Writing

Hello everyone, it's time for the regular AW update :D

We've been working on some cool stuff over the last week. In fact, I'm pretty shocked by how much writing I've gotten done. It seems I've started to find my writing groove because I've written about 12,000 words since the last post. I've also gotten some coding and general improvements done, as well as some administrative work for the wiki. All in only six days, five if you subtract the Sunday I took off.

It's too early to officially announce the results of last week's poll, and it's still open for another day if you haven't voted yet. However, the results are pretty overwhelmingly in favor of the Koikatsu option. There was also a solid percentage of patrons voting in this poll, which is great. I've been tossing around the idea of hiring someone specifically to generate body portrait images for us, so we can get those in the game sooner. (If you have any opinions on that, feel free to share them!)

My writing efforts for this week have primarily been dedicated to job events, in particular, events for the Institute Services job. There are now about 10,000 words of events for services job, spread out over 11 events. Several of the events are multi-part or progressive events as well. I decided to focus on a single career so that the events would feel more unified, I'm pretty happy with the results.

Most of the rest of my writing was creating story threads for Lily and Toby. Basically, these characters will talk about their past during dates/hangouts/interactions in a way unique to them. This way these conversations will line up with their backstory and unique relationship with the player character.

This upcoming week I'll be starting the final writing for the male prologue to finish that as well. After that, I'll probably spend some more time focused on sex scenes. 26 is shaping up to be a pretty cool release!

Besty has been working on a new location in Appletree, as well as a job to go along with it. It's looking pretty good so far! Being a stripper should be an interesting career option for sure, especially after we get a decent amount of events and job content set up for it.

In case you're curious, there are only two more jobs planned for the game. These are the job at the farm coop, and the job at Progenerate Technologies. Not all jobs are going to have the same amount of content or potential for advancement. The three Institute jobs, along with the job at Progenerate will likely be the largest of the bunch.

That's it, for now, I'm heading back to the AW Word Pit to get some more writing done!

o7

ThaumX

Hard Poll

Please forgive me for this silly pun. At least I went with a stripper pole instead of another type of pole...

I've been hard at work on version 0.26, and I'm happy to say that with the exception of some extra testing and cleanup, the female start prologue is complete. I'll begin work on wrapping up the male start prologue in the next couple of days. (I'm going to take a brief break to work on some other tasks to change things up.) Thousands of words of new story content along with new writing for the job fair, a new science aptitude challenge, some light sadism, and more.

The Organ Donor setting finally has an ad

Besty has been working hard as well, and he has got the nutrition/fitness system running along with custom tattoos that allow you to upload your own tattoo images in-game. There's also several other minor things he has been working on, with more planned. There will be several cool things ready for 0.26!

The Poll!

One of the things I've been investigating lately is another option for creating character body portraits. The difficulty of getting it right has kept it on the back burner thus far, but I've still been investigating possibilities when I become aware of them. I'm still going to be focusing primarily on written content over the next few months, but I thought I'd see what everyone thought of some new possibilities.

While it would be nice to get some custom art made if we can both find an artist willing to do the work and get together enough money to pay them well... the amount of variables we can reasonably represent in drawn work is low. One of the things I like about AW and several other games is the level of customization you can have over the player and NPC characters. With hand-drawn art, it's going to be very difficult to show that level of customization in the body portrait.

That's also what makes certain options appealing; some options would allow for more details to make it into the body portraits. For those who are newer to following AW, we did experiment for a while with the Dynamic Avatar Drawer. While it did allow for comparatively easy compatibility with game data, the appearance of the avatars was largely subpar.

Some of the most recent options I've explored are established character/body creation tools. Japan has developed some pretty neat tools to build your own waifu, and they have the kind of detail needed to represent a lot of body variables, while still looking pretty nice. It would still take some dedication and some technical work to make these solutions viable, but the results could be well worth the effort.

Options

I'm presenting three options for the poll. Characters created using Koikatsu (A), Honey Select (B), and BodySlide (C) as a generic option. Option (D) will be to wait for hand-drawn body portraits. My personal favorite right now is Koikatsu. I'd like to see what all of you think. Please don't base your decision on the actual body type shown, these are just some samples I threw together.

