Inner Circle post for February (Patreon)

Hi there!

So, I don't normally post much about changes I'm working on until they're actually done. There's a few reasons for that - for one thing, it means I get less grief if they run into difficulties and have to be postponed from a release.

With this post, that will change a bit and I'll be going into more depth of what's coming up.

The next update will be the first step towards female NPCs. So far I've been working on chances to Newlife's inner workings that won't be very visible to players.

I've restructured the NPC classes and added a female one, but it isn't fully complete yet and there are a fair few changes before they'll be able to appear in the game.

I've also started updating the clothing system, and this is what I've been working on today.

Currently clothing items have factory methods that output an articles of clothing of a particular type - a dress or a bra or whatever. This is fine for stocking the shop but has an isse that there's no way to guarantee if a dress will be cute or sexy or whatever.

A few specific items had special cases. For instance there's actually separate factory methods for babydolls to get cute or sexy versions.

I wanted an approach that would that would keep the same functionality for the shop, but allow outfits to be generated with clothes that fit an npc's preferences. What I've done is define a bunch of clothing styles. The factory methods now take a Style, and this will modify what type of clothing item it outputs.

For example, if I pass the cute style into the Dress class' factory method, it'll tend to output a pink or white dress in one of the cuter styles. If I ask for a provocative dress then it'll be likely to be short, low-cut and have a higher chance of being see-through.

The shop will use a generic style that'll give the same results as before.

As well as dressing female NPCs, the methods should lead to improvements of how male npcs buy clothes for the pc. It might even help with optional automation of the player's wardrobe.

Once the clothing and outfit updates are done, I'll be looking over clothes again with the intent of balancing clothing stats and adding new clothing choices. If there are clothes that you want to see in the game and that would work with the current slots & utfit types then this release is a good time to bring them up.

At the moment I'm not sure how long all this will take. It might be possible to have an initial female NPC release out for the next version. Alternatively, I might end up putting out a clothing-focused one with female NPCs being worked on behind the scenes but not yet appearing in-game.

Well, that's the summary of what's going on with Newlife this week. I'll keep this same post for all the updates until the next version comes out, and I'll add comments with more information as it becomes relevant.