Hello everyone!
It's time for a more normal update because we've been focused on polls and larger development issues lately. I think version 0.35 "the Yummy release" is going to be pretty cool, despite being a little scatterbrained. We were in a bit of limbo while figuring out what you guys wanted, so we've worked on several different things rather than charging full-force into relationships. We will still have plenty of cool relationship stuff for you, but we've also got other things I think you'll enjoy.
One thing that I think everyone will appreciate is the effort I've put into our mental status functions and the "doom clock" system. The status functions in AW are rather complex because they are at the core of the gameplay mechanics. Rather than a simple "Add 5 stress" as you may see elsewhere, the status functions consider the character's personality, contributing factors, and use various math functions to give each stat more complex behavior.
A simple example of that math can be seen with stress. The higher the stress level, the stronger the effect of adding new stress, and the weaker the effect of removing stress. Similarly, while the stress level is low adding more stress is weakened and it is easier to remove stress.
I've improved the way that notifications happen in regard to dangerous status levels, and I've made it more straightforward to remove a doom clock when they occur. I've adjusted the code for "over status" conditions and actually starting a doom clock. I also made some fixes and improvements to the doom clock code itself so that it is much more reliable, and the player is given the full length of time before a bad end actually happens (the only exception being if you trigger another doom clock while one exists, which causes an immediate bad end). Finally, I've written a rather extensive encyclopedia entry (over 1,000 words) on the doom clock and mental statuses, explaining in a lot more detail how they work.
Hopefully, this will remove a lot of the frustration some players experience with managing their character's mental status and keeping them alive. I know we sometimes like to joke about AW being the Dark Souls of adult games, but that should be more about all the possible ways to die rather than it actually being difficult to survive in Appletree.
I've also tackled a couple other issues, such as modifying SugarCube to improve game save reliability, improving the prologue skip for the male start, adding a prologue skip to the female start, and enabling female character templates.
Our new developer has been working on creating the cheat NPC editor to edit NPCs during the game, which should be ready to edit all the major values in the upcoming release. That's a useful cheat feature, and will probably come in handy for testing as well. It's also a first step toward getting the NPC template feature working (for generating specific npcs instead of using procedural generation).
Besty has been working on relationships, specifically some of the kinky behavior you may expect in a relationship. more dom/sub behavior, bondage, keyholding, and other fun things. Besty also tackled the unpleasant task of converting male avatars into the new format. The male NPC portraits now look similar to the female ones, no more blocky monstrosities!
Our freelance writers have been working on generic environment/world content to help bring Appletree to life, while our erotica writer has been working on Besty-ality content. There's also plenty of smaller things we've done such as fixes, upgrades, and smaller content items that you'll see in the change log next week. We'll be working on more relationship mechanics and content, as well as testing as we get closer to the release.
That's all for now... It's time to get back to work!
Thanks as always for all your support, AW wouldn't be possible without you!
o7
ThaumX
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