Koikatsu

This character creator has by far the most customization options. There are also numerous shading, lighting, and line options to further customize the appearance. This is a 3d model projected into a 2d drawing style. It has the advantage of having some extra mods allowing easier export and should be easier to take a layering approach with. The main downside is the anime/drawing style, which some people may not care for.

Honey Select

This character creator has a lot of customization options, though not as many as option A. It's still sufficient for our purposes. This is a rendered 3d style, which has a more realistic appearance. The lighting and skin details in this look rather nice, but it also makes a layered approach nearly impossible (meaning much larger resource size). This creator isn't as easy to export from, but it's still plenty possible. Based on the timing, there may be an improved creator in a new game release in the future.

BodySlide

This is really here for comparison purposes. However, there are a lot of different 3d modeling options to render a female body. If you choose this option, you're basically saying that you like the idea of using a rendered character for the body portrait, but you don't like option A or B. 

That's all for now. If you're a supporter, please be sure to vote!

o7

ThaumX

Downpour

When it rains, it pours.

Actually, this post image is to commemorate the nearly ten inches of rain we've gotten the last 4 days or so. The miracle of the rainy season, though to be honest I really like rainy weather except for the inconvenience factor.

It seems like there's a new time-cock in town, screwing with the game.

For those of you who are new, we started calling bugs that affect the game's time system time cocks. I honestly don't remember why; it was something to do with discord. This one seems to be pretty easy to avoid though, which is good. Basically, using the time stop cheat and going on dates (possibly multiple dates in a single day) can break time in an as-of-yet unknown way. I'd recommend avoiding that cheat--at least on days you have a date--until we get it fixed.

With that out of the way, I thought I'd mention briefly what we'll be working on this month. Basically, I'm going back to focusing more on content. I'll be writing prologue scenes and job events for the most part. Besty's going to be working on fleshing out tattoos and adding a proper tattoo parlor to the game, as well as finishing up the game's nutrition and exercise system so that the player can lose and gain weight.

As a note on that last part, the game's weight system should be fairly forgiving. Descriptions will continue to use the BMI-based scale, so changing a couple pounds up or down in a given week isn't going to do much. It'll take weeks of gaining or losing weight to change your appearance. We'll probably also create a new cheat to totally turn off changes in weight from diet and exercise.

We'll also be adding some semi-permanent NPCs to the Farm Coop, including a few hucows and a bull to make friends with. There will also be some smaller improvements, and if time, more writing for sex scenes. I did realize, too late, that I forgot to search one file of the sex scene system for assumed pronoun gender, mistakes that date back to the writer we tried hiring. I'll get that fixed as well, it basically just involves replacing he with <<he>> and minor changes like that.

I've got a (thankfully) minor cold, a welcome home gift from Guam, the land of plagues. (Having small children doesn't help, either though.) It hasn't been interfering with my work though, and I've been feeling a lot more comfortable with writing lately too. :D Besty has been suffering through a summer that's too cold, apparently, they've been having high temps of only 13C where he's at. Mother Nature doing her thing, I suppose.

That's it for now!

o7

ThaumX

The Creamy Release - Version 0.25 Change Log

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Creamy Release.

I wanted to try and make this a special release, simply because version 0.25 feels like a milestone. A good chunk of our work this month was focused on improving some of the main systems in the game that were rough around the edges. The most prominent of those being the interaction system and the sex scene system. 

The interaction system has a bunch of unique content spaced out between dozens of situational tags and several relationship levels. Unfortunately, a lack of polish in initially meeting NPCs, combined with lacking the planned ways for NPCs to approach you themselves naturally, led to the system seeming to be somewhat incomplete or shallow. So we made NPCs come to start their own conversations with you where they would occur naturally (such as coworkers and classmates). We also improved the opening text and options for sex scenes to make it work smoother.

