Wow. It has been a hell of a month. Had two different sets of family staying over, and of course the fun of everyone getting covid. I put in a crazy amount of "overtime" over the last two weeks in addition to my normal schedule in order to catch up, and now we have a solid release for you. (I am SO tired.)
We've got a significant amount of new hucow content, built for the day-to-day events that happen at the job along with other hucow love. We've finished up the female NPC portraits, baring any tweaks we may need to do later, and made some other improvements like reducing the initial loading time. Finally, we've added a lot to the card game, from improving the sex scene selection menu, to adding text content to each card. There are new cards, a couple examples of character-specific cards, and two new card types (items and kinks). The enemy AI is significantly improved as well, and now chooses what card to play rather than just playing one at random. We even added a card viewer to the character menu and game that shows you all the cards in the game, and the ones that will and won't be in your deck. It's the baby of the light deckbuilding system we'll have.
Note: we're planning for deck building to be fairly optional. You'll be able to play the game fine without it. Though your actions may get a bit erratic as your deck gets bigger and you have more cards, you'll still be able to win. What the deck building will let you do is disable cards so they don't appear in your deck. This will let you focus your actions towards the kinds of activities you want to do (and yes, make your deck more competitive). Of course, some cards you won't be able to disable...
Oh yeah. We also added a "Milk Yourself" card, because we thought it would be fun with hucows and all. Right now it's just the basic card though, not the improved versions for mutations. Any lactating character can use it.
For the next release we're planning to work more on the mechanics side of being a hucow, specifically milk quotas and paying of debt. I'd also like to start some of the storyline events, and possibly start adding in transformatives for the hucow optional treatments. We'll also keep working on the card game, rounding out the functionality and capabilities so we can start fleshing out the card library.
Our dev cycle for version 1.23 does happen over the holidays, so as usual we won't have quite as much work time because everyone gets a week off. It's hard to get work done anyway during the holidays, so might as well focus on enjoying them... or at least limiting the stress.
We hope your holidays are enjoyable and as stress-free as possible! Thanks for your support!
ThaumX
Change Log
- Improved hucow job task resolution.
- Large hucow daily-event expansion.
- Daily events are events that happen every day while a hucow when there isn't a more targeted condition-specific event that takes place. They explore life as a hucow, and also operate mechanics related to your cow performance.
- Different types of events have better explanatory text in dev comments, and a number indicator for which scene it is. (i.e. "[2 of 20]")
- lots of images added.
- images of coop personnel, scene-specific images in AW fashion, etc.
- If you get a punishment outcome for the day, you will now receive an actual punishment, which will have various effects on your character.
- Several more events are planned, only one added for now to make it functional.
- Added "Deepthroat Training" punishment scene.
- Doses you with shorter-duration compound eta (oral consumption)
- Bloats your tummy with cum.
- Fun scene.
- If you get an experimentation outcome for the day, you will now participate in an experimental type event where the coop tests something on you. Effects will range from very good to quite bad, though the bad effects depend on your perspective...
- Currently only one 2-part event with multiple potential effects, but more are planned.
- Added the "Cock Eclair" experiment scene.
- Scene is two parts. The first involves eating a cock-shaped eclair, which they use to test a new compound on you and a couple other cows.
- The second part is the outcome/effect of the compound they tested on you.
- There are six outcomes with a random chance of occurring.
- 3 outcomes are some level of good including udder growth and bonus milk production.
- 1 outcome is a fun scene where you have an itsy-bitsy seizure and resulting vision/hallucination. The bad outcome.
- 1 outcome that is mildly bad/inconvenient that includes a wet hucow thigh gap.
- 1 neutral outcome.
- If you get a "Cowing" outcome for the day, you will experience a look at activities that you do during an average day at the Dairy, including taking classes, exercising, and a number of other things. This reveals more about being a hucow, hucows in general and the general setting, and some other fun stuff.
- Currently has three large events, a series of classes prevented by a friendly milkmaid named Sara.
- Each event has a different theme/tone, and generally focuses on hucow teats or the milkmaids themselves.
- One of them contains some Thaum doodles :P
- Explains why hucow teats are so sensitive/orgasmic, and some other lore stuff.
- If you get a "Social" outcome for the day, you will experience an event with other hucows in a social setting at the Dairy. These start of short and light hearted, becoming longer and more relevant as you move through the list of events. These give you helpful hints for content/characters, and also give tips to achieve certain kinds of objectives. They also reveal more of the setting through the perspective of hucows themselves.
- There are 16 events, 11 (or 12?) of which are new to this release.
