Happy new year! (Patreon)

Happy New Year to you! I hope you're doing well. I've been celebrating the new year by filling in my tax return. Such a thrill.

The next release of Newlife will contain a scene where one of your female friends visits and you play with your baby together. The idea is that this will spark an interest in having children in her - it's intended as another path to getting your friend knocked up that's more suited to non-evil player-characters.

I'd also like to address the "trying for baby" status which is far too rare at the moment - there needs to be a straightforward way to set this, probably via the "important talk" action on dates.

Aside from that, I also had some ideas about splitting up the namelist into sub-categories to allow specific namelists to be linked to specific races - so there could be e.g. a Nigerian namelist for black characters.

It might also be interesting to remove this from the Java code altogether and put it in a yml file so players can customise it however they want. These are just some tenative thoughts though, and I may reconsider after looking at it more closely.

As for game two, development on the code & game-content is going a bit more smoothly over the last few weeks. I had some annoyance in December when I came back to it after a break and couldn't remember what changes were partway completed. To stop that happening again, I've tried to commit to working on it at least a little bit every day so it's always fresh in my mind.

I've been focusing recently on adding some new events, and as I work on those I've been adding to the game mechanics to allow me to do things that weren't previously allowed. For example, previously a skill-challenge was always done by one character but I've recently added a new type that uses the combined skill of the whole party.

I haven't touched the UI recently though, and that's both the most difficult and least enjoyable part of the work, at least for me. The artwork also hasn't progressed much lately, and I think I'll have to go recruiting for artists online again - another task that I'm not too fond of.

All in all, development continues but there isn't much concrete to show at the moment.