0.54 Reflection and 0.55 Preview

Happy Labor Day, perverts! At the time of Ruin Me, it would have been a relatively new holiday; it was signed into law in 1894, so somewhere vaguely around when Theresa was born. I can't say for sure, because the game doesn't take place at any specific year. You might wonder why the US celebrates workers on the first Monday in September instead of on the International Workers' Day on May 1, especially if you don't live here. The idea for Labor Day actually came first, commemorating a march in 1882. The Second International picked May Day in 1889 to honor the organizing around the Haymarket Affair, where the government executed several innocent people to try and suppress the labor movement. That incident was still way too fresh for the US government in 1894. In fact, May 1 is officially both Loyalty Day and Law Day in the US, a deliberate attempt to resist labor organization. Pretty fucked up, huh?

Barrowport is a small enough town that there's not a lot of urgency for labor organization there, although there's probably at least one cannery, Esther Shepherd is a radical leftist, and my notes for Cathy Liu say she's the local ILA union head for the folks who load and unload ships. Still, I imagine that the town celebrates with some grilled fish picnics.

Personally, I've been putting in some labor on new Ruin Me writing, which I'll talk about in a bit! I'm happy to see folks returning to support me now that releases have resumed, plus some new folks. I started a poll for the Center of Attention patrons on how much people replay the game or play stuff that's not the newest release, to help me get a feel for the player's priorities. So far, it looks like most people have one main save that they play the game with; some folks play even when they're caught up on the story. The next poll will probably be on whether I should start releasing web-based versions of the game. If you want to weigh in on either of those, you can support me at $5 and also get access to the cheat menu and requests for small bits of writing.

Reflection on The Nostalgic Conjugation

I really like how the new horror expedition turned out! I think this is the first time I've drawn new art for an expedition; for it to work, I felt like I needed a character portrait for Your Spouse. It wasn't too much work, and I hope it has the desired effect on y'all. You can let me know when you get there!

If you're curious, the memory-blurring effect is a combination of two different pieces of art, one more vaguely-drawn than the other, filters in Krita (my drawing app), and in-game Ren'Py filters. The different "blurrinesses" of Your Spouse just cross-fade instead of actually adjusting their blurriness levels; it's much less resource-intensive that way, and I don't feel like most folks will be able to spot the difference.

In my preview post for this release, I said that this expedition would be in Act I, but as the design evolved, I realized that it needed to be in Act II instead. If you haven't read the entire back archive of Patreon posts, here's my rule of thumb for what expeditions unlock in which act:

• If you could reasonably trick yourself that nothing supernatural happened and you were just dreaming or drugged, the expedition belongs in Act I.
• If the expedition involves a nonhuman creature or another clearly-supernatural phenomenon, it belongs in Act II.
• If the expedition bends reality itself, involving an otherworldly environment or a change to the nature of existence, it goes in Act III.

The change to how nightmares are assigned feels pretty good to me. You can still end up getting the prophecy nightmare to an expedition before the expedition itself, but it should be much rarer, especially if you are doing things other than just beelining the main story. It also makes it more appealing to add more nightmares that are triggered by things other than expeditions. I do want the poor professor to be able to have some peaceful nights, but I may make it rarer to have two in a row.

The ability to train Theresa in anal before coitus might seem arbitrary, but I think it will eventually make sense. It did present a rather complex logical situation: there were places everywhere in the game where I checked e.g. "permissivity >= 3" rather than actually seeing whether the specific training was complete. I did my best to search for every case where I used a stat check when I actually wanted to check that she was trained in a specific act, but please let me know if I missed anything!

Because testing this sort of thing manually means clicking through a whole bunch of scenes, even when using Ren'Py's handy fast-forward feature, I greatly expanded my automated testing so that, when I run the full suite, it plays through most of the game twice, once with each training order. Even at top speed, this takes several minutes, but it can run in the background as I do other things. I still manually review the transcript (using the excellent merge/diff tool Meld), but it's so much easier to make sure everything is working how I want it when I have things scripted out.

Next Release

Graduation, finally! I'm currently 680 lines deep in the final graduation option, a public exhibition event. For reference, the solo date option is around 2810, and the orgy around 2917. That doesn't map directly to playtime or complexity, but it gives you a general idea.

Speaking of complexity, this one has some, but I think it's a manageable level. The general current plan is that you'll be doing a tour of a few spots in town, letting Theresa show her growth at each one. You'll pick a control/sharing dynamic: just you fuck her, anyone can fuck her, you just watch people fuck her, or you and her both fuck the crowd. You also pick a general approach: a bar crawl, a strange festival, or a town-wide scavenger-hunt style game. Each approach has an additional option to flavor it a bit. Finally, you'll pick a sequence of (roughly) three stops for the tour (out of a selection of seven or so total), with each approach having one option that's not available for other approaches.

I've tried to make sure that the graduation events felt big and customizable, and I hope that this keeps up that feeling. If you want to just go drinking and fuck Theresa in public, you can do that. If you want to get cucked by her in a blasphemous religious festival, that's an option. If you want to both serve anyone who manages to collect enough clues and prizes, you can do that, too! I'll be making extensive use of the optional "Jealousy" toggle, I'm sure. I considered having a dynamic where you were the only one serving the crowd, and Theresa was fully in charge, but that would have basically required an entirely different scene for every stop, so sadly that option won't be available.

I have some ideas for new costumes to go along with some of the graduation options (that will then be available to every player once any graduation is complete), but we'll see if that ends up working out. I want to keep building my art skill, and in order to do that I'll have to keep practicing! New outfits should provide a good opportunity for that.

Beyond all that, I have some more user interface improvements I've been putting off and want to get to. One big example is an improvement to the mobile interface so the buttons at the bottom of the screen aren't as difficult to tap; this is also an accessibility issue! The other thing I really want to get done is Ren'Py Sync, a feature that will let you transfer saves between devices. You'll upload the saves from the old device, get a code, and enter that code in the new device to load them in there. I've already tested the basics, including reporting an issue with file sizes, but I want to make sure that the interface looks right and is easy to use.

If all goes according to plan, the next release will have the third graduation option, maybe some new costumes, and those UI improvements. There will probably be a lot of behind-the-scenes work to continue preparing for future work, but those are the big things that will be visible to you.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this upcoming release or a previous one! I'd especially love to find out if you've run into any issues: error messages, garbled text, or just something that doesn't seem to make sense or work right. I hope you all continue to do well, and I very much appreciate you helping to make this game possible.