0.39 Reflection and 0.40 Preview

Hi, perverts! I hope you had a sexy and spooky Halloween. I've been super heartened by how supportive everyone's been since I returned. I wish I had been able to communicate better with y'all, but it's been very encouraging at how so many of you have welcomed me back.

I'm going to be very mindful of avoiding burnout moving forward, as well as planning my work so that larger chunks of writing can get done over the course of multiple releases. I'm also probably going to adjust my patron benefits soon: I have no plans to increase the cost of any existing benefits, but I may add some. The $5 Center of Attention patrons have a poll active for feedback on benefit options, but if anyone has suggestions for benefits that would encourage folks to support the project, please comment here or PM me.

Reflecting on Graduation

In the release post for 0.39, I noted that the source code file for the orgy is almost 21,000 words. That's an enormous amount of writing, and I think it turned out pretty well. Because it involved multiple NPCs interacting, it also provided an opportunity to revise a lot of the game's art to make it more consistent in scale and style.

I intend for the final game to have at least three options for graduation celebrations, including one that doesn't involve sharing Theresa at all. This option, the orgy, was selected to get made first in a poll. I think it's also the longest and most complex of the three. The other two will involve much less branching, I think, which will help a lot with keeping their scope manageable.

In addition to the obvious orgy invitees (the folks introduced in the tutorial), there are also several options that are "hidden" in the sense that you'd need to go and provide invitations that you might not immediately assume would be satisfied. I'm curious to know if folks found those tricky to track down.

The combinatorial complexity for the orgy is pretty huge. I don't know if I'd actually change that if I could do it over again -- first I'd change how I worked, rather than what I worked on -- but it made it tricky to keep track of everything while writing. There are three planning decisions with three options for each (that, for the most part, don't change much prose), eight possible guests, three decision points during the party that have three options each, and most of those branches have minor choices or variations depending on player anatomy and the guest list. I think I managed to keep track of everything, but I wouldn't be surprised if y'all find a mistake for me to fix.

Next Release

I'm pretty sure the next release will be coming out sometime this week.

The big new chunk of writing is going to be another Night Music scene that lets you share an erotic dream (or nightmare?) with Theresa. After this, just one more of my planned Night Music scenes will be left to write; I want at least one scene per level of Depravity. I still might add more later on, but once five songs are in the game, it'll feel complete enough.

That scene is done; the other thing I'm working on will satisfy a patron request to let the player get body modifications. To start with, I'll probably just do some selected piercing options. These may not show up in writing or art much, but I think it'll be fun to be able to have another way of customizing your character.

Beyond that, there's a few different bug fixes and minor improvements that'll show up with the public version of 0.39 and get rolled into 0.40 as well. If you come across any issues yourself, whether they're technical errors or just places where the writing doesn't quite work, please let me know! I always welcome feedback, ideas, or reports of how the game got you off. You can comment here, send me a PM on Patreon, or write: phanes@phanes.me