Quick Update - ALPHA now in [EDIT: Late December] (Patreon)

EDIT: 

See here for updated release plans. 

ORIGINAL POST:

Hello all, 

Apologies for the lack of updates & posts here. I've just been keeping my head down, and staying hard at work on the ALPHA build for v0.10 trying to bring it to a place I am comfortable with as soon as I can. And while I've made some tremendous progress, I unfortunately won't be able to have it done in time for this month (November) as I originally planned. So I just wanted to give you all some heads up and explain what's happening. 

The "Bad" News:

Yes, this is something that many of you probably saw coming a mile away. This is why I've been reluctant to set specific dates...

However, I am very close now, and while the game still needs about another week's worth or work, and then a couple of days of testing, it is technically in a "playable" state now for the first time since I started redoing a lot of my back-end work earlier in the year. What I mean by this, is that I've fixed all known crashes that I'd logged as a result of these changes and the game should now once again have, at a minimum, feature parity with v0.09. You can once again play the whole game through with only a couple of potential soft locks for certain choices that I am in the process of ironing out right now. 

But while it may technically be "playable", as I've been frequently saying, there isn't much point in trying to get feedback on a build of the game where a bulk of the new features are still only partially functioning as advertised. I've still got many Perks, Skills, Items, Scene Audio/New Skipping Method overhauls, and a handful of other features that are only partially implemented. Not to mention a handful of annoying bugs both new and old that I would like to address before launch.

One of the main things I'm looking for with this ALPHA is for people to test out a lot of these new systems at play and let me know if their thoughts on what works well, what doesn't, etc.  So really, I need to make sure everything is working as close to 100% as I can before launching this thing or else the bulk of the feedback I'll get won't be all that helpful or actionable, plus those who decide to give it a try will just have a much worse off time.

So this now means an Early December Release for the Alpha & a Late December Release for the Beta. 

The "Good" News:

What I will do though, is give you guys a release date for the ALPHA in another post before the end of the month. (I just don't want to do so just yet, until I'm a bit more confident in it.)

And, like with other overzealous ETAs of mine in the past, anyone who was a supporter during this month (November) at any point will be sent a download link to the ALPHA when it's finally done if they don't stay subbed in December, since I was pretty sure I was going to have it done this month and did allude heavily towards that outcome.

As with the past times that I've done this, anyone who was a patron in November will get a DM with the download link to the Alpha when it releases. Of course, December patrons can just access the release post directly when it's out. This DM business is just for people who were only subbed for the month of November and who wanted to try out the Alpha that they were entitled to. :)

The "BETA":

This doesn't change my plans too much for the BETA yet, though. Except that I'll now be working through Xmas week but what else is new?  :'D

Right now, we're probably looking at the the final week in December, probably around the 31st, and a lineup of scenes that will likely include:

• Tiffany X Barney.
• Debra X Jeb & Barney.
• Debra X Male Zombie Combat Scene.
• Debra X Female Zombie Combat Scene.
• Debra X DD Zombie Combat Scene.
• Debra X Futa Zombie Combat Scene.
• Debra X Zorse Combat Scene. 

Ofc, this is all subject to change, and I can't 100% guarantee a BETA release in December, or at least one with all of these scenes specifically if things take longer or problems arise. But I will try my best to endeavor.

And I will also DM December supporters with links to the BETA in the event that I do fail to deliver on time, as I will be doing with the ALPHA for November supporters. So hopefully that will make up for any potential delays that may occur. And let's be honest, when I'm involved, something always goes wrong...

Also, while I have been referring to this second build as a "BETA", I suspect that not much will change between the ALPHA & BETA aside from the addition of the aforementioned sex scenes. Honestly, the more I think about it, and the work that still needs to be done before the "Full Release" of v0.10. I may end up renaming this to "ALPHA 2" or something since there will likely be an actual "BETA" that is much more content complete before the "Full Release" in early 2022. 

So that's just a heads up if all of the sudden I start referring to the BETA as ALPHA 2 or something, that's why. Though it'd just be a name change to appease my OCD rather than anything changing about the content.  :)

Some small v0.10 development tidbits:

Now, before I wrap up, I will also share some of the info here that I've been posting on the Discord over the last 2 weeks, to summarize the small selection of things worth noting that I have worked on lately. (Though most of what I have been doing this month is continuing my work on implementing the features talked about at length in previous Dev Blogs) I'll go ahead and embed the attached screenshots into the post again to make things easier to refer to. 

First up, here's a look at some improvements I've made to viewing Tiffany's tracked character data:

• I've made a distinction between Beast and Zombie Beast stat tracking. Which will also apply to Tiffany's preferences so she can potentially be a slut for each independently of one another if that's the way you'd like to play her. In the Full release I'll also be distinguishing between Slut for Zombies, Slut for Female Zombies & Slut for Futa Zombies. Though I won't be tracking their stats separately here, that'll just be for Tiffany's kinks, in case you want to have your Tiffany make exceptions for them and give you more control on what she likes/dislikes.

• You can see some of the many new GUI icons here as well, but that's a minor detail I've added and you can see the rest for yourself when playing. This screen isn't a great example since I've used a bunch of the same icons for these stats, but that's something that can be refined at a later date. Else wise, it feels good to have most icons be a lot more representative of their tracked data, item or skill.

