the list of tags that Nathan might retain, as well as any topics he currently is retaining.

Perk Updates
With the addition of Topic Retainment, I updated some of the weaker skills in the game, such as Seduction, and Fashion and gave them some Topic Retainment tags. The fashion perks grant retainments based on what styles your currently wearing to keep it more inline with Fashion. More clothing options with different combinations of style tags will be coming in the next update to give you more options.
New Perks
Besides the three new Retainment Perks, I've added a few other perks to boost skills that I felt needed it. So Selfishness, Healthy, and Fitness have all got a new Perk,  although the new healthy perk is more of a Healthy lifestyle boost, since it requires the lifestyle.

New Function: Computer Wallpaper
While working on Gina's Good Brother content, I came up with a prank Gina would play on Nathan where she changed his computer wallpaper, and then I thought, why not add that in as a real option...so I did. Now Everytime you do a photoshoot with someone, at least one of the pictures will be added as an option for wallpaper. I also gave the option for you to toggle if you want to see your desk and monitor, or just the Monitor when sitting at the computer. I have retroactively granted wallpapers for AT's that are no longer accessible if you're playing from a Save file.

New Function: Status
I've added a system simialr to character status effects for Nathan, so that taking pills, or boozeing it up with another character will grant a status effect for a limited period of time. Like all new systems, this one is currently minimal but will expanded on in the future.

New Feature: Adaptive Loading Screen
Specific screens take a bit longer to load than others, and since I don't like buttons being visible while they are configured, I've added a short loading screen to two worst culprits (Skill Screen and Party) rather than just increasing the loading time of all screens. It's a simple loading screen that pulls a random image from your list of saved wallpapers.

New Topic Features
The most obvious new topic feature is favors now have adaptive icons to properly show the characters current AT. The less obvious feature is some topics have hidden effects that only trigger when you use that topic in conversation with specific characters. For example: If you use the Good Brother Topic, with Diane, it acts like a normal topic with the Honesty, Friendly, and Civility tags, but with Gina or Becky they'll get +5 relationship as well. There aren't many of these currently, but I do plan to add more in as development progresses. These additional effects are secret intentionally.

Continued Party Update
Last Update I expanded the party a bit with Tilley having reactive intros based on her current pose and status at the party, and I've begun converting Becky to the same standard. Currently it only affects Blonde Becky. I'll do her Purple Hair reactive intros in a future update, but there is a decent amount of new Becky content in the party.


Character Page Update
While fixing a bug on the character screen, I did a little sprucing up there.  Now there are tooltips for everything in the Possible Archetypes section. This is the first step in cleaning up this screen, and making more of the information accessible through tooltips, so that I can eventually make room on the character screen for future features.

Skill Screen Update
I did some finishing touches on the Skill Screen, regarding the perks overlay. I seperated, skill perks & lifestyle perks, from stat boosts, and unlocks. I also added text to the skill and lifestyle perks to display where the perk is coming from. The perks are color coded, if the perk requires a skill, the color of the perk will be the color of the primary attribute of the skill (green physical, blue mental, pink social, white for generic). If the perk requires a Lifestyle it will show as tan, Stats will show yellow, and Stat Overflow perks will show light yellow. Research unlocks show as purple, Skill unlocks show as light Teal, Location unlocks show as red, and the Gamestart Perk will show as Aquamarine.

Updated Tutorial
With all of the changes regarding Inventory, and the new perk system, the tutorial was extremely out of date, so I spent a good amount of time remaking it and explaining how the game works with all the new systems in place.

UI Overhaul
This part took the longest and was not actually intended, but more of a side-effect of me trying to de-spaghetify my early code and make a flexible validator, and state engine. Once I had finished making the validator and state engine, I added them to the buttons and the scene player, but the conversion code I created to convert all the legacy code into the new system wasn't completely accurate which meant I had to review the configuration of every button and scene in the game by hand.

My primary goal was to unify the systems I used to affect the game state, or to validate the game state, but in doing so, I also (thankfully) standardized the Tooltips on buttons. Now if an action requires a topic, you lose it when you push the button, rather than at the end of the scene (if I remembered to add it that is.) Also the tooltips will give you a lot more feedback now. If you're short a topic, the topic cost will be red, same for stat, skill, lifestyle, and perk requirements. I also generalized gains, and split them off into the Alt Tooltip you can see by holding shift while hovering to remove some of the clutter.

