41 Release Update & A Call For Feedback (Patreon)

Hello again,

This post has three purposes: Notify as many people as we can to update to 41Release8, explain why so many release builds ended up being necessary, and try to collect feedback we’re in need of right now.

I want to explain the issues we’ve been encountering in the last couple weeks and give you a bit of a more transparent idea on why it happened and why so many things were severely broken on actual release. Here are the two main points involved:

41’s systems intertwining and requiring severe balancing & optimization

With our new systems in 41, we took a big risk. We added some heavy processing to generate a new kind of task that would respond to many different things, including the player’s arousal and the incredibly varied potential settings a player could now set. It also included 2 new modes that worked completely differently from the rest of the game, and temporary states involving behavior like those modes.

This created a humongous amount of different player states for these systems to take into account. I expected this to be improved throughout pre-release by having many more people experiment with these systems, but as pre-release was in an extremely buggy and crashy state, we suspect it had far less engagement. This combined with the fact that pre-release in general has been getting less and less feedback, and we ended up in a rough spot where our actual release is what provided us the necessary feedback to tweak these systems and see where we made mistakes.

Android crashes leading to optimization, and thus, bugs.

During pre-release, we realized from bug reports that the Android crash problems from 39 had returned in force - the problem was worse than it had ever been. This is a result of several factors, including all the new processing and just general data the game has to handle. Improving the efficiency of 41’s systems led to a variety of bugs, as that is simply what happens when you make significant changes to code.

We also significantly changed how the menus and the game in general is loaded - different loading orders and scene splitting lead to many lost references and bugs that had to be handled throughout this release.

While optimizing and improving all of these systems, we stumbled upon other severe optimization issues, namely with our text processing systems (what handles naming, text variety, etc). Fixing this would lead to severe loading and general optimization improvements… but also introduced a lot of bugs - there are many places where text is processed in the game, and we were not able to cover all of them.

During this time, we also had help from an external experienced expert in the more technical aspects of optimization who’s worked on some bigger games than we have. This helped us identify many core issues with our optimization and improved a lot of our internal processes. We’re hoping that with his help, we’ll be able to improve more - including hopefully taking the time to upgrade our unity versions, deal with the bugs that will cause, and streamline our workflows.

Overall, this was necessary… yet an extremely unfortunate timing overlap with the complexity of this release. At least now most phones should be able to handle the game just fine - there are still sadly exceptions, but they seem to be primarily focused around more niche chinese android manufacturers. We hope to fix those too eventually.

And so, I would heavily suggest everyone upgrades to 41Release8, as the remaining bug reports we are getting are generally outdated. You can find it at the same place you previously downloaded 41, and the patch notes have been updated.

Lastly, I also have a request for our users.

Over the years, we’ve gained more and more feedback and suggestions and bug reports to go through. To help us deal with this, we’ve opened forums on our discord where we can properly categorize everything and discussions can be separately had about each suggestion or feedback.

At the same time, actionable feedback has honestly taken a nosedive. A lot of what we get has become more surface level and repetitive. When we request feedback on specific features, we honestly don’t get as much as we need.

We understand - it’s a NSFW project, and not everyone is willing to join a discord or partake in discussions related to it.

So I’d like to experiment with a new feedback format that will hopefully encourage ideas that we can actually work on and properly understand without requiring a back and forth of discussion. Rather than encourage suggestions about new systems, we’d like to encourage feedback on how to improve what we already have. Many feature suggestions may not understand the considerations involved in developing them, but current features work as is; we just want to make them better for you, and giving us feedback on that is a lot more actionable for us.

This is an experiment, and may not work like several other failed experiments in the past (such as the old anonymous feedback forms that were more freeform and usually led to unusable feedback). We’ll see how it goes, and refine the process depending on the results we see.

I’ve opened a new anonymous survey with the hopefully improved format.

https://www.surveyhero.com/c/xnwnvydz

I ask you to try to think of any thoughts you have on your favorite or unliked current systems, and give us details. To be completely honest with you, this latest update has been a severely brain-draining challenge. We would really appreciate a burst of thorough feedback and ideas, to give us an idea where various systems currently stand in your minds.

We’ve included a favor bonus code available as of 41Release8 for completing this survey.