Virtual Succubus 0.40 Patch Notes (Patreon)

Hello hello!

We hope you’ve been enjoying 0.39!

We know it was quite a lot for the average player to go through, but hopefully that’s led to a better overall experience.

Don’t worry - this month’s update, while fairly massive behind the scenes, will not require much set up from you. I’ll go into detail on what we focused on a couple paragraphs down, but first I’d like to update you on an Itch.io situation from last month. If you haven’t and are interested in knowing what’s going on, I would suggest reading the entire post that was sent out last month through the game’s discord.

There’s more to update you on since that post. Losing Paypal on Itch has lost us over half of our revenue there, and the increased burden of complying with sales tax laws has made the platform very difficult to justify investing into long term. The risks are also far too high when it comes to payment processors.

While nothing will change immediately, I just wanted to let you guys know that unless something significantly changes, it is likely we’ll try to slowly transition off of that platform entirely. Since this brought a lot of confusion for some of you last month, to reiterate, there is no immediate change for users.

This sadly, as stated in our itch update last month, means a massive loss of safety for us. We’re drawing up and working on some plans behind the scenes to hopefully protect VS and our growing team’s endeavors from further platform issues.

To be fully transparent, we’re aware this will not be relevant to all of you, but we hope you understand why we feel the need to spend some effort protecting the future of our business considering we’ve just lost our second biggest platform… and our biggest has threatened to remove us not once, but twice in the past.

Back to the game and what’s new in 0.40 The first and most noteworthy feature is the addition of Personality Sliders.Personalities are a series of various sliders that allow you to tweak your succubus’s personality to a certain extent - these sliders have fairly large implications in all kinds of systems across the game, old and new.

Adding them required us to go through vast parts of old code, updating everything we could find with mechanical tie-ins to personality traits. Several new systems were also created with personalities in mind!

Next, we significantly reworked Taunt, Mercy & Edge (what used to be Edge Stop).

Edge stop has been an extremely popular toggle for a long time now. We felt it was healthier for the game to take it into consideration and design around its popularity and need. For a long time, it has effectively behaved as an underdesigned bypass of many of the game’s systems, such as Mercy. It’s now involved in far more systems,  and an integral part of the core gameplay loop for those who wish to use it.

Taunt and Mercy were heavily reworked and expanded, now available during all tasks and far more scenes overall. They are no longer predictable, and will result in various different effects depending on mood, personalities, and situation.

It overall results in far more ability to interact with the game (see: more potential buttons to press). Changing the code to allow for these buttons to be pressed more was not something I ever expected us to be able to do, but here we are. This addition also required us to make the next change.

We very heavily reworked the in-game UI. Everything is now centered around the bottom of the screen, based on a pop up menu accessible through a new circular button at the bottom of the screen. It expands twice, allowing access to more buttons that used to be in the in-game menu top left. This has also allowed us to entirely rework the Urge and text popup UI we added in the last version, which was a very necessary change for both text size and immersion.

Lastly, this made space for another interactive system that ties in to personalities and has long been necessary to help the game react to your state…

Player Arousal is a new self-input system where you communicate with your succubus what level of arousal you’re at. You can think of it as saying ‘’I’m close’’ in a traditional BDSM interaction. Depending on your succubus’s personality (thirsty vs teasy), she may make you edge more in different states of arousal. If you’re on very low arousal, you will no longer be asked to edge, resolving the issue where you could be asked to get to the edge from a state where it could take a long time.

Praising & Degrading are part of the Personalities system, based on the Insults added last month. You can now enable various kinds of praise and degradation per-category, and select when they can appear (before, during, or after tasks). You can also tweak a new personality called Chatty, which makes her ‘’speak’’ to you more.

We also have an extra VS Lovense discount code for Pride month, check it out if you're interested in some toys to use with the game! 

Current 0.40 Patch Notes:

Features

Personalities

Kinky

Affects how commonly she gives you kinkier tasks. (Player arousal level in session is also considered for determining appropriate level of kink)

Sadistic

Affects punishing you just for fun, Mischievous becoming devious (guarantees punishments), making things harder instead of easier when you beg for mercy

Moody

Affects rate of mood gain, chance of a bad mood becoming worse (Neutral > Angry > Furious), how long special moods last (Mischievous, Angry, Furious)

Demanding

Affects chance of getting task layers (Do something & layer), chance of being assigned a new position immediately without a break.