I also cleaned up some of the more obnoxious aspects of the old UI. The big pop-up telling you that you got a new Topic will only occur in very specific instances now. Instead a smaller pop-up will appear on the left side of the screen like any other scrolling pop-up, except it will have the Topic icon next to it.

Loads of New Topics

With 8 new tags added to the game, you better believe there's a lot of new topics as well. There's well over 50 new topics if you're counting new Permanents, Transient, Items, and Gear.

Massive Scene Refactor
My desire to unify the game state validator came from how much of a pain in the ass it was to check all the different data types that comprised the game state, so I built a whole new system to track stats, and flags, for characters, locations, and the player. And rather than add to the spaghetti code and tack on an addition to what I was already using, I created a whole new system to validate game states. Unfortunately that meant I needed to convert a lot of the old systems into the new one, and that took a lot of effort and time, because both Scenes and Buttons had thier own methods of validation, and I had to convert those to the new method. So, every button and scene was remade in some way. While a lot of them were converted, a huge amount of them needed a bit of manual configuring to make them work.

Hence how late this update is. On the plus side, I started this update cycle at about 35% done with all my planned refactorings, and now I'm at something like 85%. So, I made huge strides in overhauling the engine. It just cost an unbelieveable amount of time, and stress. 

I had initially planned to have a Diane, Charlie, Becky, and Gina AT in this update along with me adding in the Photo Studio Upgrade, but for starters Charlies AT took a lot longer than expected, due to me having to also make a crap load of scenes for Jesse (Almost a full AT's worth of new content). Then there was the refactoring...my initial plan to quickly consolidate the stats on characters unintentionally turned into me creating a new engine to change the game state and a new engine to validate the game state, and then me having to tinker with every button and scene in the game. I've spent the last 4 months just fixing buttons and scenes. 

Needless to say, I ran out of time for any of the other planned stuff. I took time to add smaller new additions when I needed a break from reconfiguring buttons (such as the Dark Web), but all in all, this update was really a system focused update more so than a content focused update. I hadn't planned on that, but that's what happened. Needless to say, I will not be refactoring anything next update at all.

  

Primary Download
Secondary Download (Only use if Mega is not available to you) 

New Jay Archtype: Mostly A Flirt
New Jay Archtype: Mostly A Babe
New Tilley Archtype: Queen Bee
New Diane Archtype Path: Cosmopolitan Mother(5 star) -> Resigned Mother(5 star)
New Gina Archtype Path: Girlfriend <-> BrotherFucker(5 star)
New Gina Archtype Path: BrotherFucker(5 star) <-> SWBenefits(5 star)
New Gina Archtype Path: SWBenefits(5 star) <-> Bartender(5 star)
The new AT's for Jay and Tilley are mostly self explanitory.
You can now transform Diane from (5star)Cosmopolitan to (5star)Resigned, making her completely capable of transitioning Between her 3(5star) AT's now. I also updated those AT's with some new 5star specific content.You can also Transform Gina from (5star)Girlfriend all the way back to (5star)Bartender and back again. I've also added a bit of new content for all the 5 star versions of Bartender, SWBenefits, and B-Effer.

New Location: Jays House
You will be able to unlock Jay's house and visit her on some days. You can get there from the park.

New Inventory Feature: Dedicated Clothing Slot
There is now a dedicated clothing slot for Nathans various outfits, that clearly state all thier benefits upfront, and do not take up one of your precious inventory slots.

New Game System: Perks
I've condensed a lot of skill upgrades into Perks to make it more readable in the skill screen. I will over time be replacing most skill requirement text with perk requirement text.

Upgraded Player Skill Screen
As I kept expanding the game and adding new systems, the skill boxes became more and more crowded, and kept looking uglier and uglier in my opinion (see Below).

So, I created the perk system to allow me to condense some explinations into a tooltip. As seen below, every line item on your skill screen now has it's own Tooltip to explain what it does.

Consolidated Menu Screen
I've done away with all the random little menu's where one screen will let you save/load your game, while a different menu was used to modify scaling, audio, or exit to main menu. Now, if you press esc, you'll get a single menu that will show your current hotbars as well as give you access to the Inventory screen, Wardrobe screen, character screen, skill screen, save screen, load screen, exit to main menu, exit game, as well as volume, and scaling sliders.

