0.56 Reflection and 0.57 Preview

Hey, perverts! I hope you all are doing well and that your new year has begun without too much strife. The recent release was huge, probably the last big overhaul that will touch every part of the game, and I think it's been a big success!

A quick note first: I've uploaded a pair of small hotfixes, 0.55.4 and 0.56.1-p, which fix Cathy showing up uninvited during the final Wrens scene and some misalignment of conversation menus on phones. They're not urgent updates, but if those issues bug you, you can download them.

You might remember that I asked for the advice of my Center of Attention patrons regarding releasing a web version, as well as inviting all of y'all to rate Ruin Me five stars on Itch. Well, I have a couple of graphs to demonstrate the difference it made!

Here are my views on Itch.io around and before the new year. That huge spike at the start of November is the release of the web version. Usually, after a release, my views level out, and you can see that they're starting to drop to a steady line above pre-web-release levels. I asked for help with ratings on Nov. 21, and you can see that there's actually a gradual increase in views at that point, probably due to a combination of it being higher-rated on Itch and the web version letting people try the game quickly! But here are my numbers after the most recent release:

This graph has the same starting point as the first one; it's just scaled to include the week since release. As you can see, more people have checked out the game with the last release than ever before, by a solid order of magnitude. This latest release was in Itch's top ten new and popular adult games for a solid day or three, and it's in part thanks to all of your support. Thank you so much; I love being able to share my work with more people!

If you're a $5 Center of Attention patron, I've just put up a poll on my current proposed plan for pricing of the full version of the game. It'll remain open for a week in case you want to up your pledge and weigh in on it! Currently, I plan for anyone who has access to the Patreon version to get the full version once it's out.

Reflection on Terrence Radcliffe

Adding the option to train Terrence, in addition to Theresa, was something I've been planning and working on for a long time. I've always wanted Ruin Me to avoid assumptions and defaults regarding gender, orientation, and so on. I started with the option to pick your character's gender, anatomy, and presentation, with nonbinary protagonists being added later. Still, the game is a bit heavy in characters that are not men, and it felt like it was (like most porn games) leaving folks out who are primarily attracted to dudes.

Letting Terry be a man instead of a woman felt like a good way to make the game even more open to possibilities. It was important to me that Terry was basically the same person regardless of gender. I suspect that your childhood circumstances shape your experience of gender enough that this is unrealistic, but I get to write what I want, and I think I was pretty successful in making Terrence a believable, if rather effeminate, man. There's definitely a lack of training/corruption games that focus on men (but not feminization), so I hope the game now helps to fill that niche!

There's a funny bit of synchronicity that I noticed while adapting the art to include Terrence. I use photo reference for most of my characters, and Theresa's original facial inspirations were Emily Dickinson, Audrey Hepburn, and Elliot Page. Since the game was released, Page came out as a trans man, so I had the delightful experience of using his now more-masculine face as reference for some of the new art I'm drawing (although Theresa and Terrence do share the exact same facial art in all poses).

Doing this gender overhaul was a good opportunity to update and improve several of the systems in the game. Outfits are now represented in a far more maintainable way, making it easier to add new ones and making it simpler to preview outfit changes and purchases. I also made the display of outfits simpler; previously, I called a show_theresa_outfit() subroutine every single time I wanted Terry to be clothed, which opened up the risk of them being naked or in a default outfit when they shouldn't be. Now, Terry's sprite has what Ren'Py calls an "attribute function" that automatically picks their hair, gender, and outfit if it's not otherwise specified. It makes my code easier to write and cleaner to read!

The one big chunk of writing that needed to change was coitus training. Before I announced that I was adding Terrence, I added the ability to pick the order of anal and vaginal penetration training, as wanted him to be able to train as a bottom first, if the player desired. But vaginal sex needed to change a whole lot for basic anatomical reasons. It was fun figuring out how to shape lessons in an activity that we often assume people with cocks just automatically know how to do well.

Next Release

A feature I've long wanted to put in the game will finally become available: save file transfer between platforms! Ren'Py has released their latest version that will let me implement the Ren'Py Sync feature, where the game can upload an encrypted version of your save to the cloud temporarily and you can pull it down on another device using a code. If you've been holding off on switching the device you play Ruin Me on because you'd need to start over, this should be welcome news!

I'm well on my way into writing The Crazed Imago, a new horror expedition that will take place in Act III. This one will be structurally interesting: much of it will be told in flashback, revealing a mystery that's you've been involved in since shortly after arriving in Barrowport. It'll have themes of doppelgangers, body horror, and optional gore/knife play (without any lasting harm to the participants). I've already done most of the art involved in the story, and some of it unsettles even myself.

That brings us to another project I want to start working on: adding art to earlier parts of the game. As my skill and comfort with drawing has improved, I feel more able to create bespoke character/creature art for expeditions and other scenes. You've seen a little bit of this with the growing library of art for expedition mementos, as well as the character featured in The Nostalgic Conjugation. It might not be included in the NEXT release, but I plan to start with drawing the creature you encounter in The Mica Sign.

Note that some art might be abstract or vague if I feel like it's better not to show something mysterious. I may also leave out art that I'm comfortable depicting in text but doesn't feel tasteful in visual form (or might be prohibited by platforms' terms of service).

This update will also have some fixes and improvements that piled up on my to-do list while I was focusing on Terrence.

It definitely will not be part of the next update, but I'll be starting work on the finale sometime soon! I'll likely be working on that in the background for a while as I release other things, so that I'm less likely to have to spend many months between updates as I work on that huge chunk of story.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the latest update or anything else about the game! You can comment here, post on the discussion board on Itch, DM me on Patreon, or email phanes@phanes.me. Thank you so much for your support!