Amazon reveal + Devlog #112 + Monstergirl poll #39 is on! (Patreon)

Amazon! Doesn't she look amazing? ^^
She was drawn by LumpyPaca! It was my first time working with him. He was super patient and professional, and really just a joy to work with. He did an incredible job with her and she turned out better than I could ever have expected ^^
Now, I'm pretty sure no one expected her to look this way! One of the main reasons I went in this direction with the design was because of the results of the Valkyrie monstergirl poll.
Amazon's mods are Impractically revealing armor, Mini giantess and Long hair (gets longer with rank). Valkyrie's mods are Expansion obsessor, Impractically revealing armor and Mini giantess. With two of their mods being the same and the fact that you'd usually expect both to be pretty humanlike, I was afraid they'd end up looking too similar. Out of the two, I figured Amazon was the best choice to make into a more monster-y girl, and so I chose a Caracal cat as the base for that!
Another issue with Amazon as a species is that Amazons are really just humans, so this was another great reason for that change. What I did get from Amazon as a theme was of course the presence of muscles, the tattoos (which is more paint here, but it works!), and their fierce nature which is where I got the idea for the wolf (I've actually had this idea of the hair turning into a wolf since the Amazon poll ended, which worked well with the long hair mod. It's great to finally see it come to fruition! I'd originally intended for it to only be a side view silhouette, but Paca hit me with this amazing badass wolf instead. It's so good! And not only that, but I think it works even better now as a dog/cat combo. Since the hair gets longer across ranks, the wolf gets bigger too!). A "coin armor" type bikini armor was simply perfect too in relation to an Amazon with the Impractically revealing armor mod, and these coin armors work really well on her thighs and torso as well.
So yeah! I guess I had a lot to say about this one ^^

Here are all the monstergirl ranks:

Rank 1

Rank 2

Rank 3

Rank 4

Rank 5

If you can, please do follow LumpyPaca and/or support him on Patreon! Be aware that most of his content is 18+

https://x.com/LUMPYPACAs/

https://www.patreon.com/LUMPYPACAs/posts

And now, here is a big list of changes I worked on this month:

Alt + Enter doesn't fullscreen the game anymore. Instead, F6 does even outside of debug mode! (Will be switched to F11 eventually)

Improved the battle character swap system:

You now start all fights with (amount of characters in the party - 1) cards

+1 card when refilling the board (maxed at (amount of characters in the party - 1 cards))

+2 card when refilling the board with a perfect clear (maxed at (amount of characters in the party - 1 cards))

Lessened the swap heal (3% instead of 10%)

The amount of cards available is now shown

Fixed a bug that allowed adding line breaks to notes and potentially writing infinite length notes

Removed the puzzle skull entirely (old fight system from before the previous demo)

Improved the status effect presentation slightly

Piercing attacks (Shape damage, Veomea) aren't affected by attack buffs anymore

Fixed the sliders in the settings menu. It turns out these could be selected even without the settings tab being active!

Added a language option. You can now select between English and English2! It's just a placeholder, but it's good to have in place now.

Added colorblind mode (oyons turn into Fei symbols)

Nightmare sometime wouldn't switch to the Nightmare realm spell immediately if her HP landed in a very small window > fixed

Fixed a bug in the slingshot sequence that could cause the slingshot to stay caught from the 1st phase into the second one

Added a difficulty slider. 1 is the default value, it can be lowered down to 0.5 (damage received is divided by 2) or increased to 2 (damage received is multiplied by 2). This also affects the heart regen rate in Shape fights and some special sequences. Some fights and sequences don't let you give up in the gameover screen and your only option was "Try again!". For these cases, a new option called "Try again! (Easier)" has been added, which lowers the difficulty by a notch every time it's selected for that fight/sequence only.

Added a keybinds setting!

The + and - buttons in the spellcard menu now hide the inventory automatically to reveal the character portrait when clicked

Cutscenes are now skippable by pressing enter and the middle mouse button at the same time!

