Update Preview for v0.7 (Patreon)

Version 0.7.0 - Exposed is coming to the patron edition on March 18th, and to the free edition on March 25th. I know this one took some extra time, my apologies for that. Let's get into it!

New Story and Side Content

Chapter 2 is complete as of this update! I wound up cutting a secondary optional path here, it just didn't work well, so it turned out pretty linear. Still, I think it's a pretty good chunk of story, and I hope you enjoy it.

As far as side content, the main thing here are new requests, as you might expect. I've written two to completion, and I'm hoping to complete at least one more before release, but now promises.

Ne events and other content are also out there for you to find.

New Exhibitionism Content

The update comes with a few new exhibitionism features, and a reworked exhibitionism perk line. You can read the specifics in these two posts:

New exhibitionism systems. 

For shame. 

The long and short of it is that there is a new flashing activity. It's fairly basic for now, but it's structured sort of like a sexual encounter, so it can be expanded and improved in the future, and I intend to add more to it.

There's also now a shame status and related emergencies, and the resulting situations provide a handful of new optional events for you to enjoy!

New Bandit Faction Content

The bandit camp now has a group sex variant. A new request from Charlotte also opens up the bandit camp's faction trade.

Character Portraits

Probably a weird thing to make a heading, but there's a lot of changes here. First, portraits are now improved with drop-shadows to improve clarity. They can also glow certain colors depending on what's happening to help add to scenes. For example, when the player character is embarrassed, the portrait will glow pink.

Two new sets of portraits have been added, one with an embarrassed expression, and another with a sort of embarrassed borderline ahegao expression. These new portraits are completely implemented, but I made some mistakes in the hygiene settings, so they may do not show the correct levels of filth if I don't have time to fix that before release. It's not super noticeable, so it's low on my priority list and I may not fix it until the release of the free edition.

Finally, you can now click the portrait to see the full body shot from the character menu. This is just a quick shortcut to check, for example, your clothing state, or if you want to ogle the protagonist. Improvements to the body shots will also be coming in the future, but we'll talk about that later.

Progression 

The perks related to exhibitionism have been reworked and expanded. New special request traits have also been added.

Level and rank caps related to expeditions have also been increased. Party members can now reach level 7 and you can now reach rank 7, allowing you to have 7 total members in a given party.

Engine Improvements

I don't normally talk about this sort of stuff since most users won't notice, but there's a very important change you need to know about: autosaves have been altered! The game now autosaves less frequently by default. There is now a setting to adjust the frequency of autosaves if you want to change it back, but this change was made for performance reasons.

Many other changes were also made to improve performance. I noticed the game felt sluggish and laggy, so I've spent a decent amount of time trying to improve the game's performance. Lag would typically happen right after clicking a link. My experience was that about every three to five link clicks would be accompanied by a spike of lag that caused the game to hang for about half a second or so. I managed to get that down to about every ten links in most cases.

This was the big thing I spent a lot of time working on, and it's the reason I'm running a bit behind this month. I think the engine should be running well enough to get us through the rest of the game now, so I don't expect to need to make more optimizations in the future. I was able to refactor and  clean up a lot of junky code, too.

The April Update

I said last month that I'd be slowing the update schedule, that's not gonna happen yet. The April update will come out in April, hopefully in mid-April, though since this one slipped a week or so, that one may, too. We'll talk about the new update schedule in April instead, and it will probably apply to May and beyond. I'll keep you all up-to-date on that front.

See you all on the 18th!