Dengue Fever

Hello everyone, this is going to be something of a short blog post, basically because I feel like shit. I don't have Dengue fever, just yet another common cold courtesy of the plague island. Besty has also caught some sort of cold, we somehow managed to get sick at the same time despite being thousands of miles apart.

So far this cold hasn't been too bad, fatigue, fever, sinus pain. I started getting sick on Sunday evening, and It feels like perhaps it'll be on the short side thanks to my well-practiced immune system, or at least I hope so. I've been trying to get a little work done while sick, but it's hard to focus so I've been bouncing all over the place. Some bug fixing, some event planning, and some art stuff.

Last week I added several new events to the Progenerate Technologies job and took care of some other things. Besty has mostly been on bug elimination duty. I've started working on some events for the S.P.E.R.M. Division at the Institute.

For some reason, on Monday I got it into my head that I should draw some sort of band/music related thing in the world of AW. I guess because I had this sort of concert event in mind at the town square. I'm not sure what the band name should be, all I've come up with so far is "10-inch idol". If you have an idea feel free to throw it my way. I'll use it if I like it. (It's a rock band with a female vocalist.)

I imagine that this costume doesn't last long on stage...

There's been an outbreak of Dengue fever here on Guam, We're up to about a dozen locally-acquired cases. They've closed some schools in my area, which also happens to be near where the Dengue-carrying mosquitoes seem to be located. Thankfully the fatality rate for Dengue is quite low with proper medical care unless you're unlucky enough to end up with the hemorrhagic fever. Either way, it's a very painful illness (its nickname is break-bone fever) that will cause you to bleed from places you shouldn't. 

The local government has "started taking measures" to control the spread of the disease, but so far I don't think they've even started spraying to try and kill the infected lines of mosquitoes yet. Hawaii had an outbreak quite some time ago and was able to eventually murder enough mosquitoes to get rid of it. They still wound up with hundreds of cases before that point though. 

Mosquitoes suck. I get bitten on a semi-regular basis, but we're taking some extra precautions to avoid them. The odds are still very low that I'll be infected in any case, so it's not really any reason to be worried. Besides, if I were to catch it, I'd be stuck with weeks of bedrest with very little to do but work on AW, lol. 

That's all for now, I'm going to go write a pervy scientist event. :D

o7

ThaumX

Curved.

Hello everyone, let's get this update started!

For this update, I'm going to share some of the results of the last survey and respond to some of the comments that stood out to me. Before that though, I thought I'd give you a brief peek at some of the things we've been working on. Besty has mostly been working on resolving reported bugs but has also set up the map for the resort at Lake Clitea. I got a little sidetracked by the realization that despite having pregnancy in the game, there was no description of belly size yet. After fixing that omission, I went on to add pregnancy accelerants, elasticity mods, other fertility-related drugs, the potential for a belly-burst bad end, and set up some new Fecundate Division events. Then when I went to make them available for the player, I was reminded how much of a mess the medical district was in, so I did a lot of cleaning up there.

So now you can properly visit Gestique and other medical clinics to get treatment. The whole area is a lot better organized and more clear. You can also get treated with some fun things like: 

Altogether there are 11 different drugs/treatments you can take related to pregnancy, along with a 'fetal health sauna' and abortion procedure. The medical district now has all the treatments separated into the planned clinics--complete with graphics--such as Gestique, Dollmaker, and Proliferant. Additionally several of the medical treatments originally created by Besty have been edited and/or got partial or full re-writes by me. It should make handling medical issues and getting body transformations a more enjoyable process.

Gestique Fertility Clinic and Spa Waiting Room Location Image

Overall a little bit different than what I was strictly planning, but based on the survey results you guys will probably appreciate it. To be honest focusing on things I find more enjoyable or fun (like pregnancy content) has been easier with all the stuff going on in my personal life. Thankfully my daughter is out of the hospital and seems to be doing better, but at the same time, my wife hasn't been doing that well. The doctors say that it's very likely that she will be needing surgery soon, and that the cause may be cancer. She has some more tests coming up and hopefully, we'll find out more about what's going on.

Besty Reading Survey!

I love being able to do these sorts of things when I can spare the time because it's really useful to be able to gauge what you guys want, and what we can improve on. I think I've learned some really important things with this survey, such as determining that cereal, is not, in fact, soup.