Not all options will be visible all the time. This is intended. For example, I don't let you save the game when in a conversation with a character, so the save game option might not be visible if you open the menu.

New Feature: Advanced Starts
This is just the first step of this feature. There are now a few categories of game starts to choose from. Advanced Starts will focus Nathans early game toward specific skills, while Focused Starts will focus on specific people. These starts are recommended for veteran players, as the customary Primary trait (Physique, Smart, Charm) along with it's level 1 Passive skill are not granted, which makes it a touch more difficult in some ways. Stick to basic starts if you're new to the game.
New Advanced Starts 1

New Advanced Starts 2

New Focused Starts 1

As I said previously, this is just the first step. I will eventually be adding in some start specific content. For example a Focused start for Jesse, where Nathan starts the game already dating her, or at least banging her. I also plan to add even more advanced starts called Expert Starts. One example: Paragon- A start where the player is permanently locked to the Tidy, Order, Healthy, and Moral Lifestyles, but get's some real big boosts elsewhere. I also plan to add smaller start content as well, such as the Dealer start possibly having encounters with Lisa when Nathan is drug dealing. But that's content for future me to deal with.

Dynamic Party Screen:
So this was a big one, that took a lot of work and still has a bit of work to go. Over the last few updates, I've been slowly moving the Friday Night Party scene away from being completely Becky centric. Previously almost every trigger, and scene was referencing what AT Becky was and I knew that was gonna cause problems in the future, if I kept doing it that way. So I completely rebuilt the party system from the ground up. The character Avatars at the party will now give a lot more information. For example, the image below shows Jay giving you some sort of look, cause you've been vibing with her all night.

Where as this party pic says Becky and Jay are on drugs, and are currently vibing with each other. Speaking of Vibe... I added a special Tooltip behavior to the party. If you hold shift when mousing over a character action, you'll see the normal experience overlay, but you'll also see that characters current Vibe rating with you. This is the rating I use to determine which character picks Nathan during the Afterparty.

New Tag Jealousy & New Party Mechanic Jealousy:
I've added the new tag Jealousy to Selfishness XP pool. And with the more dynamic Party screen, I decided to make it a more tangible Interest. Currently only Tilley can get an interest with the jealousy tag. If Tilley has the Jealousy Tag in one of her interests, she can become a bit disruptive. Should she ever take the lead in 'Vibe' with 3 or more, she will begin interferring with anybody else that might have vibed with you at the party. The example to left shows Tilley being Jealous of Jay and Nathan trying to start a conversation with Jay. The normal conversation screen doesn't appear, and instead Tilley kinda cockblocks you.

New Jay Outfit Naughty:
I've added Jay to the Boutique, and you can now buy her some new duds, though this is only available for the Mostly A Babe AT.

Online Profiles Jay & Tilley:
I've added Online Profiles to both Jay and Tilley. You can access them just like Becky's. Public Pictures are character specific(for the most part), however private pictures are shared between all posted parties, so if there's a conversation between two characters on a social media post, that post will show up in both characters private profiles.With two new Social Media Profiles, I've also added two new targets to hack.

Crap Load of New Topics:
With the new tag Jealosy, and a focus on characters that haven't yet recieved a lot of attention, there are quite a few new topics in the game focusing on new, or less prevalant tags. This ones my favorite from this release.

Ghostbar Reintroduced:
With the all the kinks of the new Inventory system more or less being ironed out, I can now start implimenting some of the features of the old inventory system that I felt were worth keeping. Ghostbar being one of them. When you use a topic, an ghost of the topic will remain on your hotbar, and upon entering Nathans room, your hotbar will attempt to replace all ghost topics, if you have them in inventory/storage. To remove that ghost, you just have to put another topic in it's hotbar slot.