Added some room generation optimisation to the cutscene rooms

Relevant rooms are now flagged as discovered after some cutscenes (T's boss room, Voleia's temple's entrance)

The usable Rietti plains pod is now only available after Nightmare is defeated

Tips text now shows on top of character dialogue, like in alchemy mode

Item descriptions now get squished if they are too long in trilobite inventory windows

Stored consumables now show up in storage with the "All" tab active

Fixed a bug that caused a weird animation on Tril when grabbing him twice in quick succession

Moved the debug room into its own area (Sablee can now be 100% discovered without having to visit the debug room). Pressing F9 in the debug room sends you to Vuu's room

In shape fights, the orange gauge is now a timer after which a rank is given. Ranks solely depends on how many times the player got hit during that time. The blue gauge will fill accordingly to your rank.

In shape fights, the next shape wave appears faster and faster the lower the fight's HP gauge gets (affected by the difficulty setting).

In shape fights, less kills are required to regenerate a heartshell.

Optimized Heartpower related code

Yoyo Heartpower must now be kept active by holding right click like before, middle click won't affect it anymore. Releasing right click while the Yoyo is "stunned" after hitting a shape won't wind it back. It's is now a purely single click weapon again!

The Shell Heartpower (the one that spins around the cursor) has been buffed. Each shell can now hit one additional shape, and all shape will spin more slowly once a charged attack is ready.

The Swatter Heartpower has been buffed. It now deals more damage and has the fastest charge of all Heartpowers. Additionally, a second swatter/insect will be spawned if right clicking after a small delay has passed, even if another swatter is still on screen. On top of that, successfully swatting the insect will cancel that delay and instantly spawn another swatter/insect.

You can now use directional keys to sift through areas/floors in the map menu

Using Smash now causes items and magis to bounce away

Slide particles for thrown items/Tril have been restored

Fixed the missing shadow on followers

Improved some chibi related code to make it easier to use in the future

The Veomea charge SFX now loops nicely

Current area colors are now shown below the spellcard

Time played is now shown on the save file slot

+ a bunch of smaller bugfixes

That's a lot of new stuff! Many bugfixes of varying sizes, and a lot of features I've had on the backburner for a long time now. I'm especially happy with the Heartpower changes and the new settings, as well as the changes to the character cards in fights. All of this had been in the back of my mind for months now, it's a big relief to have it all out of the way. And with that, my next step is now a lot of Exploration related stuff! Harvestable items, some improved rooms / puzzles, hint system, and more ^^
Before anything, I'm working on a room compendium that contains a screenshot and all relevant information for every single room of the game. The truth is that I already made one during the super crunch month before the new demo's release, but I lost all that data by mistake right after I was done using it at the time... I had no choice but to do it again. It's mostly done, but I still need to add some info like NPC dialogue summary, cutscene placement and such. Once it's all clean and finished, I'll be able to plan where to put harvestable items, which rooms and puzzles need to be updated/added, which chest content needs to be changed, which secret needs to be made easier/harder to find... Everything exploration related really. It will also finally be time to remove that extra lock in the Night dome!

The plan is to have all of that taken care of by the end of the month (and more if there is time) for the next build!
So yeah, a lot of good work taken care of once again! It really feels like I'm taking big steps forward with each of these devlogs which is very encouraging ^^

And now, the Monstergirl poll stuff!

The next monstergirl poll has begun! You can now vote for the monstergirl you want to be included in BE Witches in the Discord server if you are a 2$+ patron!

The poll will be active until the 12th of this month. After this, you will be able to change your submitted modifier until the 15th. Finally, the two rounds of the modifier poll will take one week each afterwards.

Monstergirl poll rules

Poll submissions

Also, now is a good time to submit a monstergirl and/or modifiers if you haven't already as a patron! If you can't think of anything to submit, here is a list of ideas you can choose from. You'll need to join the server to submit anything!

And that's all for now! Thank you! ^^