I do want to take a moment to say that the vote on PC body portraits hasn't disappeared into the aether, which is something that got a couple questions. While it may seem simple, creating the portraits and the system to display them will take a lot of effort. One of the reasons I've had it as a funding goal is to allow paying for help with the process, though it'll happen regardless eventually. I suspect an initial implementation will take me a month of work, so I won't be able to work on other goals (it's difficult to work on piecemeal). I'd like to get some of the other main objectives (content) done first before taking the time to get that done. :D 

The results of this question were pretty close to what I expected, though the popularity of the self-employed option surprised me. I expected the non-job money-making options to have some fans, but not be the second most popular. I kind of wish I had split out the main methods of self-employment into their own options. All three have their own planned expansions/content, but it would be good to know where to start.

Milking income will see some love at the same time the Farm Coop job is written, so the two jobs that'll see new content most immediately are Progenerate and SPERM. 

This item was pretty informative. Obviously, the schools with more content in them do seem to be more popular, but what I've really noticed is the number of people who don't really bother with the skill-improving schools. Thanks to you guys, I've realized that a big part of that is likely that the schools are just too much of a pain to go to while working one of the standard daytime jobs. It's difficult to make it to lessons on time, or there simply aren't lessons available for the period while you're off work.

When initially setting the times for lessons, I wasn't focused enough on making the lesson times line up with what the player is able to attend. Fortunately, adjusting the times should be fairly straightforward to do.

I'm happy that the male start seems to be fairly well regarded!

You guys generally seem to view the female start positively, though not to the extent of the male start. This makes sense to me, because I wanted to take the female start in a different direction rather than just have a slight variation of the male start. Of course, because there's not the same TG element, it also makes sense that more people would feel neutral about it.

For me, I look at both of these stories as pieces of the same story. I think that'll start to become more apparent as the female start character starts interacting more with Lily, making the relationship between female-start and male-start PCs more apparent. I'll do my best to keep them both fun and interesting :D

Sadly, this isn't an unexpected result. We are committed to squashing bugs, however. I've maintained a constant policy of examining and fixing any bug that gets reported by the next release if possible (bugs that are reported right before release, or that are particularly tricky sometimes take an extra release to get fixed). We got a few comments about AW's general bugginess, and there are some reasons why it can seem that way.

a) A bug isn't reported. We actually got a suggestion in this survey to add a bug tracker and/or bug submission method. We've had those for ages, lol, it's a good suggestion. A lot of people don't bother to report minor bugs, which is something I totally understand. Who wants to stop playing in order to report something minor? But without someone telling us, there's way too much to look at for us to find those on our own. Often we get bug reports from people playing the public release (I appreciate all bug reports, so it's a good thing). But the public release is 6 weeks behind, so it's likely that the bug they report has been in 2 to 3 releases.

b) some of the bug reports we get are really vague or hard to figure out what they mean. I usually try to figure out what a vague report may mean, but Besty tends to be really literal with bugs (it's more time-efficient for the person who coded something to fix the bugs in it). So sometimes we get a report and either can't replicate it, or think we fixed it but in fact, fixed the wrong thing altogether. This means the bug stays in. I'm going to do some more talking with Besty though, because I can think of a few bugs that were "fixed" multiple times before actually getting fixed ;)

c) AW is really complex. A good example of how this can manifest is with game saves. We had been getting the occasional report of saves taking too long, and in particular, autosaves not working properly. So we fixed the hell out of that stuff. I did a pretty significant rework of SugarCube's save system and tried several things to ensure a slow autosave in the sleep screen wouldn't mess things up. Eventually, we even moved the autosave to before the sleep system starts so that it couldn't cause issues. But it turned out that the whole time there wasn't a problem with saves or autosaves themselves... there was a problem with game data getting bloated. Basically, a reversed sign in the NPC suicide system caused more and more NPCs to be generated each night until the data became so massive that it started causing problems with saving after playing long enough. If we had some info with those reports like "after playing long enough X happens" we could have found it sooner, but it wasn't something obvious. 

d) It's hard to test everything. AW is pretty huge now, so we're forced to focus on testing new content/changes. We haven't had many volunteers lately that are willing to do testing and report bugs before a release. If you're interested in seeing the newest stuff before everyone else... come be a build tester! It'll also help us make the game better!

Fortunately, we're mostly done with the framework and system integration, so most new bugs should be pretty limited in scope. We've got suggestions for unit testing, and let me just say that's a whole giant issue. We've got thousands of functions and a very complex data structure to deal with. This would be manageable--if painful--if it wasn't for twine/twee. Twee is very difficult to test or integrate into tests. On the bright side, we may get a little volunteer help from someone who's pretty skilled at that sort of thing.