Tons of under the hood upgrades:
I ended doing a lot more revamps than I had initially planned. I've been slowly removing more and more manual character updates from the scenes and creating automated systems for them. 
For example, If I wanted a charater transformation to include unlocking a new location, previously I had to add the unlocking of that location to the scene in which the character transformed, which isn't a big deal, until transforms are makeing massive changes to the game, because all those changes have to be proccessed by the scene controller, before the scene ends...which makes the engine drag. 
By moving some of these changes to the actual function of the transformation, then those changes can happen in the background, and the scene controller becomes less cluttered...i.e...less drag. I pretty much remade how player data is stored, with the introduction of the perk system. I also built a large framework for a future refactoring I will be doing to give character data the same treatment that player data got this update. This probably doesn't mean much to you unless you're one of those folks that edits your save files.

I had initially planned to have a Diane, Charlie and Gina AT in this update as well, but...time is a beast. And That was honesly way to ambitious of me. The additional content, and transformations scenes for Gina and Diane took almost a month which was 3 weeks longer than I had planned, and with the Party Controller annoying me to the point where I felt I had to remake it, There was absolutely no way I was gonna be able to do 6 AT's and a new location on top of the menu consolidation.

Dropbox Download (Backup-Only use if if Mega is not available)

So, I've finally gotten this update more or less finished. I'm gonna give it one more day to cook (bug hunt) But then I'm gonna release it. Here's a pre-emptive changelog.

New Becky Archtype: Precarious (self explanitory)

New Gina Archtype: Girlfriend (self explanitory)

New Diane Archtype Path: Resigned Mother-> Cosmopolitan Mother(5 star)  You can now transform Diane back to Resigned Mother, though as a 5 star version, it's now a bit different. You can also transform from Resigned(5 star) back to Scorned. You can Transform Diane from Resigned(5 star) to Cosmopolitan(5 star), however currently this is a one way trip until version 0.11.00, so just be aware.

New Character Feature: Livestreaming   Some characters may decide to start livestreaming. If they do, You'll now be able to watch thier livestream when they are active. You can find this option in the characters social media screen (currently only Becky).

New Character Action: Date There's a new system available for Diane's Resigned 5 star and Cosmopolitan 5 star Archtypes. You take them on an official date, and are locked into that date for the duration.

Dates Replace your standard stat pools, with date stats. The stats are Fun, Excitement, Romance, Sexy, Boredom, and Anger. Depending on those stats different actions can become available, as can different Endings to date...If you're boring all night, the person you're dating may sudden come down with a headache...on the other hand, if you get them all hot and bothered...fun could be had.

During dates, a characters bans and interests play a major role in affecting the Dates stats as every action you take has 5 tags and interested tags may add to the date stats, while banned tags may piss them off. This includes secondary interests, so you can play with a person's secondary interests just to see if you get different outcomes or possibley different options. The tooltip even gives you hints, if you've got the appropriate skills to see those modifiers.

In the tooltip, you'll see different glows to represent the different stat changes, such as a red glow coming the bottom middle of the tooltip represents anger. You can also look at the pools to see which interest is causing the change in date stat.

New Inventory Screen The inventory screen has been completely rebuilt from the ground up to allow for drag and drop, and as such all the old buttons are gone. Now if you want to add a topic to your hotbar, you only have to drag it into the hotbar slot.

In order to ponder or trash an item now, you just need to drag the item onto the appropriate area. There is also a toggle at the bottom of the screen. When turned on, you can use the slider to set a minimum amount you'd like to keep. So in the example to the left, if you dragged a stack of 5 topics onto the ponder area, while the toggle was set to 3, you'd ponder two of the topics, and keep three. If the toggle is turned off, then you only ponder or trash a single topic at a time.

With the removal of the Query button, I created a filter system so that you can filter visible topics as needed. By clicking on the different tag filters, you can cycle that tag between Visible (yellow), Hidden (blue), and Forced Visible (Red).

Topics with Visible tags will show so long as those topics do not have any Tags that are hidden. Topics with Forced Visible tags will show regardless of if there is a hidden tag.

There is also two buttons above the filters that can set all tag filters to visible, or all tag filters to hidden.

I've also changed the Interest helper to operate with the tag filters. So one simple way to see all the topics that will benefit a certain character is to hide all tags, Press F1 to open the Interest helper, and then press the Force Interests button. Then when you press F1 again to hide the Interest helper, you'll only see topics with tags that your choosen character is interested in.

