0.53 Reflection and 0.54 Preview

Hi, perverts! If you're reading this, thank you for keeping up with the project after my unplanned delay in work. I've had stuff cooking for a day job that hopefully will give me more space to work on Ruin Me without worrying about where my rent is coming from, but it meant that my brain space was divided. That also resulted in some good old writer's block for the Wrens story (the main think holding up the release). Now that it's cleared away, it feels like Ruin Me work is flowing more freely again!

I want to be realistic about the consistency of my work, so I'm still not inclined to give projected release dates, but I do not expect the next release to take as long as this one. :)

I've said this elsewhere, but: while I am very thankful for folks who support me through dry spells, I completely understand pausing or reducing your support in times where there aren't updates. I would rather you unsubscribe and then return when releases resume instead of feeling like you're not getting what you want for your pledge. I appreciate all the support you are willing to give!

Reflecting on The Wrens

This will probably be the final "Birds" minor ruination for a while! There are now five options for folks to help, with the overarching story only requiring three of them. One of my goals with Ruin Me is that folks have enough options to avoid anything they specifically don't care for. That doesn't go so far as me enabling players to, for example, only interact with straight people, but I want to offer enough of things like Birds and horror expeditions so that you can skip some if you're super not into piss or bugs, for example. Another part of this ethos is to provide ways to resolve things that let your character avoid being directly involved. The game doesn't allow for doing a fully asexual playthrough (yet?) but I definitely want to support players who like the erotic stuff in the game but not the idea of their character getting their own hands (and other parts) dirty.

Speaking of spectating, it was a lot of fun to write a cuckqueaning scene. I'm not monogamous myself, but I get the allure of partner-sharing. Unfortunately, a lot of the cuckold fetishism I see around is both misogynist and racist, treating both the wife and her (usually non-white) partner as objects for masochistic gratification of the (presumed-white) husband. It doesn't have to be this way! I did my best to write a story that focused on the fraught pleasure of exposing marital intimacy without fetishizing race or treating a partner as a sexual object.

Lillian and Xavier Lacalle draw some inspiration from historical people, although I've taken some liberties by including some inspirations from later decades than when the game is set. Lillian's first name is a reference to Lil Johnson, a singer that we don't know much about, but released some truly filthy songs like "Get 'Em from the Peanut Man (Hot Nuts)." I highly recommend listening to some of her stuff as an antidote to the idea that popular music used to be less horny and explicit. Xavier is inspired by a bunch of Cuban and Spanish bandleaders, including most notably Xavier Cugat and José María Lacalle García. And, of course, there are clear parallels to the immortal Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball of "I Love Lucy" fame, although I have no evidence that Lucy loved to watch Ricky fuck other women.

I hope that the new mansion ambiences are welcome. I want the world to feel alive, not like it's a theme park that only exists when you want something from it. At the same time, I know that procedural text can start to feel overfamiliar and I also want to avoid putting too many speedbumps in your way when you're just trying to get to the next bit of story. Hopefully, the default settings I've arrived at, where you see ambience the second time each day you pass through the entryway, avoids these issues. I'm interested in feedback, and remember that you can adjust the frequency of this sort of thing in the preferences.

Next Release

I'm going to continue to convert NPCs to use the new social menu format that's already in use for Theresa and Byron, in an attempt to keep their conversation menus from feeling like a long list of undifferentiated options. Cathy will be converted in the upcoming release, and maybe another character; we'll see! Another thing that this UX change supports is each NPC having their own activity associated with them besides play scenes. It probably won't happen in this release, but I'd like to overhaul how exploration and Ken gain works; in the future, you may unlock new locations via Arthur (for locations outside town) and Esther (for locations around the mansion). "Grinding" Ken may become more interesting as well, but we'll see how that goes.

The main piece of story for this release will be a new horror expedition; it's available in Act I and plays with concepts of memory and identity. This is a bit of an odds-and-ends story: I have a lot of ideas and images in my concept document that aren't enough to carry an entire story on their own, but are still cool, so I took some that would work together and combined them! Expect miscellanea like a petrifying well, Enochian magic, the name of God, and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This one opens with a chain of nightmares, which led me to another change.

My general concept for nightmares is that each expedition has a "prophecy" nightmare, which is unlocked when you start the expedition, and an "echo" nightmare, which reflects back on it (feel free to speculate in the comments which nightmare corresponds to which expedition!). The idea is that you'll have a bit of a dreamlike feeling of déjà vu when you see images or concepts from a nightmare in the waking part of the game. This currently works all right if you tend to mix up your activities in each day, maybe doing one step of an expedition and then spending the rest of the day in exploration or training or play scenes. But based on play reports I've seen, no one actually plays like that. People seem to pick up an expedition and then play it straight through.

I don't want to enforce some sort of limit on how quickly you can do an expedition, but I do really want a better sequence of prophecy-expedition-echo. As a result, I'm planning to add an act's expedition prophecies at the start of each act, let you experience them, and then have you encounter the echoes and other nightmares as they're unlocked. This isn't perfect, but will mean that you're more likely to encounter a prophecy before the expedition it corresponds to.

Finally, I've continued to do more behind-the-scenes work. One type is automated testing; I now have scripts that play the game through the start of Act II. I can run these for each release and make sure there aren't any new gamestopping bugs. Another type is a bunch of revisions to support a big feature that I haven't announced yet. This should actually result in something you can see, however: you'll be able to choose whether Theresa's Permissivity 3 training is vaginal or anal sex. The one you don't pick will be in the Experience 4 slot (currently anal). So if you want to train Theresa to be an anal slut first, you'll be able to!

That's the main list of stuff; Theresa's third graduation option, with potential exhibitionism and public sex and free use, is coming soon but probably not in this release. If you have thoughts about this past release or about a way that you want the game to go, please let me know! I'd also love to hear if there's a place you find out about games like Ruin Me where people don't know about it yet. I'd love to be able to expose more people to the game. I hope you are doing well, and thank you again for your support!