Status Update on 0.56

Hi, perverts! Here's an update on how the next release is coming along! For a quick summary: I've done a bunch of work, but it's probably not going to be ready in November.

The bulk of the work for this release is revising every scene in the game with Terry in it. Most of the work is replacing pronouns with dynamic text: "She smiles" gets replaced with "[t_she!c] smiles," for example, which substitutes in "She" for Theresa and "He" for Terrence. Where I can, I'm leaving lines mostly intact and just swapping out phrases, such as having "rubbing her pussy" change to "stroking his cock." Sometimes, however, I just swap out an entire line or series of lines, in cases where there's larger relevant differences between Terry's sexes/genders.

I mark every file I've revised in this way, and the only source files remaining to revise are the main Reform Institute file, manual sex training, oral sex training, BDSM training, coitus training,  and advanced permissivity training. Manual, oral, and vaginal sex training are probably the sequences that call for the most revision compared to others, given the anatomical differences, but they're really only a small portion of the total revision work I'll be doing. Coitus play is a special case: the existing coitus play scene will become exclusive to Theresa, while Terrence will use a highly customized version of the strap-on play scene.

I've also taken this opportunity to overhaul the way the game stores and handles outfits, since there's extra complexity there around Terrence's default outfits and making sure each gender can acquire the others' outfits at the Tailor. Previously, outfits were an elaborate mess of copy-pasted code and endless if-elif-else statements, but now they're data-oriented, which let me straight-up delete about a thousand lines of code. A nice side effect is that it became simple for me to implement outfit previews: when you hover over (or otherwise highlight) an outfit at the Tailor's or in Terry's chambers, you'll get to see what it'll look like without having to go through dialogue.

I also have to revise a whole lot of art. Thanks to work I've been doing behind the scenes for a while, some of it is already ready for Terrence; for example, I drew the "asleep" pose with both genders in mind. The poses with the most work remaining are "kneeling," "on back," and "bound standing." As well as swapping around chests and genitals, I also need to be able to support different haircuts (at some point, Terry's hair will be customizable, but for now each gender has a single 'do). I've taken the opportunity to improve a lot of art. The "kneeling" pose in particular is getting heavily redrawn to look much less flat, thanks to my ever-improving drawing skills.

The horror expedition I have planned, "The Crazed Imago," is still mostly on the drawing board. It's almost entirely outlined; I think I'm going to play with flashbacks! I'm not yet sure whether it will end up in this release or the next one. It'll depend on where I feel most inspired to work, as I find that being able to switch between tasks helps a lot to ward off fatigue and burnout.

In any case, with Thanksgiving holidays coming up in the US along with their typical breaks and distractions, it's not very likely that I'll have a release out in November. I appreciate your patience and would love to hear if you have any thoughts on my plans for this release! Thank you all so much for your support. If you feel like helping the game get more attention, I would very much appreciate you giving it a five-star rating on Itch by clicking "Rate this game" in the upper-right of the game page!