New Wardrobe Screen  Similar to the Inventory screen, The wardrobe has been updated as well to allow for drag and drop. For the most part the screen still operates the same as the old one, though there are a few minor differences. The magnet button in the stash is the new "Pull" action to draw all the drugs into your stash, though it will ignore any drugs you have on your itembar.

The "Pop Pills" button has been replaced with a drop area similar to trash or ponder inside the stash screen. It's the area with the Pac-Man icon. The area next to it is the new cut drugs area where you can turn quarterbags into joints, and bottles of pills into individual pills.

Some items have hidden stats that were only ever visible in the shop, or in specific screens. But I've updated the system to show the bonuses granted, for example what kind of wardrobe bonus your clothing will grant with the clean yourself up action in the Wardrobe bonus screen.

New Interaction Functionality  I've added your Item Bar to the Interaction screen, when you want to discuss topics with a character. This more or less represents your pockets, so you no longer need (or even can) move items into your hotbar.

New Save Engine I was previously using a save system I bought in the Unity Asset store, as I was not that comfortable with coding around persistant data. My first save system was a freakin mess. While the purchased save system is a very strong and versatile save system...it's slow. While fixing bugs, I kept running into timing issues, and a lot of those issues came from the fact that I had to slow certain parts of the game down, in anticipation of loading a saved game, with the very slow save system.

So, I bit the bullet and got myself much more familiar with creating save files, and the new save engine is very fast, and much better than my first attempt. Your old saves still work, though I have moved them into a back-up folder in your save folder. You can tell the old save files from the new ones by the color of the time stamps. Red timestamps are the old saves, and white timestamps are the new saves. The new saves are standard JSON format so, for all you cheaters out there. Rejoice.

New AT Functionality: Delayed Change Some Archtypes for one reason or another may be locked into place for a while. When that happens, you'll get a message in the potential AT section of the character screen telling you how long you have to wait. Currently only Girlfriend Gina has this effect, though more will be coming eventually.

New Character Stat: Grades With both Gina and Becky being concerned about the grades, it only makes sense to track em now. Though currently Becky is the only person affected.

New Functionality: Clothing Auto Change You'll no longer miss out on going to a party with Becky, or going on Date with Diane because you're wearing the wrong clothing. Now if an action requires a specific style, and you own some clothing with that style, You will automatically switch to that outfit when you push the button.

Inventory Access: Nathan's House You can now access your inventory from anywhere inside your house. The wardrobe is still limited to your room, as is locations outside your house, but to save on some excessive clicking, I've added the Inventory button to all rooms within Nathans home.

Under the hood: Pretty much a whole new engine By building a new inventory system to add in drag and drop capabilities, I ended up uncovering older buggy systems that I had made when I was still learning unity and C#. While fixing those buggy systems, I had to remove some Code snippets I had been using to help me make the game easier to modify on my end...which resulted in me having to rebuild most of the button logic on all buttons in the game. I also had to redo how the scene player was loaded, how characters were stored, how archtypes were stored, how the user interface was loaded, as well as how unity handled transitions between levels (locations), and how all the data in the brand new schedule system I made last update was dispersed.

...So... Locations, Buttons, Scenes, UI, Characters, Archtypes, Inventory, Save engine, and Schedules...that's pretty much all the major systems my game uses...and I more or less remade about 80% of them in order to deal with bugs, and excessive game delays. That being said...The game runs very smoothly now. It's much faster, and responsive, and saving no longer makes you think the game just locked up. But...it was a lot of work, and required an immense amount of help from my Discord to help me track down all these bugs.

Gina's backward compatibility.  Unfortunately I just ran out of time  to render the transform scene for Gina to revert back to B Fucker 5 star.

Diane's additional 5 star scenes for her older AT's. With Diane able to return to Cosmopolitan and Resigned Mother as a 5 star. I plan to add some interactions to those AT's that are only available if you've gotten her to 5 stars. I just ran out of time.

Diane's Transform from Cosmopolitan 5 star -> Resigned 5 star. Diane is intended to be able to switch between Cosmopolitan, Resigned, and Scorned...However I need another Date location created for her transition back to Resigned 5 star, and it takes a fairly large amount of renders to make a Date. So I decided to put that transform option off until next update.

Yes. If that's not enough, you can die in a fire.

Mega Download: here 

Dropbox Download: here  <- only use if you cannot use mega please