Hot Work

 

Hello everyone, it's past time to talk about the results of the expansion poll. The pick-multiple approach got us some interesting results, and I'm glad we took that approach. It allowed all of you to select the things you're most interested in, rather than having to pick only your favorite choice. While I'm here, I'd also like to talk about what we're working on this month; it's something easier said than done.

This month's work is focused on playtesting and using what we learn to fix bugs, improve balance, and generally just make sure things are working the way we want them to work. Normally, we test the specific things we work on, or play the game for short segments relevant to our work or finding bugs (and Anenn hardly seems to test at all :P) This makes it very easy to miss minor bugs, stylistic things. It also makes it very hard to get a sense of whether a thing that happens over time is balanced the way we want, for example, natural lactation training reduction and the behavior of leaking.

We've already found a bunch of things, and we keep working to fix everything we find. We're even finding some bugs that wouldn't be noticeable during play because of error handling, but that actually impact the way things work. One example is outfit coordination. The attractiveness/desirability of the player character's clothing ensemble is modulated by whether or not the clothes match. While the main portion of this works (same color, or coordination with universal colors like black, white, and denim), the code that handled complementary colors wasn't working at all because of a minor bug. In this case, players were being penalized for some outfits accidentally. It's not something obvious, so it was never reported.

That example was only about 30 minutes of work, but it's a good example of some of the things we're looking for. Another example is not getting companionship gains when at work with coworkers, and not having companionship modulated by difficulty settings. Easy to overlook, but makes a difference in balance. Similarly, we had issues with the system for choosing work events, causing many events to occur only very rarely, while others happen much too often. Not technically broken, but not the experience we're trying to give.

We're hoping that making things look better, work better, and be better balanced, we'll have a much-improved game for you for the 0.52 release. It's also an important part of getting ready for 1.0.

Also, we have Anenn working to further expand the amount of content in the sex scene system. It's a good place for more content, and it helps keep any new Anenn bugs from popping up while we're working so hard to get rid of bugs ;). FYI: The descriptive text in the sex system currently clocks in at about 96,000 words, about the size of your average novel. It's mostly split into 15 different groupings, with standard plus 14 "kink" variations.

Poll Results

Ordered from most to least votes for convenience

The results had a mix of expected and unexpected things. The futa player expansion having a lot of votes was pretty expected, that's been one of the most common and consistent requests we get. On the other hand, we didn't expect to see so much support for the sex system or transformatives, though we did expect them to get their share of support. While it's only a guess, I believe that part of the uniqueness of the results is that many people chose certain items as their second or third choice. This is a good thing though, as it helps get a better idea of the general things appealing to people compared to the pick-one approach.

As I mentioned in the poll's description, this isn't going to choose what we actually work on, we'll be having a vote each time before starting on a new reaction. What this will decide is what options we'll put effort into timing out and explaining for the first vote. I'll be doing that for the top 5 items in this poll.

This top-5 group includes some of the things I'm most excited about, and I think any of them will make a good addition to AW. You guys did tend to pick the items that require the most work though... not that it really bothers us ;)

Futa player will be a ton of work, but will also pretty dramatically alter how you can play the game. There's events to change, systems to expand, and plenty of fun things to add... such as all the things you can do with the cum your character would be able to produce... Plus, think how certain jobs like being a hucow farm hand can change when a cock is brought into the picture.

Transformatives are pretty cool, and I'm glad to see a lot of support for this expansion. For one, it'll let us start using the Institute employee enrichment center. I enjoy the mechanics of both exploring different modifications and creating the perfect character. We've got a great system for supporting these sorts of effects, so we can focus more on adding fun things, mutations, and appearances.

Improving the sex system will make it more fun to use, and that makes for a better game. Most of it will likely involve refactoring code and improving how things work, but it should make the system more enjoyable. Since it's a central part of the game, it makes sense to make it better.

Hucows are fun. There's been a lot of support for hucows in the past, and it's exciting to explore a bit more of that world. (not to mention sexy...)

The careers are something neat because the main jobs in the game were all designed with a second stage in mind, along with more content/story to go along with them. We thought it was more important to provide variety and basic stories for more entry-level jobs than it was to have just a couple full-length jobs though. It'll be really nice to add some of that expanded play to the jobbing minigame, along with some of the confounding choices and misadventures.

That's enough babbling for now...

Thanks for your support!