Hey lads!

I've been so focused on moving to a new flat, then working on v34, and dealing with my sick pregnant wife and kid last week, who both dumped all tasks on me, and now I'm also sick since yesterday (no fever, just annoyance), and have been busy as hell. I totally forgot about writing a progress report... Sorry...

Since it's been a month, this post will be long, so brace yourselves!

Works on v34 are finished, and it works pretty well. There have been no reports about issues with stability or performance, which is great. I was a little bit annoyed after releasing v34b due to its lack of content, so I smuggled in an additional event with v34c (see screenshot). And now I can safely move on to working on v35.

For v35, I aim to continue with free-roam events, allowing Jane to encounter various (repeatable & low requirement) events simply by walking across The City. At this point, the game already has many sex scenes, although many are locked behind higher requirements or choices, making it difficult for players to experience them all. However, for the initial release of v35, I plan to prepare 3 sex events (since I already have the dialogues done for them) - Returning to work at Kevin's Diner after getting fired. Lovey-dovey (first time) sex with Ben. Check-up at the gynecologist (which will provide a long buff). Additionally, the gynecologist will offer the option to enable/disable pregnancy for a fee.

Furthermore, the game lacks a proper tutorial, and that's another aspect I want to focus on for v35. I'm considering implementing pop-up windows instead of forcing players to click on highlighted elements, but I'll see how it goes once I start working on it.

Another planned addition for v35 is an update to the female face art and a remake of the feet. You can see a comparison between v34 and the work-in-progress (WIP) v35 in the attached screenshots.

Additionally, I plan to release mustaches & beards as part of the Basic version, since we have just fixed them, meaning they will no longer be in the experimental state. There will be 3 variants of mustaches and 3 variants of beards, so the total number remains unchanged. Furthermore, we will add 2 rounder variants of foreheads & chins, as they seemed lacking in variety.

With my sick UI skills, I'm striving to enhance the readability of Event Sheets. Now, all events are sorted by location, and clicking on a location will show or hide its connected events. I've removed the events' location while checking whether they meet requirements, so events in different locations won't turn red anymore (though this can be restored with the Toggle Locations button). Events now display the current chance to trigger, and some unnecessary information can be hidden by turning off debug mode (F4 button). If there are no events for a location, it will be hidden. You can also manually hide locations by clicking on their names. However, there's an issue with duplicates since one event can happen in multiple locations, causing the same event to appear in each location. Searching for events with quotation marks " " will now search for an exact match.

Speaking of events, I aim to make them more obvious and easier to trigger in many cases. I plan to remove penalties from some choices and backstories while adding multiple bonuses via backstories, stats, perks, traits, etc., to make gameplay smoother.

I'm also making unique clothes obtainable from hobos with high reputation. The fastest way to acquire them would be cooking for the hobos, but triggering hobo events could also work, though it would take much longer. Currently, this includes nurse and two diner outfits, but drifter/homeless clothes will also be included.

In two weeks, we have Easter, and I'd like to add something small despite having a lot of work. However, I'm currently clueless. If anyone has ideas, feel free to share them with me.

There's a roadmap mentioning much more stuff for v35, which you can read about my main goals for 2024 on Discord (https://discord.com/invite/47mBKMnh9c). However, there's only so much I can do in one go, so expect more as part of v35 in April, while some will be delayed until v36.

Now for some bad news. With all the fees, taxes, meds, and price increases this year (and more to come in the upcoming weeks/months), it's getting harder to run this project. It's common knowledge here in Poland that running your own business is difficult (and kinda shunned by society for some magical reason), and that's why you hardly see any projects like this here, despite a population of 40 million. I'm not going to increase pricing, add microtransactions, DLCs, or other monetization schemes, but I might be forced to look for a part-time job if things get really bad. This means I'll have less time to invest in this project, as I have a family to feed. Naturally, I'm still going to do my best and keep working.

On a brighter note, with the v35 release, I'll be adding one more game version - CH (Cheats). It will be a middle ground between BA (Basic) and EX (Extended) for people who only care about cheats and not about my experimental and unusual features. It will be priced at 10 euros on Patreon and $11 on SubscribeStar. So what does this change for you? If you don't care about cheats, or if you are interested in special features from EX, or you bought the game on itch.io - then nothing changes. However, if you only care about cheats and nothing more, then you can freely downgrade from the 15 euro version to the 10 euro version and save some money. I'm just hoping that all of you won't instantly downgrade, because it will definitely hurt funding for this project even more, but I leave the choice to you ^ Additionally, I'm going to release CH to the public as well, but downgraded by 2 versions (instead of 1 like in the BA case). So you will get to see public v35 CH together with public v36 BA. Enjoy!

Now, I really don't want to sound ungrateful or greedy, as I simply try to make this project as transparent as possible by staying honest and communicating about any problems. I've already started working on the new character angle, but since I'm really struggling financially right now, I'm unable to pay my artist for it. It involves re-making ALL of the character art, for both female and male, including clothes and other details from scratch and in more detail, since the side view is the least detailed angle, and I have to repeat it for every new angle. So I'm really sorry, but I can't pull it off right now.

Obviously, the second project is on hold, because if I can't afford to hire freelancers for this project, then I won't do it for a lower priority project either.

One of my dreams was to develop a big project and support it for ages, like, you know, one guy (or a very small team) spends years on it and keeps expanding it even after a release, like Kenshi, Dwarf Fortress, etc. While I never wanted (or even thought about it) to become a hentai dev, still after like 5 years spent with this project, with its ups and downs, I've become rather attached and fond of it. So I would really love to continue working on this project because thinking about what it could become after another 5 years gets me really excited, especially after polishing out the game's foundation. Really, compare v34 with v30, or some older builds like v0.27 & v0.01, a lot has changed.

v35 (Patreon & SubscribeStar) and v34c public will be both released on March 30th, while v34c EX will be released on itch.io on March 17th.

P.S. Looks like an event in v34c is bugged and won't trigger (it's a dumb oversight, my bad), but its second variant that's a bit harder to trigger (requires buying clothes) works fine. There's no way for me to release v34d, as I've already started working on new features for v35 and can't roll back. Sorry!

Cheers!