The sex scene system is still something of a marvel in terms of what it can do, containing more than one 'first-ever' for an adult text game. However, it doesn't really matter if the system can handle orgies or do other fancy things if the basic content and polish aren't there. A lot of the things have been on my to-do list, but I figured they were things that needed to be done sooner rather than later. After all, sex is pretty important for an adult game! To that end I've written thousands upon thousands of words of new content for the system, filling out all the actions that were missing text. I even wrote nearly 3,000 words specifically for PC and NPC orgasms. I also fixed a lot of the minor bugs, parser issues, and not-quite-complete items that were lowering the quality of the scenes. Finally, I improved the action button UI to make choosing your next action faster, while also cutting the between-action loading time in half.

It's also worth noting that we set up a brand new full-featured wiki this month! Check it out here www.aw-wiki.com (we could always use awesome contributors too!)

Of course, we've got an assortment of new things for you too: tattoos, body writing, magazines, fertility seals, abduction by a serial killer, new options/actions in different areas of prostitution, and more. We also have spent more time working on fixes and improvements to try and make this release as stable and playable as possible.

Besty and I both hope you enjoy it!

Known Issues:

We fixed the autosave system (hooray!), but that means that loading an autosave from version 0.24 absolutely isn't going to work.

There is a very strange issue that has seemed to cause certain prologue flags to be flipped when loading an older save using backward compatibility. It doesn't occur all the time, and we haven't been able to reliably isolate the issue enough to fix it. If it does occur upon you loading a save, we've added some code to sleeping overnight that should put the main flags back to the correct place. This issue doesn't affect saves from 0.25

Change Log

Words: 1,895,265 (Only 2.9% are "fuck"!)

Characters: 11,292,539

Lines O' Code: 179,992

[Note] My head is killing me, and thanks to some extra day job work and a sick son, I'm running behind on getting this change log (and release) done. This list of changes may be a little derpy.

