Hey everyone! Hope you're all doing well.

I'm now in the final stages of preparing version 0.1.5 for release and it should be published any day now!

This has turned out to be a much bigger update than I expected and I'm happy to say that it should include everything we discussed here, along with a few extras. Some of these features are particularly important for the project's future, such as Background Events with notifications (Devlog #33) and the addition of Character Traits and Statuses. There's also some new content and customization options, along with major improvements to the overall gameplay experience (Devlog #32).

With so much going into this update, I unfortunately won't have enough time to get the Project Codex and the new tiers with cheats and credits (Devlog #30) ready for this release. That said, I expect to have them ready shortly after version 0.1.5 or with the launch of update 0.1.6.

I hope you'll understand the cause of this postponing when you get your hands on version 0.1.5. I can't wait to share everything I've been working on with you!

Thank you all for your patience and continued support! See you soon!
Orane

Hey there! I hope you're having a great day.

I've been working hard on the next update and the release shouldn't be too far off. In the meantime, I want to keep you in the loop by discussing some of the changes coming in version 0.1.5 and the reasoning behind them.

This update is a big step toward making your characters' lives feel like they continue even when you're not interacting with them. But this raises an important design question: how do you keep players informed about what's happening in the background without overwhelming them with information?

We've had Event Popups since version 0.0.5. They work well for local events that give players the opportunity to react, but having too many could quickly become annoying. Imagine getting 20 popups about things like "Alexia is feeling lonely" or "Dave is struggling to complete his daily tasks with his hands tied".

With that in mind, I decided to keep Event Popups focused on things that need your immediate attention, like opportunities for the player to act and major world events.

The solution I settled on is a notification system. It's a tried-and-tested way to keep someone informed about events without interrupting their gameplay, just like notifications on your phone.

Notifications will be separated by importance, allowing players to choose what they want to see. They can focus only on events with a direct gameplay impact or also read flavor text for extra context and immersion.

Adding notifications was essential to making BDSM devices and bondage affect your characters in the background, which will be an important part of the game.

Another major benefit of notifications is that they'll make it easier to keep track of your submissives working as prostitutes. Previously, you'd have to visit the city and check the log to see what was happening. This made it easy to lose track of your submissives while they were out earning money for you.

On a different topic, I've been wanting characters to have a more visible presence throughout the game, rather than appearing only in scenes and during interactions. I think this would help players feel more connected to their avatar and the other characters in their entourage.

I won't be able to implement everything I have in mind, but one change I'm making this update is displaying your character model in the Location window. I hope this helps you feel more connected to your character and the world around them. More changes like this are planned for future updates.

I hope you found this devlog interesting. I'd love to hear your thoughts on these changes, as well as any other aspect of the project. Your feedback is always welcome.

Thank you for your interest in the game and I hope you're looking forward to the next release!
Orane

Hello everyone! I hope you're all having a good day.

In this update, I wanted to address some of the issues that come up most often in player feedback and share what I'm doing to improve them.

One of the issues that came up is how annoying it can be to have to travel to a city just to see the Aesthetic Score of a submissive there. So I've added a new tab to the Character Inspector window.

It will only list cities you've already discovered and you'll still have to take the character to a city to find out their score there.

The (???) shown in the screenshots are cities the player knows about but where that specific submissive has never been. To make this work, I also had to make sure city names never repeat and add a way to see city names on the map. Now when you hover your mouse over a discovered location on the map its name should appear.

Of course, the fixed and random Aesthetic Score is just a placeholder but I hope this makes the trading experience much better.

I've received quite a few comments about the saving system, with the most impactful being from players who lost progress because they forgot to save thinking the game would do it automatically. This is particularly important because losing progress can be enough to make a player not want to come back to the game.

So in this update I'm adding autosaving and multiple save slots.

I wish I could already implement save compatibility between game versions, but I'll only be able to do that once the core mechanics of the game are more developed.

I already made another devlog about this problem and my solution (Devlog #31) but basically I'm adding a simple job that the player can do to earn at least enough money to hire a mercenary and get back to raiding villages.

This issue is mostly about wanting more content, and I actually take that as a good sign. It means that some players want to keep playing the game in it's current state even after they've already experienced the available content.

To improve on this, I'm adding new village content and mechanics that become available after defeating bandit camps. You can read more about this in Devlog #29.

With a game like this, it can be difficult to balance building the systems needed for future content with actually delivering new content in each update, even when those systems aren't in their final form yet. The plan is that as the game develops I'll be able to focus more and more on just adding content instead of building the core mechanics to support it.

This is an issue I won't be able to fully fix in one update but I'm making some additions that should improve the training experience.

The most important one is that devices and bondage will now have background effects. For example, a gagged submissive may gain some Discipline from time to time.

It's not a full solution but I'm also adding a fuck machine. It will be expensive to buy but it should considerably speed up some skill gains if you want to take a rougher approach to training.

Of course, training is one of the most important components of the game, so it should become more interesting as the game gets more mechanics and features.

When it comes to customization, one of the most common pieces of feedback I've received is that there should be more hairstyles, especially more feminine ones.

So this update is getting a lot of new hairstyles. You can even get a small spoiler for one of them in this post's screenshot.

I know these are far from being the only issues with the game. I have a long list of other things that come up regularly in feedback, but I wanted to share some of the things I'm currently doing to address problems you may experience while playing.

If you have any other issues or suggestions, I'd love to hear them. Your feedback is really important for helping me figure out how I can make the experience better for everyone.

Thank you very much for your interest in the game and for helping make it better!

Hey everyone! Hope you're having a good day.

Development on the new update has been going well and it should be ready for release in October. The original plan was to release it this month but I got a little too excited about some features, so it'll need a little more time to cook.

I hope to stick more closely to the three-month release schedule next year when I have more time to work on the game, but for now I'd rather take a little longer and make each update something worth looking forward to than rush it just to stay on schedule.

I've been getting some feedback about how reaching 0 copper can make it difficult to recover. Theoretically, you can keep raiding and accept that you'll lose most of the time until you eventually earn some money to hire some mercs. However, I understand that being defeated can feel bad even when there are no real consequences to losing while you're broke.

I imagine many new players may have simply given up on the game after finding themselves in that situation, so I wanted to address this issue sooner rather than later.

That's why I'm adding a low-paying job in cities to help you get back on your feet. In both the next Public Build (0.1.4) and Early Access Build (0.1.5), you'll be able to take patrol shifts at the Peacekeeper's Station.

Cities are interested in occasionally hiring you for patrols because citizens tend to be on their best behaviour when they know a Domitor or Domita is watching, even if they aren't willing to pay very well for it.

This also means the introduction of a new type of character: the Peacekeepers. They are responsible for keeping order in cities but have a tendency toward corruption and don't particularly care about the common citizen. That's something you'll eventually be able to exploit.

Thank you for your interest in the game and I hope you’re excited about the update!

Orane