House of Hellish Harlots - Update Dec 7th and a Slight Change of Plan

Time for the weekly update.

For this week it was mostly a case of putting the maintenance hat on and burying my arms up to the elbows in code.

When it comes to coding, I'm a firm believer in taking pauses every so often to review, refactor and clean up code.  It saves a lot of pain in the long term.

In this case, I started with the individual harlot scenarios (creating a more streamlined tester for them) and moved out to some of the NPC code.  The original NPC Gossip (Elegant Woman) code was a bit of a mess as she can be interacted with both before and after the harlot room.  You may have noticed bugs with regard to infinite coins or actions because I missed those checks from certain pathways (because there were too many of them).  I rewired all that and put the proper checks in place, so hopefully that will fix those bugs.

Overall, I've been doing a little more than that 'slight refactoring'.  It's a lot of behind-scenes stuff that isn't terribly interesting, but should speed things up and remove potential snarl-ups further down the line.

As a result, I'm going to change my release plan and put out The Portly Gentleman in his own release.  The code overhaul was a little bigger than I initially thought.  And while I have been testing changes fairly thoroughly, there is still a chance I might have missed some interactions.  I'd rather we caught those bugs with the unsexy NPC release, rather than getting people excited for the new sexy harlots only to have the demo be a bit buggy.

I'll also be putting a few more 'dummy' harlots back in place.  I want players to be able to run the demo for at least 4 to 5 rounds regardless of which harlots they pick (the demo is very short if you pick Panta Prota first right now).

The first release will be the revamped code, Portly Gentleman and more dummy harlots.  I'm hoping for that to be sometime next week.  You'll be able to get feedback on how the harlot encounters go in terms of how many coins the Portly Gentleman pays out.

The second release will be a new batch of harlots.  I'd like at least 5, but ideally more.  Once the Portly Gentleman release is out (and bug-free), I'll be adding new harlots like crazy and will try to get that next release out before the end of December.

Thanks for your continued interest and support.

- manyeyedhydra