v0.4 early access 5

Edit (Hotfix 1):

Fixed a game breaking bug caused by the lava siren encountering more than one charmable enemy. I really should have caught that one during testing, sorry about that. (Thanks to Spencer Tyrell, Myahmary and IcyNinji for the bug reports).

Original post below:

This will be the final early access for version 0.4. With a public release planned for sometime after the early access for version 0.5 is uploaded.

I was able to get most of what I had planned added to this build. But I'm far less productive in the summer heat so some bits and bobs got delayed to future builds.

The bus reskins turned out alright, but there are a few clipping issues with their outfits that still need ironing out. I ended up renaming them to Lava Siren and Nightmare instead of their pokemon-esque working titles.

I ran into some issues with implementing the original gameplay planned for the lava sirens and had to go back to the drawing board a few times. The plan was for them to dance around, luring enemy monsters into lava. But working out the movement and for everything to stay in vision of the player to enable counter play was a real headache. In the end I settled on the much simpler solution of the siren being static in a pool of lava. It never moves or directly attacks anything, but any enemy monster entering in its vision with a full naughty meter will get charmed and move towards it. I ended up liking the final version better than the original plan, it's simple and the counter play is rather clear. Either take out the siren, keep your ally's lewd meter low, or help your ally reach the siren without touching the lava. It was a good reminder to not overthink things, but rather start simple and add complexity later.

The plan for the nightmare is for it to possess allies through sexy dreams. But I didn't get much time to work on it so they're functionally still just reskins of the regular buses. Fun fact: The mythological "mare" is a succubus like spirit that rides people in their sleep. Which is why we call bad dreams nightmares.

Lava sirens and Nightmares can be customized at any mirror just like the Incubus and Succubus.

I ended up doing a near full rewrite of the scripts controlling the bus character avatars, so if you've had problems getting them to load during cinematics please let me know if this changed anything.

Pressing the pause menu button (escape key) during memory cinematics will now open up a menu that lets users change stage, belly blending and individual monster effects while the cinematic is running.

Under the hood I've made a few improvements and future prep to the games code. There was also a few changes to the meta save file, but the game will patch save files from the previous version so it shouldn't be necessary to start from scratch. Some character customization might have reset though.

I also changed the shared bus cinematics to all use the same unlock ID, so that when one of them is unlocked it also gets unlocked for all the other characters reusing it.

The preview for v0.5 early access 1 will be up on the 1st of July.

Thank you all so much for your support.

Full list of changes below:

New stuff:

• New Lava Siren enemy.

• New Nightmare enemy.

• New Goblin x Incubus cinematic.

• New Goblin x Succubus cinematic.

• New Minotaur x Chloe anal cinematic.

• Added a new pause menu (escape key) to customize running memory cinematics.

Changes:

• Reworked summoning tome (Thanks to Kerenga for the reminder).

• Updated the tutorial (Thanks to This vexes me for the reminder).

• The game now allows for gendered characters rather than needing a specific archetype for each variant of a character.

• The Incubus and Succubus archetypes have been merged into male and female variants of the new Metabus archetype.

• Moved a bunch of code over to the new gendered character system.

• The game will now automatically patch save files from the v0.4 early access 4.

• Pressing the mouse anywhere on the screen will now count as a continue input in textboxes without options.

• The debug console is now alphabetically sorted.

• The cinematic memory menu now shows one character archetype per page.

• Removed the ability to take objects from summoned monsters.

• Reused bus cinematics now share unlock IDs.

• Rewrote the logic for avatars of bus adjacent characters.

• Water vials now solidify 5 tiles of lava in a + pattern.

Bugfixes:

• Hairstyle customize option is now properly hidden when wearing clothing that overrides hairstyles (Thanks to Lulu for the bug report).

• Fixed translations not properly formatting "\n" as linebreaks (Thanks to Orpheaned on itch for the bug report).