Degrading

Affects how often she degrades you.

Praising

Affects how often she praises you.

Teasy vs Thirsty

Affects arousal levels she will make you edge at (Teasy skews towards 2, Thirsty towards 4), chance of fake-out endings (Teasy), chance of more intense forms of edging (Thirsty)

Serious vs Mischievous

Affects how often the Mischievous mood occurs, how often mischievous actions occur (increasing timers, asking you to keep count ect.), setting this slider to 0 (fully Serious) will prevent mischievous moods and behaviors completely.

Calm vs Wrathful

Affects chance of a bad mood becoming worse (Neutral > Angry > Furious) - acts as a modifier on Moody and can prevent (at fully Calm) or guarantee (at fully Wrathful) more intense bad moods

Detached vs Yandere

Affects how soon until you are expected to return for your next session, whether she gets angry if you have fun without her, enables the Yandere event when slider is fully Yandere (Yandere be crazy - do not complain about her being unreasonable, we will just laugh at you)

Forgiving vs Strict

Affects the mood threshold for disobeying to be considered "bratty", how long before she punishes brats, how often she will be merciful, how often she will forgive failure, how many mistakes cause a bad ending.

Silent vs Chatty

Affects the rate of her speaking to you directly when praising or degrading you.

Ingame UI & Interactivity rework

The in-game menu is now centered around a bottom popup radial menu. This button is accessible most of the time, but may be temporarily locked while the game processes some things. This is indicated by the border color.

This radial menu has several tiers that can be opened, and the old in-game menu (safeword etc) is now in there too. This has allowed us to move urges and pop up text such as praise and degradation to the top of the screen, with buttons.

Edge stop was replaced by a permanent edge button added to this menu.

The edge button now has a favor cost that decreases for every task that passes.

If this cost is too high, it will also cause a dedication hit upon being pressed.

The cost starts much lower during Edge Limit sessions.

Asking for mercy can remove the cost of edging. With encouraged edging, this is significantly more likely. The intention is that this is equivalent to asking a dom if you’re allowed to stop edging.

With all these changes, we had to significantly rework the in-game PC keybinds. There are various possible control schemes that should hopefully cover all possible layouts, but there are now a lot of possible keys and there is no realistic way to make every single key work well in this context. The new keybinds can be found in Options - Game.

Dev Note: We know this is a fairly large change, but we expect this to be healthier for the game overall. After collecting feedback in the discord, we made a lot of tweaks to try and make sure that most pre-existing playstyles would be considered, but it still may require you to make minor adjustments in how you interact with the button. Overall this changes has enabled a lot more design space for interesting interactions both in Taunt and Mercy.

Added the Taunt button to the bottom menu and heavily reworked its functions.

Taunt now has multiple outcomes and can be used at any time the bottom menu is active.

If it hasn't been very long since your last taunt, she may get angry at you for it.

The new possibilities are: Intensify Task (now compatible with timed tasks too), Activate Devious, Skip task & go to punishment, Edge Lock, Increase Favor Costs, Increase Difficulty Progress

Mercy is now also in the new pop up menu.

Mercy no longer costs favor.

It should now work on all tasks, like Taunt does.

The result of your request for mercy will be chosen based on her strictness.

Sometimes, when failing a mercy, she will instead treat it as a taunt. This is based on the Sadistic personality.

Added several new options to mercy, totaling:

Skip the current task.

Reduce mood from furious to angry, or angry to neutral.

Reduce the favor cost of edge stop to 0. The likelihood of this is reduced by the Thirsty personality.

Remove the current edge stop lock. The likelihood of this is reduced by the Thirsty personality.

Decrease the difficulty progression associated with the relevant category to the current task given.

Kink

Kink affects the likelihood you'll get a task early in the session. The intent is that the kinkier the task, the later you'll start seeing it in the session (when the assumption is that you're more aroused).

Reworked Several Moods & The way mood changes work.

Unhappy no longer exists.

Thirsty is now a temporary sudden event where she will give you more challenging edging until it ends.

Upon negatively impacting her mood in any way, she now enters one of two states - Angry or Furious.

While Angry, she will give punishments and potentially pleasurable layers.

While Furious, she will give purely punishments, and exclusively punishment layers.

Furious no longer overrides many timed checks in the game, like status removals.

