Another release and as it’s tradition, it’s now time for me to unload my spare thoughts on the state of the game:

Minimap / Questlog update:

One of the more common complaints I got was about the fundamental gameplay loop. Basically, you look into the quest log, advance the time to the given point, do your event – and repeat… To ease this problem, the newest version possesses an “event signifier” i.e. the hearts in the girls’ portraits. I guess, this system is very helpful and will nullify this complaint – even I became scarily dependent on this feature during testing...

But this system isn’t perfect yet…

First of all, there are probably still a few bugs hidden inside of that system (although none have been found at the moment) and second, this system only cares about events activated by interacting with a girl. That means events started by entering certain locations, interacting with the galaxy map as well as events with Voice aren’t captured by this system. In other words, when in doubt: Trust the quest log…

One of the limiting factors for this problem complex is a “mistake” in the coding infrastructure of the minimap from my side. For those who understand RenPy: At the moment, the minimap is an image map, with the portraits as additional image buttons on top. My plan now is to convert the minimap into a combination of image buttons as well – just like the galaxy map.

That means I will have the ability to individually target certain rooms and highlight them when an event is about to take place there. Additionally, the ship will have some changes in the room layout, so the change in the underlying coding structure is helpful as well. Furthermore, I’ll add portraits/hotspots on the minimap for Voice in the MC’s cabin as well as for the galaxy map. I think that should cover every possible event in the game…

A new feature, that also saw the light of day last week, is the reworked quest log. Most of my reworks were just “beautification” of the old concepts, while the new feature itself is positioned in the top right corner. This table highlights which character will play a major role in the quest line.

I know, this “feature” is probably of very limited use… But I just woke up one day and wanted to make this feature… Probably the only people, who will get a good use out of this feature, are those who want to ignore certain LIs…

Additionally, I could add further functionality to this table and make them clickable, so you can get teleported to a LI from the quest log.     

Since (almost) no one complained or even mentioned the UI changes, I assume everything works and looks fine.

Lin‘s Cabin:

I have to admit, I haven’t done much with the possibility to enter the girl’s cabins and since this feature’s implementation, I haven’t even opened up further cabins. But as you can probably tell from the title of this chapter, this is going to change soon…

As you might have guessed, Lintar is the next one, who will grant the MC access to her sanctum. But Lin is kind of a special case… I hope I got her characterization to a point, where she appears to be quite uptight/frigid in public, but you know she can be quite kinky behind closed doors, which will be of course important in her room…

My plan for her cabin is that every time you try to enter it, there’s a 50%, that basically nothing happens and you enter the cabin as you would any other cabin, while the 50% will turn into something spicy.

You would catch Lin dressed up in one of her (fetish) outfits posing in front of her mirror basically for herself. As soon as the MC walks in she models her current outfit for him. At this point, the available outfits for this will be the lace set she wore during one step in the quest “All the way Down” as the base-line outfit and the latex pants as well as the maid dress as soon as their requirements are met. In the future, I’ll probably add some scenarios including self-bondage gone wrong, but that’s probably a long road to go… (ETA version 0.11)

I also want to limit the scope of these interactions. They will probably be only 5 to 10 lines long and will not feature any intercourse, since these random events could get annoying if you need to visit Lin in her cabin for story reasons. But in the end, I want to know, what do you think about this kind of approach...

Reworks

As I have mentioned in the last dev diary, the next scenes I want to rework are the Pirlia x MC scene from version 0.2 as well as Rachel’s thighjob and Pirlia’s cunnilingus in the shower.

Apart from them, I’m almost running out of scenes, that are in need of a rework. So if you think, there’s another scene in the game, where you think I could do a better job by now, please let me know.

Additionally, I’ve already shown in the prelude to version 0.4, that I’m willing to not only rework graphics but also story bits if necessary. So if you think, there’s a scene/event messing up a story/character development, you can let me know – I guess this will mostly become necessary when discussing the following part:

Poll Analysis

First of all, thank you all for your contribution to helping me to make the game better! Second, here’s the final result of the previous poll about your favorite LI. I’ll reference it in the next paragraphs:

Next, we have the poll from this update asking, who’s your least favorite LI? First of all, there’s a lower participation this time around. Although a higher voter turnout would be nice, I have to give a big shout-out to everyone who abstained, because he couldn’t pick a favorite. I see that as a huge compliment! Anyway, here is the poll result from this time as seen on f95:

First, the obvious ones: Rachel has the lowest result with just 5.2%, which isn’t very surprising to me. Second, Annica is quite high on the poll. After all, Annica isn’t a real LI (yet), has only one sex scene and about 20% the lines of a full LI.

Next, there are Ladira, Lin, Sabrina, and Sarlé. Those four are quite low in this poll and are more or less in sync with the old poll. Therefore I don’t see the need to change something about them or to discuss them lengthily (I anyway wouldn’t have much to say about them…). The only thing that surprised me was how well Sarlé performed in both polls… I don’t have a good explanation for that at the moment...