• You'll notice towards the bottom that I fixed the issue with the Milk Produced and Jizz Consumed counters overlapping with the text by having it condense measurements from "mL" to "L" once the value gets too high(and even kL if anyone grinds that far in the future) so that's looking much better now.

• Ofc, the major improvement here is that you can now easily check the Health of Tiffany's Fetus(renamed from Ovum HP) alongside who actually knocked her up and what day of her Pregnancy she is currently on (She will give birth at the end of "Days Pregnant 3") I think I was overthinking the need for a separate pregnancy Tracking Page. When you have one of the girls in your party, you can check their current pregnancy stats too. In the Full Release I'll add a dialogue option so that you can talk to them when they're not in the party to check on their pregnancy status.

You'll be happy to know that I've fixed that annoying and intrusive Save System!

• The "Save & Load" option in the pause menu will now behave like it used to and take you straight to the list of save files to save/load into one of them.

• You do not have to name your save beforehand any more. For those who wish to edit the name of the save before saving, I've added a rebindable hotkey for it (2 by default).

• I have also added a rebindable Quicksave hotkey (1 by default) that will automatically save to a designated Quicksave Slot for the quickest way of saving progress without interrupting gameplay.

• Likewise, there are now also 3 Autosave slots. The game will perform an Autosave to one of these slots whenever you change maps(by default, can disable these ones) and any of the previous manual save prompts (that you got before choices where a character could die for example) have been replaced by these background Autosaves instead for less interrupted gameplay.

Ofc, like with any game where you have to make game-changing choices, I wouldn't rely entirely on the new Quicksaves and Autosaves. Especially if you are juggling multiple play-throughs as those slots will overwrite each other. So it will still be a good idea to make manual saves (and give them unique names) when you actually want to save that spot for future reference.

I've also been adding all of the necessary items and events for each of the various Skills to make sure each of them actually have some functionality and award exp/buffs in the ALPHA. Lot's of cooking/farming related items recently (and redoing my old events for consumables to make them more efficient when dealing with the hunger/thirst system), plus I've now added foragable Berry Bushes & Mushrooms as part of the Survival Skill.

I added a "Kinks" Hotkey ("K" by default) which will quickly provide a list of the various kinks that your Tiffany has acquired (Slut for "X", Hates  "X", Addicted to "X", etc):

I've also ended up separating the Repair part of the "Reload/Repair" Hotkey (mentioed in a previous post) into a separate key. "O" (Default) is now the hotkey for Using Outfit Repair Kits. I figured some people would always want to reload, but may not always want to repair their outfits if they want to play nude or something and this would be better than them having an extra two button presses to decline the repair part of the "R" key.

I've added a basic "Fast Battles" toggle to the "Options" menu. Fast Battles will Disable all images & dialogue that play when the girl's perform their moves, but not when being Stripped or Overpowered, making combat much faster for those who want that.

Though at least for Tiffany's wide new selection of lines in v0.10 I'd recommend leaving it off to hear everything she has to say in combat at least once or twice. :P

Speaking of, while I'm not going to get around to spicing up the rest of Debra's lines in time for the ALPHA. I did go ahead and remember to add images and a few RNG lines of dialogue to her Guard move too like I did with Tiffany & Lara:

Closing Words:

Okay, that pretty much wraps up any of the interesting new things I have to share. Again, a lot of what I've been doing is things I've already talked about, or dealing with bugs that have been created from one of those things. 

For example, the new Skip Scene plugin I implemented and showed off works great, but it doesn't work when you're in the middle of a battle, which is where all of the combat scenes are played. You can skip them when in the gallery, but not when they are played inside of the battle screen. So the solution to this is going to be to change the way I handle the combat sex scenes so that the fight ends, and it spits you back onto the map, before it plays those scenes. This is not too much work, and should be fine once I've finished making it work, but it does create some issues. 

For example, do I want the combat scenes to play with the map displayed in the background? Or do they look better with the more basic battle backgrounds behind the transparent renders as we've always done? Because if I want that I'll make to make a system to get that working.

And what about the other active zombies on the map? Should I pause their movement until the sex scene is over? Or should I let them continue to walk around and slowly surround Tiffany? This would make more sense lore/logic wise, but it would lead to a lot more situations where Tiffany ends up getting surrounded in a never ending loop of zombie assailants. Yes, this is hot, but it could end up being very frustrating for actually trying to progress the game. I could make it an option for the player, or create some kind of event where Tiffany blacks out for a bit and then recovers later to give the zombies a chance to disperse. Both of those would require additional time to implement though, and could create their own issues that then also need to be addressed before release.  

^As you can see with that mini rant/ramble, what I actually spend a lot of my time with is dealing with mundane issues that crop up like this. Everyday there is always something that I am discovering or some combination I didn't think to test that causes problems. I spent most of today polishing up the Gallery and making sure players couldn't break it since it allows you to change Tiffany's body settings and kinks before viewing scenes and then reverts these changes back to what you had upon returning to the actual game. I had to disabled saving the game while in there and using Outfit repair kits and a few other things as various safeguards to protect against breaking the actual game-logic once players teleport back into the game maps. This is why things always take longer than expected...

But again, making good progress and getting very close now. I'll make a very short post before the end of the month to give you the projected release date and share any other developments that have cropped up between now and then. 

Thank you again for your patience and support. I couldn't make this without you all. We are getting very close now. The dark times are almost finally behind us. 

~ Jim