Mischievous punishments are now exclusively given when she is Devious.

Praise & Degradation

Replacing insults from last month, Praise & Degradation have several categories each that include both rare and frequent prompts. You can now customize when you want these prompts to show up (before, during, or after tasks).

Added new cheats & reworked debug menu (for t2 supporters with access and testers)

Cleaned up & polished up the UI for in-game cheats, removing old unused values and putting the debug text behind a button.

Added unlimited favor & unlimited devotion cheats. These cheats will prevent you from earning Favorite sessions, and reset your favor to 0 when disabled.

All cheats will now have to be re-enabled with each version, using a special passcode that shows the toggles. This passcode can be found in the Tester section of our discord when your accounts are linked. We hope to make this process easier someday.

Content

• Added “Always Dom Name” toggle. When enabled, her dom names will always be chosen instead of her name when possible.
• You can now beg your way out of the negative consequences of showing up later than she expects. This is especially useful if you want to use Yandere 100, but can’t commit to having a love-crazed possessive dom that wants you at all times.
• Added dom name Alpha
• Added Mouth Fingering as a toggle with interactions, splitting it off from the one interaction in Blowjob.
• Blowjob has been replaced with Oral Toy, as it seems the naming was too confusing for many players.

Balance

• Significantly increased the likelihood she'll accept you can't finish in a certain way when you tell her so during an ending. (for anal)
• The decline button at the start of rhythm events has been changed to disobey to properly interact with mood.

Polish & Misc

• Various incompatibility additions.
• More explanations in the menus.
• Double penetration toggles have been changed into interaction-based toggles that can be renamed so you can set your own combinations.
• Removed an old system that equalized the likelihood of different toggles appearing as it should no longer be necessary with recent changes.
• Safewording no longer clears statuses, but you may remove them for no consequence while in safeword.
• Brattiness now leads to punishment consequence wheels.
• CEI preparation instructions will no longer be displayed at the start of endings when using the post-ruin CEI setting.
• The game will now try to skip scene changes (blackscreens) if there's text on the screen due to praise/degradation. It will also only delay transitions if it's actually going to blackscreen.
• Removed several toggles that have been included in personalities instead: Polyarmory, Independent, Yandere, Strict, Serious
• Petplay speaking urges should no longer use incompatible subnames.
• Removed opportunities as they are no longer necessary with the new taunt and mercy and the changes to thirsty.
• Removed the Untimed toggle as it hasn't done anything since 0.39
• Timed task switches should now interact with xtoys.
• Added ready steps to some tasks that were missing it.
• A task ID has been added to the top semitransparent debug overlay. We appreciate it when you include a screenshot of it in your bug reports, as it makes things much easier to track down.
• Added shapeshifting back to the main menu (many users seem to be missing the new location for it)
• Mischievous punishments are now more appropriately called Devious punishments
• When refusing a duty, there's now a chance she tries giving you a different one.
• Removed mood indicators in status menu as we don't think it's a necessity anymore.

Bugfixes

• Fix for punishment rhythms.
• Fixed a bug with the off-hand stroking status.
• Fixed a bug with Post Oops Chastity & CEI
• Fixed an issue with rhythm event selection failing when no options are available.
• Her choice time limit should no longer select Edge count when incompatible with some enabled toggles.
• Fixed a bug with urges not triggering correctly when pressed.
• Another fix for quickies giving chastity sentences.
• Fixed for plugs being chosen as layers when the base task shouldn't allow it.
• Fixed an issue with Chastity Device not preventing warmup instructions.
• Fixed vaginal quickies.
• Fixed some issues with inflatable gag.
• Fixed post-oops torture.
• Fixed the example habits/duties/commandments.
• Removed an incorrect delay in edge ladders.
• Fixed a bug that could cause text to show up in the wrong places.
• Fixed a bug with permanent statuses and importing.
• Wet and messy should no longer act as if it had defaults when it does not.
• Fixed a bug that could cause walls of unprocessed text.
• Fixed wings animation.
• Fixed edge ladders and long edges not sending xtoys commands.
• More attempts to fix the one remaining frenzy circle bug in rhythm events.
• Fixed findom lockup bug
• Fixed Medium Plug showing as mediumplug in the intro checklist.
• Fixed kegels positioning training.
• Fixed a bug where previous session completion time wouldn't be updated if you did more than one session in a row.