Next are the two Illabs. What’s interesting about them is the fact, that they performed very well in both polls, meaning there’s a large group of people liking them as well as another group, that strongly dislikes them, thus changing too much about them, would always anger at least one group. Therefore, I’m not going to change much about them, since the favorites outweigh the negatives percentage-wise. One guess for this dichotomy could be their loli-ish appearance, that’s either hit or miss for most people.

But to go into more detail, the dislike of Saefia is probably rooted in her (way too) sex-positive character, where you have to fear she’s going to cheat, the moment you lose sight of her. I’ve already tuned down the very NTR-ish aspects of her, but some still take some offense to her. We will talk lengthy about where to go with her in the long term in the next dev diary or in the one after that.

Also, let’s talk a little bit about Zoela. She ruled the last poll with almost 20% but also came in second this time. Additionally, to the point mentioned above, a reason for the high disliking could be the general disliking of femdom, although my guess is that that’s also the main source of her popularity…

But in regards to Zoela’s femdom and her scene in particular, I think I made a mistake. In principle, D/s relationships should be predicated on trust, yet at this point in the story, Zoela is certainly the least trustworthy of the LIs. Even her whole scene is basically a distraction and after that, she “forgets” the MC.

Since Zoela’s monopoly on main quests is basically broken at the current point, I can now focus more on developing her relationship and hopefully, the next scene with her will be more consensual/trustworthy. Additionally, since Zoela is an Illab after all, she’s physically powerless against the MC. So I imagine that in future scenes with her (ETA V0.7 / V0.8) the MC might be allowed to quite literally flip her over, instead of continuing to endure her “torture”.

Okay… now let’s talk about the big blue elephant in the room… With 20%+ Pirlia is undeniably the least favorite LI. There could again be a couple of reasons: First, again a general disliking of femdom or muscle girls. Additionally, Pirlia is the most alien LI, which is the most distant from the average human.

But these three points fall all under “it’s not my cup of tea” and I think they are not enough to explain this break out toward 20%+, so there have to be other factors, for whom only I am to blame. There could be her at times quite rude character as well as her rather underdeveloped character. Whatever it may be, that makes you dislike Pirlia, please tell me. Also, I’d very much appreciate, it if you also have any proposals, that don’t fundamentally change Pirlia’s concept.

All in all, I’m pretty pleased with the result of this poll with the exception of Pirlia. All are quite tight together and except Pirlia, there are no big deviations. Also, if you feel like I butchered your reason for your disliking, please let me know.

Music

I have to admit, especially during the beginning of the game, I didn’t carefully select the music I put in my game. Therefore there are many pieces of music, that can be a bit jarring/annoying/misfitting. Examples of that are Lin, Pirlia, Sabrina as well as Annica and Adrian’s (main) themes, just to name a few…

Additionally, for sex scenes, there are (with 3 exceptions) only 3 pieces of music in the entire game. I certainly need to change something on that front. The optimal is of course to have one theme for each scene, but it will probably end up being one sex theme per LI.

In other words, for version 0.6 I will once again go through the whole game and have a look at all the different audio files, adding tracks and changing misfitting ones. This is also the point, where you should speak up, if there’s a theme, that’s grinding your gears and you wish to be gone.    

Preview / Progress Report:

As per usual, all the texts for version 0.6 are already written and ready to be filled with renders and animations:

I’m quite pleased with this distribution, although Sabrina is a little bit low on lines…

This update will start with a medium-sized linear part, which will start where the last update ended. This linear part will start with my first try at a mini-game i.e. a turn-based playable space combat, on which I am currently working, but more to that on another day…

Additionally, the second half of this linear part will also already contain the obligatory beach day episode:

After that, normal on-the-ship free-roam will continue. As you can see, the update is also on the large side of things, with 1500+ LI lines. It will also contain 5 sex scenes, so buckle up!

You’ve probably realized, that there aren’t many pictures / concrete preview pictures this time around. Also, I have to disappoint you, by telling you I haven’t completed much for the next update. This update is going to be bigger and probably more complex than the last ones. Also, I have more other stuff to do, so can’t concentrate as much on the game as I’d like to.

I’d estimate, that the first beta will be released somewhere in July and the full release is going to start somewhere in maybe September. These are baseless estimations at the moment...  

Keywords:

All in all, I’m pretty happy with the current update and I haven’t gotten much meaningful/usable criticism this time. But if you want to help make the game better regardless, here are the talking points from this post, I’d like to have your opinion on:

• Thoughts on the minimap/quest log rewords
• Thoughts on Lin’s cabin
• Further candidates for reworks
• Reasons for disliking Pirlia
• Disagreements for my reasoning of the poll results
• Music themes, that you want to be gone

I hope you like this dev log and I hope you’ll tune in again in a few days...