Wow. It's really crazy to think that it's been almost four and a half years since AW became public and longer since I originally conceived the idea and started planning. To be honest, I never expected it to be as successful as it was; I just wanted to make what I thought would be a better life sim. Now here we are with Arcanist Codeworks having multiple employees working with me full time to turn my vision into reality.
Of course, we aren't done... we're going to keep making the game better; It's just crazy to look back at how far we've come. Over two and a half million words of content and Muschi Valley has turned into its own quirky world to explore. It's all thanks to all of you who supported us along the way, and with your continued support, we'll continue to make Appletree a better place.
On that note, let's discuss the results of the first AW Expansion poll. Before I dive into it, I should mention that we have a lot of cool stuff in this release, but more on that later. The poll was really contentious, with only a small margin separating the winner from the runner-up. Both are things we're really excited about, so if your first choice didn't win I really hope you'll stick with us until we get there.
I think it's worth noting here that our efforts are never going to be exclusively on-topic for the expansion... That's just never been how we work. We like to take advantage of it when inspiration strikes to add new things all over the place. While our main effort each month will of course be on the expansion topic, I think ignoring everything else would lead to us missing the big picture.
We're going to get started on the expansion this month. We're going to continue with our monthly update schedule by releasing version 1.01 in early March. While the futa player character obviously won't be a very good experience early on, we want you all to be able to see our progress. There are so many exciting things to add to the AW experience in addition to just "adding a cock" too! Several things should make the experience better for players even if they aren't playing a futa. It's exciting!
What's New in 1.0
Changes
- Clothing can now be removed all at once via a button in the action menu.
- Useful for swimming, tanning, or any sudden exhibitionist urges.
- Three new sex actions for NPCs.
- Complete with 10K words of descriptions for the various kink variations.
- Actions are for areas/positions where the NPC doesn't have a lot of actions to choose from, such as performing oral.
- Editing for job events for the maid, masseuse, stripper jobs, as well as the Oldest Profession prostitution pseudo-job.
- Major fix to the sex system AI.
- NPCs now change positions and do things of their own volition as intended.
- Tweaks to increase sex scene speed. (Remember, there is a setting to change the sex scene speed further yourself!)
- New kink override in sex system, which allows the player to force scene descriptions to use a certain kink flavor.
- Some additional editing courtesy of Klorpa.
- Small content addition for the rocking stool home item.
- Requested by Starglider.
- The clothing sizes bonus feature will now default to off.
- We only had it default to on because we wanted more people to test it.
- You can now view your skills while on the job choice screen.
- This should make it easier to choose a job that matches your skills.
- A new breast-shape override has been added to the game settings menu.
- Allows you to force a specific breast shape for descriptions in-game.
- The rate your home gets dirty now responds to the set difficulty level.
- The "Escape Hatch" has been removed for all but the elite version.
- The Escape Hatch remains usable while in a scenario window, but otherwise is no longer available in the rest of the game.
- Its use results in a lot of bugs, and it's generally not necessary anymore.
- We left it in for the elite version just because it's technically a dev tool now.
- An ending tester tool has been added to the dev tools menu, allowing you to experience the various endings.
- Dev tools are only available in the elite build of the game.
- The giant new addition of the end of the game's story.
- 30K+ words of content for game endings.
- 18 unique endings.
- 10 unique male story endings.
- 7 unique female story endings.
- 1 special ending for failing the pregnancy challenge
- The variation on endings is based largely on your relationship with Lily, how events proceeded in the prologue, and your own choice at the end of the game.
- Your choice at the end of the game can make a dramatic difference in how things progress.
- All the NPCs you meet during the game have their own ending stories. If you have a romantic relationship with them, there is a special outcome story that happens based on the ending you received.
- The player character has a similar ending story about the rest of their life that takes place after the main story's ending.
- A guide for the male endings is available! Female guide once wiki is saved.
- A truly epic amount of bug fixing and minor content improvements.
- Probably at least 250 man-hours of work on this.
- That said... Murphy's law basically guarantees that some will remain. We'll keep fixing any that are found!
- We're stopping the Bullseye job mod from loading automatically.
- That mod needs some updates to function better with the changes we made to the job system, we'll do it if there is interest.
- It was really only intended as a demonstration of some of the modding capability, but because the amount of content is low, it doesn't really make a good employment option for a player who is unaware of that.
- You can still load the mod manually if you really want to work for Bullseye!
