BL3 Updates: Context Menus, Tape Bondage, Stumbling Blocks

Hi all! Here's what's new with Bondage Lily 3.

Our latest major addition is... Context menus! Wow!! Exciting!!

Unlike BL2's system, which made you cycle through gag/bondage styles separately, then try items with styles that may or may not work, the new system generates a context menu that only shows the options currently available to you with that particular item.

Tape!!

And we can use it for colors too!

As part of this change, I also overhauled the way coloring works. Before, the cloth item and each of the different cloth gags had a separate sprite for each possible color. That was OK, but it would mean that anytime we wanted to add anything new that uses cloth, I would need to make at least 9 different colored versions! And if I wanted to fix or touch something up, I'd need to do it 9 times, then re-import the 9 new sprites... and if I wanted to tweak a color or add a new one, I'd have to update dozens and dozens of images... Oh no!

This didn't seem sustainable as I added more and more stuff to the game, so instead, I decided to just do something totally different. The new system draws the base color, shading, and lineart layers separately, using universal sprites for each, then colors the base and shading on the fly within the game engine rather than using the sprite's original color.

Now we can even do this!

Yay! 🥳

New additions since last month also include harness ballgags, blindfolds, cloth collars, microfoam tape, a couple of new tape gags, and the layered bondage you saw above.

Now for the unfun part of the last few weeks:

After creating the gag system you saw in last month's update, I said "okay, we've got this great dynamic layering system that works super nicely! Now adding layered bondage should take no time at all! All I have to do is just adapt the gag stuff - change a variable here, add a new case clause there, and it's done!"

No problem! Super easy! Right? Right??? 

In fact, doing this broke everything, including the gags, which had worked perfectly fine before. The lists for gags, torso bondage and leg bondage were - for some reason - overwriting each other, even if they were handled by totally different objects and there was never any instruction to clear/destroy of any of them. Why? As far as I can tell, it seems like it has to do with the way GMS2 handles certain data structures, but even once I realized that, I still couldn't get it to work properly.

This problem sucked up an embarrassingly huge amount of time - first trying to figure out WTF was going wrong, then trying to come up with a way to fix it that actually worked. Eventually I just said F it and decided to just change the lists to arrays, which meant redoing other stuff and using up even more time. Argh!!!!!!!!

Thankfully, it should all work perfectly fine now. But that's why this update is a little less impressive than the last one. Sorry. 🥲

Unlike previous updates, this one is available to all patrons (not just $10 and up). I thought it'd be good to let you guys see what I've been up to so you know I haven't been slacking. I've got something different planned for $10 patrons this month, which should be up later tonight.

Anyway, that's all I've got for now. Thank you as always, and have a happy and safe holiday season! This time of year is fun for lots of people, but tough for many others. Remember to check in on your friends and loved ones!

Thank you! 🙇‍♀️