I'm pretty confident in our development speed, especially when compared to similar games out there. I'm glad most of you guys don't think we're dragging our heels. If you do think that we're on the slow side, I'd love to hear what we could do to change that perception (honestly!). I know that content was coming in smaller chunks as we coded the game's framework and main systems, but now that focus has shifted toward content I'm hopeful progress will be more visible as it was the last release. 

One thing I have to caution you guys on is that we can't work on adding content to everything at once. It'd be brain-melting, but it's also way less efficient than focusing on adding content to certain things. Like adding a bunch of content to one or two jobs, rather than adding a little content to all the jobs. So, if you don't check the changelog, and in-game dev note popup, it might not always be obvious where all the new stuff is.

As I mentioned above, forgetting to add belly size into was a pretty big oversight. (You can now read a description of your belly size ranging from being barely pregnant to having a hyper-pregnancy. You can also find the size of your unborn children as well compared to fruit and vegetables.) There were some good ideas here, some that will be easier than others to implement. There were a couple suggestions that didn't really make sense... but I think I can understand the intent. Expanding the range of sizes on most of the mentioned items is pretty straight forward, so I'll look into that soon. I'm glad that most of you are happy with the current level of character detail though! 

This question had a pretty wide range of responses, and the second most popular item was to keep to the current schedule, so it's difficult to say we should really change our short-term plans. I was a bit surprised by the popularity of the "focus on fetish content" option though! Thankfully we asked a followup question for that response asking "which fetish?"

I know it's a bit shameless, but it's fun to see my fav in the lead here :D

The problem with fetish content is that it's really variable as to how it fits into the game. Pregnancy of course has it's own fertility system and all the stuff that goes along with that. Bimbo and Corruption are very strange because they both modify other content and have unique content, while things like bondage mostly fit into unique scenes and events. And all of these things will be able to make adjustments to the way generic sex scenes are described.

Some of these things you'll start to see more of as other content areas are added to. An example would be lactation, bimbo, and preg content that will be happening at the Farm Coop. Similarly, there's other fetish content planned with different jobs and schools. 

I'll be taking some more time to go back over the various suggestions a second time. I'm usually pretty happy to "borrow" a fun suggestion as well. Thanks to Luke we have a fun type of fertility drug that increases the rate of zygote splitting. (think increasing the odds of identical twins). 

I'm going to look into answering the fun Q&A questions over the weekend as well.

For now though... it's time to get back to work!

Thanks for your support, and thanks for taking the survey

ThaumX

Titbeast

Hello everyone, it's time for another blog update.

This update comes with a community survey, so be sure to give it a try.

The last week has been really shitty for me. It started with the dumb bugs we let escape into the release of 0.26.0, and just continued from there. Fortunately for AW, the bad things have all been in my personal life rather than things happening to AW. Unfortunately, it's left me a little distracted or occupied the last few days so I haven't been as productive as usual. I ended up having to take some time off from my day job, which also happens to be where I get a lot of my AW work done. (My job is 80% putting out fires, so there's a lot of extra time as long as nothing goes wrong.)

As far as AW goes, I've been cleaning up a few outstanding issues and going through my creative process for more writing. Happily, I've managed to repair the backward compatibility process for loading old saves. I've tested it with several saves--including some that were confirmed not to work beforehand--and it's working quite well now.

We've also fixed some of the minor bugs that have been reported, and I made some minor improvements to the compile script that I've been meaning to do. From here on I'll be focusing on writing, though there is a little more work to be done on the screen reader mode.

The Shitty Week

As far as those personal things go, the short version is that my daughter was hospitalized on Thursday. She was released from the hospital yesterday, but we still don't have a firm diagnosis... just a list of symptoms and some possibilities. We'll be seeing some specialists and getting some tests done, and hopefully, we'll be able to figure out what's wrong. She isn't in any immediate danger, thankfully.

As a parent, it feels pretty shitty when there's something wrong with your child, that's just how it goes. It's a lot worse when you don't actually know what's wrong, though. Normally there are some pretty simple steps that you can take to help your child when they feel bad... like if they are sick, you make sure they drink fluids. You feel better by helping them to feel better. When you don't know what's wrong, or what you can even do to really help... it's tough.