- If you load a save, you may have to "wrap around" past the older events to see all the new ones.
- Some events contain choices that will impact your standing with your fellow hucows, but not in a dramatic way (you won't suddenly be hated/loved).
- Job event tester has been expanded to support these events for our testing purposes. Players with the Elite build ($20 supporters) can play all these events (and all the other job events) quickly from the new game menu.
- Sex system initial menu has been redone/improved. Now is more clear about selecting your desired sex system (sex scene, quick sex, card game) with information about each.
- A standard sex scene with tutorial is no longer required before seeing this menu the first time.
- Choosing the card game sex will now launch the tutorial the first time you play the card game for each game/player character. It can still be closed easily.
- This is because the surprising amount of feedback from players saying they didn't understand how to play or what the objective is, despite a big "tutorial" button, lol.
- The female AI portraits library is now done, barring a future expansion with more traits represented.
- Info: We will give the player the option to use a selected portrait based on their character after character creation when they start a new game, but unlike the svg portrait, the static portrait will not change with the character. Probably in v1.23 release. Next up will be male NPC portraits most likely.
- Big thanks to Cowbot for helping to make all these! 3,418 unique images!
- Players who load existing games may still have female npcs using the svg portraits. This is because portraits are determined when the npc is generated.
- The way images are loaded into memory when the game is loaded has been changed. The game now proceeds before portraits are loaded, while they continue to load in the background. This will reduce the effective loading time.
- We will probably change the way resources are handled for portraits specifically in the future to further limit load times and allow us to use the background loading for more resources.
- The new setup I have planned should also reduce memory usage, but not dramatically. Performance gains are performance gains though.
- I did a lot of coding stuff for the card game to make it do things in a sane way. Most of you probably don't care, and I don't feel like trying to explain. That said, stop by the discord and we can talk about it if you're interested, or someone can point you to a previous explanation, whatever works.
- Besty was kind enough to explain new features of the Sex Card Game:
- New kink cards mechanic: You can play kink cards now which affects you and your partner. More details on it you can find in the in-game tutorial (Tutorial button in the card game screen)
- New item cards mechanic: You can play item cards and choose who you want to use the item on. Item cards are obtained by getting the items in the game. More details are in the same tutorial.
- The total amount of cards is 39 now
- New action cards: Deepthroat (Available to the characters with oral kink), Milk yourself (Available to the lactating characters), 3 dom actions that you can get in your deck by playing the "Dominant" kink card, 3 sub actions that you can get in your deck by playing the "Submissive" kink card.
- To make it more versatile we introduce a new "Second Thought" action card. It discards all your current hand and deals you 5 cards from your deck. A good way to get rid of the useless cards.
- New item cards: Gag. We will add many more next releases, it took quite a bit of time implementing and testing the mechanic so it is a proof of concept now with just one card. You can buy a Ball gag at the "Prude" shop in the adult district.
- New kink cards: Dominant and Submissive. Both affect the scene heavily causing various new mechanics to shine - adding cards to the deck, drawing a random one, and many more. We will add more kinks and eventually cover all existing character's kinks in the same fashion.
- New deck view screen where you can look at all the cards that AW has to offer including the ones not available to you yet. This makes it easier to know how to get more cards to your deck (hovering the card will show you the info on obtaining it) and eventually, we plan to introduce the real deckbuilding mechanic which will allow you to remove and add cards to your deck forming a perfect deck to fit your desires.
- Coconut Brain AI was heavily expanded. Frankly, it was just a randomizer in the last release and was not intellectual at all. All it cared about was following the rules of the game. Now, its capabilities are much more. Using a system of tags and general goals it does its best to play in a coherent fashion following objectives and utilizing cards in a sane fashion. This should result in various NPC playing in their own style which reflects the specific set of kinks and traits they have.
- The tutorial for the card game was updated to reflect new additions.
- New "Settings" menu regarding important card game options.
- Following your suggestion we implemented two blocks with texts reflecting card that was played in a standard style. This connects the mechanistic style of the card game with the in-game chain of events and adds "more sex" to it. You can see the small display\log in the upper left corner of the CG screen and the bigger screen is shown at the end of every round (though you can hide it or just disable it in the CG Settings).
- More nice animations and effects!
- The starting hand size is limited based on the character's kinks: Liberated makes it 6 while Shamefeast can only have 4 cards on her hand. The standard is still 5.
- Max hand size is 8 from now on. If you somehow dealt with more cards than your max hand size it will burn, muahaha.
- Rapid development of the CG requires a lot of testing and we would be happy to hear your suggestions and feedback on the new mechanics and AI in our discord server!
