Carnal Voyages v0.3.1 Game Update

Evening all, it's mid-month update time! As I mentioned earlier, my focus for the first half of the month has been on functionality stuff - in particular, I've gone though a number of the more complex panels in the game and added Help sections to them. It's nothing too fancy, but should hopefully help make things a bit easier to get into. The second main feature of this update was the creation of a gallery system! I'm glad to say it's much better put-together than the version I had in Carnal Coup's - Coup's was much more ad-hoc, manually pieced together one image at a time, and the methods for managing variants and unlocks were a bit clumsy. The new gallery meanwhile is much more automated, and ties into a parallel version of my progress flags system to track available artwork. Now all we need is some more artwork to put into it!

The last notable thing I put some time into for this release was a slight overhaul on the Romance Scene GUI layout. Originally I had wanted to get started on my planned 'requests' system, where you can request for a partner to do something to you rather than waiting for them to think of it on their own, however I found that the screen really needed a bit of cleaning up before adding even more to it. Clearing the underbrush before sowing new seeds, so to speak. Mostly you'll see this in the new character info panels, which now have some text added to describe what all the bars are for, are no longer turned sideways, and most importantly, now include facial portraits of the participants. I will be coming back to this feature eventually, but for the moment it's time to move on to other things.

Other things meaning more story, at least for the rest of the month. In Coup, each species basically had three ongoing plotlines: the department workers, the Specialists, and the Directors. My general intention in CV is to do something similar, with Specialists, Antagonists, and 'average citizen' interactions, but they will tend to be much more interwoven and vary a bit more from species to species. Where in Coup the Department/Director plotlines were bounced off of each other with point-based systems, CV will be more of a branching storyline, such as how the Harian System story in general begins with meeting Choker. So I'll be picking up with where I left off with the Harians, and while the second half of the month is a bit shorter, I do fortunately have a lot of time off from the day job coming up which should balance things out a bit.

That's about all I have for tonight, so until next time, enjoy the patch notes below, Liberator+ patrons can check out the new build at the link found in this post, and thanks for your support!

v0.3.1 Change Log

Game Functions:

• Help Guide added to Encounters. This can be opened via the '?' button on the top left.
• Help Guide added to Romance Scenes. This can be opened via the '?' button on the bottom right.
• Help Guide added to Maps. This can be opened via the '?' button on the bottom right.
• Help Guide added to Ship View. This can be opened via the '?' button on the top left.
• Help Guide added to Duty Assignments. This can be opened via the '?' button on the bottom right.
• Being in a partner's requested position during romance scenes will now double the speed at which they burn through the 'sweet zone' edging period.
• Gallery added to the game. This can be accessed via the pause menu. Gallery currently contains 1 CG set and 4 portrait sets.
• 'Gallery' flags added to the game, which will unlock certain gallery entries. Flags added to the following content:

** Secretary CG: Playing the Secretary scene during the introduction or at Watch Station.
** Player portraits: Unlocked following character creation or by loading a save game older than v0.3.1.
** XO portraits: Uniform unlocked following XO creation or by loading a save game older than v0.3.1, Nude currently inaccessible.
** Admiral Octo portraits: Uniform unlocked by meeting the Admiral in the intro or by loading a save game older than v0.3.1, Nude currently inaccessible.
** Choker portraits: Coat/No Coat unlocked by playing Choker's introduction scene, Nude currently inaccessible.

• 'Unlock Gallery' button added to Cheats in Options. This will unlock the gallery for the duration of the current play session. This will unlock all images including those indicated as inaccessible.
• Tab highlights added to Codex, Options and Gallery to better indicate the currently selected tab.
• Confirm Save File Overwrite prompt added when manually entering the name of a save file which already exists.
• Pressing the return key on the Save File Name and Cheat Code text fields now submits those fields.
• Romance Scene panel layout has been somewhat improved, with character portraits now added to character panels and description text added to several progress bars.

Scene Content:

• None

Art Content:

• Background added to Ship Bridge room.

Codex Entries:

• None

Bug Fixes:

• Corrected a few instances in Encounters where stat-based effects were not taking account of Trait-based stat bonuses.
• Corrected a number of pronoun-switch-based typos in scenes and romance actions.

Known Issues:

• None​