Dev Blog #132 - Judas! (Patreon)

Greetings everyone!

With Update 4.1 and Free Play finally unleashed upon the masses, it's time to set our sights on progressing further through Chapter 4!

Tis the Season

With Thanksgiving behind us it's time to start thinking about Christmas! Of course, before we can start thinking about Christmas we need to survive December, and there will be plenty of nonsense for us to deal with until then.

Update 4.2 is going to focus almost 100% on progressing the story forward through the entirety of December. This means there will be little progress made in terms of updating game systems or serum routes. Naturally I'll be looking to fix as many bugs and outstanding issues as possible (cough Sophie's feminization route cough) but for the most part we're going to be looking at adding in new linear story content. So what is that going to look like? Well I'm glad you asked! Let's take a look at a few of the main story beats Chapter 4 Part 2 is going to be hitting!

• Enter Mr G: The mysterious Mr. G will finally be making an appearance!
• Driver's Dilemma: One of your drivers needs your help! Unlock new possible interactions with Mick and Jag!
• Sophie's Stress Steak: It's time to take the boss out again, and that means new dosing opportunities!
• Essential Espionage: Covert tasks assigned to you and Penny will send the game flying into the Chapter 4 finale!
• Christmas Comfort: Choose to invite over a friend or lover to spend the holiday with, or just stay in with the family!

Some of these new story events will be fairly large, and offer multiple variations in terms of how they play out. We'll also be updating a few events from earlier in Chapter 4 to bring more important characters, namely Diana, closer to the forefront of the story.

Not Fully Featureless

Despite everything I said in the last section, Update 4.2 won't be completely ignoring game mechanics. You'll see a bit of UI cleanup, particularly in the Mirror and Notebook scenes, as well as some major changes in the way conversations work. Specifically, random conversations will be removed from the game.

Sorry, let me repeat that...

Random conversations are being removed from the game.

Rather than conversations being a random, sometimes obtrusive, sometimes wholly immersion-breaking occurrence in the game, they'll be reconfigured as player-initiated actions. Additionally, the player will be able to choose the topic of conversation based on unlocked conversations, and see if there's any new content in those topics, much like the notebook. While cleaning up the general flow of the game is a major benefit to the new system, the real intent behind the change is to make talking to different characters about different things a new way to progress various events, and give the player more meaningful ways to interact with these characters!

Additionally, with the release of Update 4.2, I'll be removing support for all save files prior to Update 4.0. We've gotten to the point where there are so many new things being tracked, or things that have changed multiple times over various versions, that it's time to do some save file cleanup. Since Update 4.0 has been out for a while now, and Update 4.2 is still a ways off, I don't expect this to affect most people. It's still something worth mentioning, and you have plenty of time to get your saves updated!

Developer AMA Announcement!

Finally, before I go, I'm excited to announce our next community event in the form of a Discord Developer AMA!

On Saturday, November 6th, at 8:00pm EST, we'll be holding the event over on our Discord server in a prepared Stage channel. Over the course of approximately one hour, Haseo and myself will be answering community submitted questions before opening the floor to everyone participating. You should also expect a surprise announcement or two while we're at it!

You can submit your question(s) through the submission form HERE! We're excited to be putting this event on again and I can't wait to see you all there!

That's it for this dev blog. Expect more information regarding Update 4.2 soon and as always, thank you all for your continued feedback and support!