E3-Ready is live (Patreon)

Update 2.525 (E3-Ready), better known as the codeweek update, is now live, one day ahead of time. It brings a host of improvements, mostly aimed towards helping people find more of the content in the game. The most important addition, which took quite a bit of time to develop, is the new milestones system.

There are three kinds of milestones: scenes, achievements, and endings. Scene-milestones get achieved whenever you reach a new scene. Sadly, due to an implementation detail, the trigger for these milestones is the same as the autosave trigger. This means that simply loading up a scene which you have already reached will not unlock it. Instead, you need to actually reach the scene normally for it to unlock. My apologies for this.

Then, there's achievements. Achievements are a set of interesting things that can happen to you in the game. When you meet the requirements to unlock an achievement, a popup will appear and an accompanying, satisfying sound will play. Most achievements have several ways to unlock them. Note that achievements are not tied to stats, but rather to parts of the game that I feel like every player should experience for themselves.

There are currently seventeen achievements, three of which are hidden. More will probably be added at a later date. Simply loading a save game where one of the achievement-parts has been reached suffices to unlock the achievement.

Finally, endings. The game currently has twenty-three endings, and reaching an ending, be it via loading a save, or by getting there manually, will unlock the ending. And here's where we get to the nifty parts of the code week.

Every ending, and every scene that has been unlocked, stores its own save game. Once unlocked, you can load into every scene and every ending that you have seen before. This should give you a greater amount of leeway to explore the various scenes, without needing to make a bunch of saves yourself.

If you reach a scene again, after having unlocked it for the first time, your previous scene-save will be overwritten. This way, you are not restricted to the choices you made the first time around. Want to play as a girl instead of a boy? Not a problem. Start a new game, and every scene you encounter will be updated with your new gender, and the new set of choices you have made along the way.

To display all of these fancy milestones, there is a new milestones page, reachable via the load screen. This page shows you how much of the game you have explored, by weighing the amount of scenes, achievements and endings that you have reached, against the total amount of milestones available.

The primary purpose of this milestone system, is to showcase how expansive the game has grown to be. I am frequently approached by people who claim to have seen everything Kobold Adventure has to offer, only for them to not recognize the name "Fenrir". Hopefully, having a progress bar will offer a bit of scope, to those who have not yet taken a gander at aMap.

Besides the milestones system, the settings page has been somewhat reworked. Settings are now divided into categories, which makes them easier to navigate, and easier to distinguish.

An option to prettify game save exports has been added. Save game exports, by default, are a single large, large, compressed line stuffed to the brim with data. If you flip a switch in the settings, then you can make them use indenting and newlines, and generally make them a lot more navigable and human-readable.

As you may have noticed in this very Patreon post, I tend to use a lot of bold and italics. Some people don't like this a lot. For those people, I have enabled two settings to disable usage of bold and italics, respectively, throughout the game. Note that this is the least tested feature present in this update, and results may vary.

I debated adding an option to disable the less pleasant content of the game. After a bit of back and forth with a few people important to the development of Kobold Adventure, we came to the mutual conclusion that these segments are the direct result of the choices the player makes.

As such, the player decides whether the kobold experiences horrible things, or lives a happy life. By adding the option to censor the bad things, that will leave only positives. If nothing bad ever happens, then the good things will feel less impactful. And this will lead to the very slogan of Kobold Adventure (the struggle for happiness) being lost on those who disable the worst of the abuse.

On top of all of this, self-censoring might be a slippery slope towards less negative consequences as a whole, since a bunch of people won't see those segments anyway. Slippery slope is a logical fallacy, but the core argument here is that disabling large parts of the game depending on a setting, will inevitably lower writing enthusiasm for these segments.

As such, a friendly mode could ultimately turn the game into something it was never meant to be. Kobold Adventure is not a happy fun time where everyone gets along. Horrible things happen to kobolds, and shielding the player from these things would only lead to storyline confusion in the long run. The option was left unimplemented. I trust that you, the players, know to click away when you read something you don't like.

And that's pretty much all I have to say about the past codeweek! I hope you guys will enjoy achievement-hunting, and once you're done with that, go check out the new settings menu! Thank you all for your continued interest in Kobold Adventure, and I'll see you next time, on the Kobold Channel. All kobold, all day, every day. Oh right, I'll throw up a poll on what to do next tomorrow or something. See you then!