Development Update: An unusual delay. (Patreon)

For the first time since the first public release in May 2020, I’ve decided to delay an update for a month.

While I would generally prefer to provide you all with consistent monthly content to look forward to, this approach has definitely limited things over the years into features that fit nicely into 1-month development cycles.

This month, we began tackling something that hasn’t been significantly improved upon in a while; task variety. While the plans began as more manageable, it later became apparent that we could make these systems overwhelmingly better with more time.

I am relatively apprehensive about having to announce this as it has no precedent in this game’s development history, but I genuinely believe it to be better for the game’s health as these changes are going to shake the core of what makes VS what it is. We cannot afford to rush this.

The next update will be the biggest change VS has ever had in terms of gameplay, and will come with an overwhelming amount of extra customization to make the instructions more tailored to what you actually want to be doing.

My sincere apologies for the late announcement on this, and to whoever was looking forward to tomorrow’s pre-release. We realized very late in the month that these systems would be best served by giving them more design and development time.

Below, I’ll go into our biggest plan for this update. There’s more, but as some parts are still halfway through design iteration, you’ll hear about them later.

Effectively, we’re reworking the current system that allows you to customize stroking, and expanding it to many many more toggles.

We’re calling these new categories of toggles Core Kinks and Core Toys. They are generally going to be the majority of your session’s instructions.

We’re also removing the selection for player sex, and will allow players to instead select the appropriate categories of tasks they want to use. This means that if you wish, you can use vagina-focused tasks as a male using whatever imaginative way you can come up with. Vagina-related tasks will also be greatly improved by this update.

Each Core toggle will have a new menu allowing you to select multiple keywords that can be given in an instruction. Most toggles can create tasks that combine 3-4 different parts.

Some examples, starting with what already exists:

• Quickly stroke the shaft of your dick roughly using a tight grip
• Slowly stroke the full length of your dick loosely using your fingertips
• Tease the outside of your vagina using three fingers.
• Slowly and firmly rub your clit with circular motions.
• Firmly make circles with your vibrator against the head of your dick using high power.
• Lightly hit your nipples with your cane.

This format has been expanded to:

• Penis stimulation
• Clit stimulation
• Vaginal fingering
• Anal fingering
• Nipple stimulation
• Breast stimulation
• Oral insertable
• Small vaginal insertable
• Medium vaginal insertable
• Large vaginal insertable
• Vibrating vaginal insertable
• Knotted vaginal insertable
• Small anal insertable
• Medium anal insertable
• Large anal insertable
• Vibrating anal insertable
• Knotted anal insertable
• Multiple penetration
• Vibrator
• Pain (This new toggle involves inflicting pain either using your hands or implements like canes, whips, floggers etc to various parts of the body)
• Cock torture
• Balls torture
• Clit and vagina torture
• Nipple torture
• Breast torture

As you can see, there are a few new toggles in there. You’ll also notice that insertables have been split into size categories to make it easier to have a good progression of toys for those who have multiple. We plan to combine this with the progressive difficulty increases added last month, meaning you’ll get large insertables once difficulty has increased.

We’ve also made all of these core toggles function as layers, meaning that two different randomly generated tasks can be given at once, resulting in instructions like:

• Quickly stroke the shaft of your dick using a tight grip & roughly pull your left nipple.

Based on feedback, we also understand that this can result in over-complicated instructions for some. We have several plans to tackle this potential problem.

Each category of keywords for a toggle has a simple form as a fallback, going to extreme lengths to allow for very non-specific instructions if that’s what a player wants. Some of the funnier classics of this can include things like:

• Hurt yourself
• Vibrate yourself

But you can also limit the complexity while still retaining some degree of it, to create instructions more like:

• Quickly stroke
• Spank your ass

Taking this feedback into consideration, we’ll also be allowing you to tag each possible keyword differently based on its use as a base task and as a layer, allowing you to completely customize how complex you want your tasks to be, and what you want as secondary interactions instead of primary.

Toggles will now also be able to be flagged as:

• Always Layer (always possible to be a task layer, regardless of the toggle not being active)
• Never Layer (this toggle will never be given as a layer)
• Exclusively Layer (the game will not give tasks only containing this toggle, only layers will be given.)

A classic example of this would be enabling CBT as Exclusively Layer. This would allow her to only give you CBT instructions while you’re simultaneously doing other things, which seemed like it would appeal to large parts of the playerbase.

One of the primary complications we’ve run into with these systems is incompatibilities - you wouldn’t believe how hard it is to allow her to tell you to stroke your shaft while you vibrate the head. Every single keyword needs to be marked for potential incompatibilities with others.

As every single keyword and all of these systems are toggleable and optional, if any of this does not appeal to you, it will be removable. If you’d rather have a simpler experience, you’ll be able to go way way simpler than it was before. If you want extremely complex and specific instructions, you’ll be able to get that too.

All in all, these systems when combined will add roughly 100 million new potential task combinations to the game. It’s a much better approach to tasks that can be scaled faster, and will allow you to customize more than was ever possible.

Some other plans that are near confirmed for this version:

• We want to remove most preparation steps from tasks, things like ‘’Get your cane’’. It feels unnecessary to most of today’s tasks besides some specific examples in timed tasks, which we’ll be tackling with the next change.
  
• All timed tasks will now have a quick ‘’Ready’’ step that shows you the following instruction before you begin. This will allow players to more consistently complete every single second of a timed task, instead of scrambling to start the instruction without knowing what it is. This change is primarily intended to make players feel like they’re able to always accurately follow instructions.
  
• We want to add more non-core tasks to this update as well, to make sure this is the most impactful gameplay update VS has ever had. We know many categories of tasks have been falling behind and replaced by various systems, and this feels like the right time to take a look at that.
  
• We'll have to work on RLGL to adapt it to the new core tasks.

If you have any feedback on our plans, or would like to throw in any ideas or thoughts, please feel free to do so as we’ll now have time to work on iterating it! The best place for that will be on the Discord, where I’ve created a thread specifically about this announcement.