• Lot of new writing for the sex scene system.
• Actions all have appropriate text, new writing is more variable-responsive
• Almost 3K words of text for orgasms in different positions/situations/etc.
• After-scene actions now all have text content associated with them.
• Numerous fixes to parser-related issues.
• Many malformatted parser calls have been fixed, particularly in sex scenes
• several parser functions adjusted/improved
• Many of the sillier nouns have had their weights reduced or been removed altogether.
• Some new macros to speed writing certain things.
• Some parser errors caused by UglifyJS fixed
• New and Improved Sex Scene actions.
• The player can now request NPC to cum inside or pull out. 
• The player can now use their own condoms when requesting a condom in sex scenes. (use of sabotaged condoms is still pending because I just forgot about them...)
• Actions to remove a condom, and NPC actions to wear one or remove it have been improved.
• Several minor fixes.
• Bug affecting the ability to change sex position has been fixed.
• General Sex Scene Improvements
• NPCs can now pull out (or try and fail to pull out) when having sex.
• Condom break function improved and now accounts for the bitch-breaker mutation.
• New faster action button menu that requires only 1 click per action.
• The transition time between actions cut down by 50%!
• Several new position diagrams illustrating the current sex position.
• loads of minor fixes.
• Cum now feeds cum or creampie addiction.
• Characters that know about your Vaginal Enzymes mutation won't try to wear a condom.
• New insemination and cum-handling methods in the character Pussy class.
• Improved semen handling in the fertility system.
• Two new images for the paper doll illustration (panties)
• Makeup can now be done at salons, allowing you to learn new styles.
• The player can now be scarred (think like tattoos, scarification) though this system is not 100% tested.
• Several fixes to hangouts and dates
• The Progenerate Fertility Seal is now available
• Purchase from the doctor in the medical district.
• Allows you to view additional fertility information with higher accuracy.
• Several new prostitution scenes.
• includes body writing, bareback, and anal sex scenes.
• Body Writing is now a thing, and you can have your body written on with a marker.
• Tattoos are now a thing, and you can get all sorts of fun tattoos.
• Tattoos will be easy to mod, possibly with custom tattoo system similar to the custom clothes tool in the game. (you can already get custom writing though.)
• Tattoos can be obtained at the Penetrated Piercing Parlor in the mall until a suitable tattoo parlor is opened.
• Tattoos can be removed in the medical district if you want.
• View details about your tattoos in the grooming menu.
• You can see an overview of your tattoos in the character menu.
• NPCs in interactions can now comment on tattoos and body writing.
• Tattoos affect attractiveness, based on NPC.
• General improvements to the medical district doctor's office.
• Character menu status page has been improved with some additional information and reorganization.
• Fertility information now split between the basics and having advanced fertility information (currently only from the fertility seal tattoo).
• You can now see your current "effective" willpower (0 to 20 scale).
• Four new magazines with interesting descriptions, text, and effects are available for purchase from Cum & Go.
• Cum & Go now has a new clerk named Daisy Blackwell who is happy to see you.
• Some new minor items including some beers and snacks purchasable at cum and go.
• Interaction System improvements.
• NPCs will now come up to talk to you (coworkers and classmates).
• Improved options for starting a conversation with a stranger.
• Conversations more accessible in general.
• The autosave system is now fixed.
• Besty says "It must work now!"
• Player now properly resumes play after work from the correct position on the map.
• Travel time to work is now accurate for the job location (jobs inside Appletree will be quicker to get to).
• New Serial killer Event!
• Serial killer portrait by me, he's pretty damned creepy.
• The event includes abduction, potential escape, and other twists and turns I don't know about because Besty wrote it ;)
• General proofreading and typo fixes. (Big thanks to everyone Besty got to proofread for him!)
• Tweak to the difficulty of gaining skill points, it is now somewhat easier for a skill to level up.
• Fix to a bug with schools that caused skill gain from taking lessons to be significantly less (rather than more) common.
• Fix to Lily's starting relationship values.
• WTF accomplished (Besty)
• Fix to a few location images that were too short.
• Lots of general fixes to minor or issues and typos.
• Several transformative fixes
• fixes to some conversation tags
• fixes to the body condition system
• new "super.die" function related to omni items that just won't die.
• SSTD fix
• fix to appletree shuttle busses
• icon fixes.
• fixes for jonesing and addiction
• fixes to minor items found in the residential area.
• removal of old placeholder buttons and obsolete buttons.
• maid sex fix
• etc. etc. etc.
• New/Improved maid sex event
• [Reserved for that thing I forgot]

Home at Last!

Hello everyone, it has been a while, hasn't it?

Now that my home leave is over and I'm back on Guam, things can finally get back to normal again. I enjoyed seeing my family again after two years, but I did start to miss having my own bed or a quiet place to work. Now that I'm back, I suppose it's a good time to share some of the things we've been working on for our next release. :D 

We've been working on some fundamentals, for the most part. Improving access to existing conversational content, for example. We also have NPCs from work and school start the occasional conversation with you, rather than requiring you to talk to random strangers on the street to meet people. I've been working on establishing a more responsive action menu in sex scenes and expanding/improving the content there. These changes should make a noticeable difference in playability.

I've also wanted to focus a little on the community options. For some time now we have basically only had the discord server, which I believe can be somewhat limited in terms of making information available, collaborating, and providing feedback. It's difficult to do things like share mods or request proofreading and things like that. It also is a royal pain to find already answered questions there as well. To make up for that, I figured it's time to expand some of the options we have available. 

First we have a new forum which you can visit here. There are boards set up for sharing mods, collaborating on writing submissions, and more. I think it should also be a little easier to share negative feedback there as well, and that's important because it's not always obvious what we need to work on improving.

The other item we've created is a proper wiki, www.aw-wiki.com to help share information about the game. It's brand-new, so there isn't much there at the moment, but we'll try to get it started with some basic information. There's a limit to what the in-game encyclopedia can do in terms of sharing information, so having a proper wiki should be helpful for new players. With some help from volunteers, we can even have a lot of useful information available like door codes or the effects of different transformatives.

That's about all I've got for now, so I'll get back to work!

Thanks for your support!

