Inner-circle update for November (Patreon)

Hi all,

I've started work on the bad-in-bed update – the trait is called “inept lover”. I've started with the boring-but-necessary part of working through existing scenes and updating the text and arousal effects of various actions. That'll take me a while longer and probably end up representing a significant part of the new content.

I had an idea for a gameplay change as well, but I need to run testing to see if it's feasible in the time available and if it improves things. So, you shouldn't consider this a 100% definite addition.

Specifically, I'm thinking that characters with the hard-to-please trait might sometimes be unable to reach orgasm. This would be reflected by a hard-block (tracked by a scene-flag) and it'd be more likely to happen if their partner is inept.

However, a partner whose traits meet their preferences would sometimes be able to break through this block with appropriate actions in the makeout & sex scenes.

For the new scene, I'm going to add an event chain where the PC has had enough of her inept boyfriend and decides to teach him how to be better in bed. This would allow her to change his traits permanently – removing inept and adding a positive trait instead.

If this proves successful then in the future it might make sense to add similar chains. I actually had an idea along these lines a while ago regarding a caring bf helping a low-self-esteem PC learn to respect herself, but it ended up canned after I wrote some scene outlines because they just didn't feel good enough. It might be worth revisiting this at some point, and there could also be an evil equivalent with a jerk bf “training” the PC to be meek and obedient (resulting in losing traits like ambitious and gaining ones line low-self-esteem or shy).

There's one other thing I plan to add, and I'd like your feedback on it.

One purpose of the inept-lover and small-cock traits was to satisfy players looking to humiliate loser nice-guy boyfriends in favour of the raw sexuality of a jerk NPC. However, this sort of thing can be difficult to add because I also need to consider players who want a rewarding and loving relationship with their caring or romantic boyfriends.

I'm thinking that a solution might be to add a new option to override default character creation and force certain men to be 'losers'. I'm thinking it'd have the following rules:

Affects non-special caring and romantic NPCs. There could also be an alternative that affects jerks & selfish instead.

Adds small-cock & inept-lover. Removes their opposites.

Never has big-cock-head or big-balls (even though these are normally allowed with small-cock)

50% chance of doormat. Never has likes-to-share.

What do you think? Does that sound like a good set of rules for the new option?

Oh, and as a final update – I'm continuing work on game2. Progress is good but there's a lot of UI work to do and this is likely to be quite slow as it's really not my expertise.

This week I've been working on the character-creation screen. Functionality is currently barebones but it's nice to be able to choose the PC's name and picture instead of them being hardcoded on starting a new game and I've made some important changes to how characters are handled as part of this.

The next steps are to allow the choice of character traits and picking a class. Of course, that last part requires me to actually implement character classes along with things like skill trees and some way to spend XP - lots to be done!