0.5 Development Update 35

Hey, folks!

Early Access post for v0.5.9 will be up in less than an hour, but in the meantime, here’s a dev update.

Let’s talk about the upcoming update. First of all, the quest log is getting a big makeover. I’m sure everyone who’s reading this knows about the Love App and the hint system, but a whole lot of people completely miss this part of the UI and then can’t figure out how to progress. And even those who do often get fixated on a single event chain and have to skip time to get to the next step. Or just push through one storyline and then it all feels a bit off when they start going through the “earlier” events.

Anyway, here’s the current mockup. Mostly works in the engine already, but all the coloured bits are added in photoshop (shoutout to our Discord mod Hats for the doodle designs).

The “routes” are “quests” now, the objectives will be the same hints from the love app, only now you’ll get a notification when any hint changes. For the first iteration I’ll sort the quests by the last update time, so you’ll see the older ones higher up. I hope the progression will feel more natural this way. Just pick one of the uppermost quests all the time, and you should have a balanced experience.

I have more stuff planned for later, for example, filtering the quest log by girl, maybe redesigning the UI altogether as I’ve grown to dislike this skeuomorphic thing. It’s possible that I’ll tweak the notifications/alerts to be less obnoxious as well. I also have vague ideas about adding an “event interaction possible” indicator to the quest log or even to the house map. But those are very vague and will probably require a bit too much work to implement properly. We’ll see.

Alright, enough with the UI changes. Next on the menu - new scenes and new interactions. You all have voted for the girls initiating sex and, uh, I probably should’ve started with this, but anyway. They will be coming up to you and asking you to join them in their rooms or other places from now on.

I’ll probably expand this mechanic later. Some sort of horniness meter seems relevant, it’s possible we’ll be making some unique variants of the sex scenes or at least some pre/post-sex branches depending on the girls’ lewdness/horniness.

And there will be more sex scenes, of course. We’re going light on the story for this next update, with only one or two story events for Cait to finish off her current arc and make a smooth transition to the repeatable sex and stuff, and everything else should be side events and maybe some “alt route” events.

There’s a side sex scene poll going on right now here - https://www.patreon.com/posts/seventh-step-sex-55638945 - but one option is way ahead, so we’ve already started on animating it.

If those of you who voted for it will go and change your vote now I’ll be very, very unhappy. So don’t do that. I’ll delay the scene just to spite you if you do that. 😶

But there will be more anyway! We’re planning on adding three full sex scenes, and maybe we’ll get to remastering some of the older ones as well.

As for the 0.5.10 and later updates, can’t tell you too much just yet, but we’re doing Rae’s story push next. More visits to her mentor, more etherwalks to the MC’s world, and other fun stuff.

And then there’s another big thing. Next week I’ll post a Very Important poll. We’re going to decide the fate of the sixth main cast character. Imma stop being all coy and show you the one I was planning to add.

There will be multiple options (but not necessarily girls) on the actual poll, I’ll go into more detail there. Despite the, uh, chilly reception, I still want to continue Yona’s story, and I will do that. But truth be told I’m not so sure I’m ready to go through all that again for another character. So we’ll have a poll, and then I’ll make the decision.

One more thing. Let me apologize in advance, but due to miscommunication I have three cross-promo posts pending for this month. I promised not to spam you all too much with those posts, and I take full responsibility for this mistake. I’ll try my best not to do that in the future.

And to end on the high note, here’s this week’s Wed Nip pics. Jen and Viv doing the meme pose of the <current month>!

And a little exclusive bonus for y'all.

See you soon!