ThaumX

The Working Girl Release

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Working Girl Release (version 0.24.0) of Accidental Woman! 

This has been a challenging month for the dev team, so we've spent the last couple days working furiously to get things ready to go. As for a brief update on the recent craziness, my wife is now out of the hospital. She was released on the 4th, which I think is somewhat apropos. Besty has laid his grandfather to rest; while I believe they were prepared for his death, it's always sad to lose a family member.

What's New in Version 24?

This release focuses primarily on prostitution, as far as content goes. There are three different varieties for you to explore. You can take a job at Fairy Tail, a massage parlor located in the adult district. It's a full job that can be lucrative, particularly in the early game. It has several events and happenings to experience as you master the art of the 'happy ending'. You can also become a member of the secret escort service run by The Oldest Profession school, located downtown. Sign up for a class there if you're interested. You can build a reputation as a high-quality prostitute by servicing clients. Finally, you can strut your stuff on a few different "street corners" as a freelance prostitute. There's more danger involved, but the potential reward is higher too. These last two can be done in addition to holding down a normal job if you can manage it.

There was also a good amount of 'Quality of Life' work done with bug fixes and balance improvements, and some system expansions such as enabling female NPC pregnancy and male cum regeneration. We also did some minor things here and there like a new gloryhole sex scene at the Shake & Pop club.

Known Issues:

Right now there seems to be a problem with the backward compatibility system. It uses a rather complex recursive function to apply save data values to an up-to-date data structure, making sure that any new variables have their default value (without requiring us to remember them!). For some reason, this seems to be giving problems with the game flags data. (perhaps one of us added a faulty data structure in there at some point...) It's a difficult error to isolate, so for this release, I've limited save loading to version 0.24 only. Sorry about the inconvenience!

It is possible to corrupt one or more save slots in the game. I've been unable to properly replicate this, but suspect that the issue is related to an interrupted save process. This may be closing the tab before saving is complete, or possibly even switching tabs during a save. If a save slot becomes corrupted, you will experience an error when trying to save to that slot. (This can also happen to the autosave slot, which will cause an error on the sleep screen.) To fix corrupted save slots, use the "Delete All" button on the game save menu, or use the Save Wipe function from the game settings menu (remember to back up saves you wish to keep first).