Of course, during all of this my son caught some kind of viral rash, my other daughter got some sort of stomach flu from school, and my wife has [redacted]. My wife doesn't want me to share what's wrong with her, but WebMD insists she has cancer of course. In reality, it'll probably also be something that requires tests and/or surgery, so I'll be going with her to the doctor as well later in the week. 

basically, it's just been a shitty 7 days. Fortunately, things have calmed down a little now that my daughter is home. 

Anyway, that's enough complaining from me! 

Besty had a great weekend and was able to successfully serve his Dark Lord. 

Until next time,

ThaumX

The Reading Release - Version 0.26

Hello everyone, it's finally time for the release of version 0.26.

For this release, I've focused primarily on content. There's a lot of new written content in this release, over 37,000 words from myself, plus more from Besty. While we do have a novella of new words to read, most of them are spread out in different places. The two prologues have been completed, and there's a lot of new job content in addition to some other smaller items. Overall I'm quite happy with this release, and I hope you are too!

The highlight of this release is likely the completion of the male and female prologues, but there are also two new jobs (the Fecundate Division & stripper job at Pole Riders). The Janitor job at the Institute Services Division got a huge expansion of new events and the Progenerate Technologies Fecundate Division job also got a starting chunk of events related to being a proper baby gestation employee. The strip club downtown has some new things to see, pregnancy now has some associated events such as morning sickness and food cravings, the nutrition system has been expanded so you can now lose or gain weight, the No Ragerts tattoo parlor has been added with tools to create your own custom tattoo, there are new unique story threads for unique NPCs, and there are several new items available for your home including a home brewing station.

There has also been the usual assortment of minor improvements and fixes, such as a new "restless sleep" scene if you try to go to bed too early, new NPCs including Toby and some Farm Coop employees/hucows, fixes to the pronoun issues in the PC sex acts text, and plenty more.

I'm quite pleased that writing and adding content into the game is proving as easy as I hoped. It makes me glad that the decision to focus on making it easy to add content is paying off. If I had to deal with some of the other setups I've seen, there's no way I could have written so much in a single month. 

With all that said, we really hope you enjoy the release!

ThaumX

Change Log

Words:  1,951,812     Characters:  11,520,510     Code Lines:  183,181

Known Issues:

• The male start prologue skip has not been updated to include the final details of your relationship with Lily, so you will not see any changes to your relationship if you skip the prologue.
• Old saves can sometimes be unreliable. This doesn't always occur, but there seems to a fault in backward compatibility that occasionally causes issues. If you are experiencing bugs or strange behavior, it may be best to start with a new game. This is more likely for older game versions.
• Not all conversation tags have writing/placeholder writing so you may see the message that "this x conversation tag hasn't been written yet". This is more likely to occur when there is little interesting to talk about (because it is more likely to pull more obscure tags).

Changes:

