May update (Patreon)

Hi, hope you're all doing well.

I seem to be coming down with some sort of a cold - I've no energy this week, been sleeping way longer than usual and my mouth is weirdly dry. So, illness :(

It's bad timing for Newlife's work because I'm at the early stage where I have to figure out how the main new scene will fit together and that's the sort of thing I normally prefer to do when I'm fully alert.

Instead, I took a little time out to go over some purely programming tasks. It might sound weird, but I find programming easier than writing and it's something I can tackle when I'm too tired to really put together useful words.

The main one there is something that was requested on Discord - I'd looked at it and thought that I wouldn't end up adding it, but because I didn't feel up for writing I ended up tackling it after all and it proved to be simpler than I'd expected. This is separating out a weight modifier for some random scenes into an external file. So, in the next release you'll be able to e.g. go in and make the mugging happen ten times as often!

Or, you could make it rarer, but who wants to be mugged less?

Another major advantage of this is that it allows me to add smaller user-submitted scenes that maybe aren't all that impressive by themselves but that third-party writers intend to expand to support content that can't go in the main game (such as the various types of content banned by Patreon). These could have their weights set to a very low value in the default file if I think they look too much like placeholders to improve the main play experience while still being available to add-ons without me needing to change the code.

The main new change though will be tackling unfaithful pregnancies. In particular, with a new scene that'll work like the current pregnancy-reveal one but instead of informing someone that you're pregnant with his child you'll be informing your partner that you're carrying someone else's. This idea is from a suggestion by Secondarian, by the way.

This will, of course, overlap a bit with the cheating discovery one... I'm not sure how yet. There's a bunch of complexities about how they all fit together and I haven't felt up to figuring them out yet.

I'm also going to be looking over some suggestions from Dunan Rayne regarding what I'm going to call "cuckoo" pregnancies - where the PC lies to her partner and convinces him that he's the father. There are some difficulties to this sort of thing given how the code works at the moment, but I think I can put together some sort of implementation.

There'll need to be some sort of path to her getting found out, of course. One suggestion was to check the race of the real father and I think this is something I might do even though it won't work perfectly with custom races.

Unless I'm forgetting about something, this can be the last update in this major release which means it'll be numbered 0.5.0 and I'll run another major-update vote soon.

As for game-two, I'm starting to commission artwork and I've done a bit of work on its UI this week. The UI is still terrible compared to how I want it to end up, but that's probably my weakest area of game development so getting there will have to be done one slow step at a time.

Hope you're feeling better than I am - have a good week everyone!