New Update Changelog

Hi everyone,

This is a midterm update and not yet chapter 7. It's an update that I've been looking forward to have ready for a long time and now. Download it here.

Animations:

Most of all lewd scenes now have animations. In total, there are now more than 150 animations in game.

As some of you may now, I started developing this game in a few years old laptop with a Nvidea 1060 GPU. That's basically the reason the graphics of NiF have this cartoonish shaders instead of the traditional Daz3D  photo-realistic look. It was the only way to make renders at a reasonable speed with that laptop. I've actually come to enjoy this style more than the traditional Daz3D photo-realistic one, but that doesn't seem to be the majority of players opinion. Regardless, the point is, is much faster to render with these type of shaders.

Fast-forward to earlier this year when I finally managed to upgrade to a top range desktop and now I can actually make animations reasonably fast. It takes longer to pose the scene than to render it. I've always wanted to have animated lewd scenes in NiF and I think I can (and should) leverage this render speed to make more and faster animations than what other games with photo-realistic styles can do. It's a way to try add value to my game.

Also, making animations is fun. I like it.

That doesn't mean I'm good at it. I had zero experience in the matter and Daz is pain in the ass to animate anything well. And, bad animations can actually make a scene worse than without any animation. Or, in some cases, can be a bit jarring to go from parts of lewd scenes with animations to parts with static renders. NiF scenes weren't made with animations in mind. They tend to be long, with changes of camera angles, and it's now hard to animate the whole thing from beginning to end.

All of this to say that the animations are far from perfect. I tried to make it so that all scenes were improved, but I might very well have failed in some. There are some animations that I'm happy with, but there are also other's that... might need improvements. For example, I have some trouble with getting the "jiggly bits" to follow the laws of physics... (screw Daz and the lack of soft bodies physics.) I might try to fix some of the worse cases in the future, but I also don't want to keep working on this forever. There's a new chapter to be made.

So, in summary, I'm really proud of getting to this milestone on this project and be able to animate most of the lewd scenes. They should now be sexier and more pleasant to the eye. There are also a few that might be subpar and in need of improvement. Please give me your feedback about which ones are which and help me improve at this skill. Animating is fun but it's hard.

New feature - Scenario Mode:

I've talked about my wish of adding this new mode to the game in the pass. It's basically a way to help players replay their favorite parts of the game and/or explore new paths, without having to play the whole thing again. In this mode, you can pick a path to focus on and you'll only see the scenes relevant to that path.

This mode only opens up once you finish the most recent chapter (chapter 6 at this time) to make sure that you're familiar with the overall story.

This is just the first iteration of this mode and is yet a bit unpolished: not all paths in the game are yet implemented and I'd also like to add some text between scenes to help situate the scenes on the screen in the bigger story.

Let me know if you find this mode useful, while keeping in mind that it'll have some improvements in the future. If you have any suggestion on how to make it better, I'd be happy to hear them.

A new more vanilla path with Jen:

A common criticism that I've heard about the game is that is too kinky.

It's interesting to see that, here on Patreon polls, it usually wins the more kinkier option. This leads me to think that, the kind of player that likes kinky scenes is happy with the game. But, perhaps, more vanilla players may be having trouble to find something to enjoy.

I have to admit that I have some trouble writing vanilla scenes. I'm not sure if they seem more "boring" to me because I'm personally more interested in the kinkier scenes, or if I'm just bad at it and everyone will find them boring. The lack of animations also didn't help make these more vanilla scenes more interesting.

After having a good thinking about this, I asked myself which characters have personalities that would be compatible with a new vanilla path. I came to the conclusion that a more vanilla path to Jen would be interesting to the story and have made a new one. This new path has some exclusive scenes with Jen, besides also using some renders/animations from the other paths. The scenes are not very long, though. To try it it, you'll have to start a new game (or use the scenario mode!).

More options during the kinky scenes:

Since this game deals with many kinks, it was always a top priority to me to not throw any kink into a player that's not interested in it. I think I've been relatively successful with that, but I've also heard some complaints regarding that here and there.

One of them was about Deb and her orgasm control kink. In some scenes, it wasn't possible to escape it (either because the MC had ruined orgasm or didn't orgasm at all) which was annoying for submissive players that don't like that kink. So, now, I've introduced a few options in a couple scenes to try to mitigate that.

Another case was in the Jen manly path were some players felt like the humiliation kink was being forced on them. While there was already options to bypass those humiliating scenes, I agree that the initial introduction of the topic could have been better handled. Therefor, I've changed a few things in chapter 4 to try to showcase that both humiliation and praising paths with Jen are equally viable.

Quality of life improvements:

There have also been some quality of life improvements like a slightly better organized gallery and music rooms, the addition of an return button the in-game phone apps, and the addition of a way to quickly change the music volume when the playing song has vocals.

For some people it can be quite annoying to try to read the VN text while a song with vocals is playing in the background. So, in these scenes, there is now a small icon on the top right corner of the screen that lets you quickly decrease the music volume quickly if you can't focus on the text.

Preparation for steam release:

There also have been some changes to prepare for steam release. The more noticeable one was that some songs had to be changes due to licensing mistakes on my part of due to the songs have just disappeared from the internet since the start of the game development. I tried my best to find suitable replacements, some are even better imo, and I hope you won't even notice any difference.

Proofreading:

Chapter 6 has also been proofread and edited thanks to the generous help of Osanaiko.

And this is it for now. There are still some things to do non-related to chapter 7, but those will stay for a later update. Feel free to give me any feedback about the changes, animations, new paths, new features, etc. I'm super interested in your opinion.

This update will be live today here and on itch. Anyone that's currently a patron (including tier 1) will be able to download the game. Today or tomorrow I'll also send new itch keys for anyone entitled to one (has supported with at least €15 here on patreon) that doesn't have it yet. If you happen to have lost yours, send me a message. I should be able to find it quickly.

One last word for my patrons:

I believe this is a required update to bring Nothing is Forever to a better overall quality level and to prepare for the Steam release. However:

If you're already a huge fan of NiF to the point of becoming a patron, chances are that you already liked and enjoyed this game the way it was and would much prefer that I spent all my developing time on getting Chapter 7 ready. You might not even like animations, be perfectly happy with the current paths, not care about new features, and never intend to play the game on steam. To you, this might just have been a waste of time on my part.

And I agree that there is a point to these feelings. While I hope some/many of these chances will be appreciated by all patrons, the truth is that they are mostly aimed at increasing the chances than non yet players will be interested in the game. Especially the vast steam player base. And this can be unfair for supporting patrons that see me divide my time between chapter 7 and this update, instead of working 100% on chapter 7 which is what they want to see.

So, I hope you're as excited as me with this update. Bringing animations to NiF was a goal for me since the very beginning. But, if you aren't, I apologize and hope that chapter 7 will make up for this.

Cheers.