Changelog

Words:          1,856,394          Characters:     10,967,088

Code:            177,815 Lines O' Code

• New Job at the Fairy Tail Massage Parlor in the adult district downtown.
• Can be accessed from the R.A.P.E.S. Office at the town hall.
• Has several events including some multiple-path sexy-times (F-M & F-F).
• You can now join the Oldest Profession escort club to work as a fancy prostitute with known clients and protection.
• Sign up for a class at the Oldest Profession school to join the club.
• Make money and build your fame as a high-class prostitute.
• Be a street prostitute by working the corner in various locations in Appletree.
• Set your own prices and service clients to make money quick.
• Being a street prostitute has its share of risks, including the cops and psychos.
• Having a higher prostitution skill will help you mitigate risks!
• There are currently four locations you can whore yourself, including the club district downtown, and even the bullseye parking lot.
• New Emoji added (doom guy).
• Body liquids & splatter fixed so that you can properly make a mess of yourself.
• Multiple-path event added to the gloryhole in the Shake & Pop dance club.
• Some minor improvements to existing scenes.
• Sex scene with options to request pull out, ask to wear a condom, use your own condom, and more, with some special endings.
• The scene can restore satisfaction, and other perks depending on your character.
• Creampies can get you pregnant with a stranger's baby.
• Implemented curves to key status variables such as happiness and satisfaction.
• Curves make extreme values (very high or low) more difficult to reach by altering the value of the input in those ranges.
• Basically makes status values a little more forgiving.
• Created a new condom break function that can be used outside the sex system to allow full use of in-game condoms.
• Created new methods in the character fertility class making use easier.
• orgasm cum extraction.
• Insemination.
• refractory regeneration.
• creampie (with multiple depth/spread options).
• Male NPCs now track available sperm when orgasming, and cum will 'peter out' after multiple ejaculations depending on individual NPC.
• NPCs with testicles now regenerate cum nightly.
• Virile and MegaNuts mutations now directly affect sperm quantity.
• Added bitch-breaker mutation to calculations for condom break chance.
• Improved the Cum Class constructor for ease of use.
• Female NPCs now have active menstrual cycles.
• Female NPCs will have a period and ovulate according to their fertility data
• Female NPCs can now become pregnant and give birth using the AW fertility system.
• Valid semen in the correct orifice at the right time of the month will set this off.
• A small number of NPCs will still 'start off' pregnant in procedural generation.
• A new Content Caution message appears on the new game page.
• Informs players about the need to explore to find new things in the game.
• Fixed the issue causing time not to pass properly when working.
• Adjusted the starting cleanliness of the player apartment.
• Requires less work to get spotless when starting.
• Cleaner apartment results in smaller happiness impact from an empty & dirty apartment for new players.
• Corner UI status bars now show happiness, while health and energy bars alternate.
• Hopefully increases awareness of depression so players are less likely to let their character get suicidal.
• Changed player home foyer action buttons, removed old defunct buttons.
• Added diaphragm status icon so that players are aware that they are wearing a diaphragm and remember to take it out. (considering a quick-action button for this)
• Several minor balance adjustments, particularly to happiness and stat changes during sleep.
• PC status should now be more controllable with fewer drastic changes.
• Added new "Road to Muschi Valley" Image to the game prologues.
• New Fairy Tail ad will appear in the "read something" action in your home living room.
• Some minor fixes and improvements to game cheats, particularly to status cheats.
• Current Credits cheat now has a larger increase/decrease value option
• Added the Escape Hatch system to the game.
• Intended to circumvent certain game-breaking bugs where the player reaches a screen with no way to continue.
• There is an escape hatch button at the bottom right of the screen that should almost always be visible.
• Executes different escapes based on the area of the game you're in to make it as safe as possible.
• Numerous bug fixes and minor improvements to the game.
• New options for starting hair length.
• New "Save Wipe" button in game menu in case player somehow corrupts all their game slots.
• The process to actually corrupt a save slot is unknown but is suspected to involve not letting a save finish properly
• Fixes to date and hangout scheduling code to fix unreported bug preventing players from properly scheduling these events (two different bugs).

German Healthcare

Hello everyone, I'm afraid that this weekend hasn't been the best for the AW development team. It started out really well, I had a productive in-person meeting with Besty on Friday. We discussed the next few months of development, shared some ideas to help with development, and generally accomplished all that business-type stuff. Then on Friday night, we did some drinking, of course.

Saturday night, however, my wife had a stroke. This is the first chunk of time I've really had to write anything since then (it's currently Monday afternoon here). She'll be hospitalized for the next week, but she seems to be doing better than she was. The biggest concern right now is that there are still blood clots that could break off and cause another stroke, heart attack, or some other problem. The hospital will be doing a full-body MRI to look for the source of the thrombosis (clot), and a special heart sonogram from inside the stomach (apparently they do this by sticking things down the esophagus). 

We have to extend our brief stay in Germany, we were originally supposed to fly back to the States tomorrow morning. Luckily we're staying with my in-laws so we have some help. The biggest issue will be rescheduling our flight, as availability seems limited thanks to the summer and associated vacations. Fortunately, we are able to get some military travel discounts so it won't cost an arm and a leg.

Besty had his own family emergency on Sunday after returning to Russia. I don't want to share his family business without permission, but Besty himself is healthy so you don't need to worry.

We have the release coming up in 3 days. We were on schedule for releasing before all this happened, but with all the uncertainty there's a good chance we may end up pushing the release back a day or two. Sorry about that! 

Thanks for your support, it means so much to us.

ThaumX

Fun Fact - German hospitals don't have air conditioning, so my wife's room in the stroke unit was 33 degrees Celsius (91 F) on Sunday.

Fun Fact: Part Deux - The post image this time features the outside of my wife's hospital room, though I did add in a German nurse.