• Male Start Prologue has been completed.
• Your choices and relationship with Lily in the prologue can result in six different outcomes. Each outcome has two options for the player, resulting in a total of 12 possible player reactions. [6,500 words]
• Your relationship with Lily will be properly set after completing the prologue.
• A minor cheat has been added that allows the player to choose the ending they want to get manually.
• Update to wardrobe tutorial to make it relevant to current wardrobe system.
• Updated the description of non-institute jobs.
• Female Start Prologue has been completed.
• There is a new Science Aptitude Challenge test in the Institute Job Fair to unlock the SPERM career.
• The empty displays/booths in the job fair have been filled with content about Appletree and the Thornton Institute. [2,500 words]
• The final scenes of the female prologue have been written. [6,500 words]
• Toby has been defined as a proper NPC and can be interacted with after the prologue.
• Organ Donor Ad created "Give the gift of research!"
• Lily and Toby starting relationship values adjusted based on male/female start.
• Player menstrual cycle starting time tweaked to better match timeline
• Also allows quicker integration with Progenerate job.
• Restrictions on starting jobs have been lifted, it's now possible to start the game with any available job rather than being restricted to institute jobs.
• Custom Story threads have been added.
• Unique NPCs (such as Lily) can have custom story threads that let them talk about their own unique past instead of being randomly selected. [besty]
• Lily and Toby each have a full set of story threads that discuss their past. Their story will vary subtly depending on whether it was male or female start.
• Institute Services career (janitor) has been expanded with a lot of new content!
• several new events, including event-chains and repeatable events, can happen while working in this career. [11,500 words]
• Players will meet Marta, a coworker in zone D, and can become friends with her outside of work. 
• Marta is a unique NPC that has been defined.
• New "job content" items for everyday things that happen at work.
• New "Restless Sleep" scene.
• Prevents game errors caused by going to sleep too early.
• Allows players to safely forward the in-game time to a time appropriate for sleeping while gaining a limited amount of extra rest benefit.
• Includes a fun video of a restless sleeper.
• Improved skill check system
• temporary skill bonuses are now calculated automatically in the skills class.
• derived skills are now standardized and implemented for skill checks.
• Skills like performance, stripping, management, etc. that depend on a combination of standard skills.
• Succeeding in these checks can result in skill point gain for one of their parent skills.
• Skills are capped to 80 points when assigning skills during character creation. 
• Character creation skill assignment will now properly apply a penalty to purchasing sex skills if the character is shamefast.
• The cleaning and aesthetics skills can now receive a limited price bonus for certain characters.
• Added some new pregnancy events that occur during pregnancy.
• Morning sickness event during the correct portion of pregnancy that responds to your current map location so you can puke in the correct place.
• Food craving event with multiple food variations.
• Pregnancy arousal event.
• Baby's first kick event that plays the first time you detect a pregnancy kicking. There are some minor variations and a unique version for your very first pregnancy.
• The Hyper Menstrual Cycle mutation now properly affects sperm survival.
• The Fertility Seal tattoo ovulation tracker now properly displays days until ovulation
• Fetal age/growth information made more clear
• Added the Progenerate Technologies Fecundate Division job.
• Job includes 6 new primary events. [7,000 words]
• Birth control discovered event
• Insemination event
• induction event
• fertility boost event
• hip-widening event
• Giving birth to children while employed at Progenerate will give a larger birth bonus, however you will not receive weekly income from these children (you were only a surrogate).
• Several unique job content items for everyday activities in the Fecundate Division, complete with images.
• Unique hiring process also factors player fertility into initial job position.
• Added some job content images to replace the "placeholder" that was in use for other institute jobs.
• Added new links to the job selection menu in screen-reader mode to make them easier to use.
• Updated the on/off toggle switches used in the game to a screen-reader friendly version in screen-reader mode.
• Improvements the the Womb class to ensure proper womb status information.
• Improvement to the menstrual cycle and ovulation timing code.
• Added aftOvulation flag for ease of tracking pre/post ovulation.
• Some tweaks and improvements to the parser.
• Generic cock size parser command will no longer poll cock girth when selecting a size verb. This will temporarily prevent the "changing size" issue with characters that have cock length that isn't matched by cock girth. (extra girthy or unusually narrow) 
• Breast size verbs slightly tweaked, and mistake in breast noun parser fixed so that it will no longer return "mosquito bites" for normal-sized breasts.
• Several grammar/typo fixes throughout the prologues.
• Updated the character description to no longer give two breast sizes while lactating and cup size isn't different.
• Loading a game with an interact window open will no longer let the window remain open.
• Escape Hatch will now remove the sex-scene loading cover and other menu items that previously could remain stuck on the screen.
• Added code to prevent children from entering sex scenes if NPC settings are adjusted to generate children.
• Updated hospital sweats for the female start.
• Fixed the navigation issue that could happen when having sex after a date in some locations.
• Fixed the character viewer in the social menu.
• Fixed the shitty pronouns used in the PC sex action text.
• Updated the navigation system to properly track time when moving between tertiary club locations and an outside location.

Besty's Changes In His Own Words:

• "NoRagerts" Tattoo parlor was added, tattoo services were transferred from "Penetrated" parlor.
• Custom tattoo creation implemented, single tattoo mods can be created, downloaded as a standalone mod and uploaded in the tattoo parlor.
• NPC options working properly now, design was fixed for easier use.
• Nutrition\exercise system and weight gain\loose implemented.
• Home scales for checking weight and BMI.
• 7 New NPC in Farm Coop area with unique storythreads.
• Unique story threads system for NPCs. Now semi-defined and defined NPC will have their own stories, not just from the generic list. 
• Story threads viewer in NPC info screen.
• New striptease club in the club district.
• Stripper work basic setup.
• Map for lake Clitea resort can be ogled from the world map.
• BB&B home items shop.
• New furniture items in BB&B shop and Bullseye electronic.
• Brewing machines and the moonshine. Available in Bullseye.
• Accessibility switch in settings.
• Alternate home inventory menu for players with screen reader software.