Hello and welcome back to another installment of me producing walls of test for recreational purposes. I know I’m later than usual, but I hope it’s worth it nevertheless. Also, there was less interaction under my last public release, than I would have expected, which means there were no major problems, except for a surprisingly large amount of people, who all of a sudden had issues with Funkelregen’s affection threshold from all the way back in V0.3. Therefore this post will mostly be me rambling about what’s coming soon:

Preview 0.9

As I have predicted last time, the next update will be a big one – in fact, it’s the biggest one I’ve ever attempted and it’s going to rival the initial release of V0.1. In total, we have 5400 lines of pure text. For comparison, V0.8 and V0.6 each had about 4000 lines and V0.7 and V0.5 had about 3300 lines. Among these are 2228 LI lines and that’s not even counting Sara (255), Liseria (288), Cathy (88) or other side characters.

In V0.7 I reintroduced Annica and declared her a full LI, just so I could bench her for one and a half updates. Therefore I planned to give Annica the spotlight in V0.8… until my semi-alphabetical event list reached “Z” and then Zoela did Zoela things and now she’s number one as usual… Ladira, Pirlia, Sarlé and Sabrina take a middle ground, while Rachel, Saefia and Lin take a little bit of a back seat. But please remember, that just 5 % would have meant much more in another update. Every LI gets at least a 2 step arc in here – although they are relatively short in Lin’s case. Also since this is going to be a big update, we are going to have a total of 5 sex scenes – 3 major ones and 2 shorter, smaller ones.

Needlessly to say, this update will take some time… maybe it could be worth investing a little bit in a beta version to bridge the long wait (yes, I’m biased in that regard…). Simply by the fact, that this post here is 2.5 weeks late and not a single render for V0.9 has been made yet, you can guess, that I’m severely behind schedule and my usual 3-month update rhythm won’t hold. Expect the first beta somewhere in June and the full release will probably happen in August or September…

As you know, I always want to make a new feature/have a new programming challenge every update. Since the time-travel bullshit is now starting to kick off, I want to give you the chance to change the past a little bit i.e. a possibility to redeem wrong choices and lost affection points.

But the big problem with this is, that I didn’t build the necessary infrastructure for this in the first place. Therefore I will have to uproot the programming infrastructure, that governs the game’s progress. Practically for you, this means saves from V0.8 and earlier won’t work anymore. Don’t worry, I’ll supply you with save games, so you don’t have to restart the whole game.

And since I’m about to operate on the game’s backbone, now could be the time to change some things, that determine the progress of the game. For example, during making and testing the gallery, I managed to “sequence break” the game, until the gallery looked like this:

Maybe I will add some cross-dependencies for Sabrina or Saefia inside the drinking quest line… But if you think, there are some other quest lines with an odd pacing or something like that, please let me know – after all, I am forced to think update by update…

Preview 0.10

Now you know, what a “mega-update” looks like… But if you remember the last dev-diary you also know that I wanted to try more focused updates in the future, where I don’t try to give every LI approximately equal attention, but instead I will focus on only a few LIs. But remember, I just finished V0.9’s texts a few days ago. Everything I’ll say here is this chapter is either a very rough sketch or an estimation:

As the antithesis to V0.8, Lin is most certainly going to become the main character in V0.9. I have 2 combat-focused main events planned as well as a date with the Red Tempest. Although as you can probably guess, Lin’s understanding of a date isn’t a boring fancy eating with a happy end. Instead the “date” will contain the lines “I’m so thirsty!”, “Be careful, gunpowder weapons have a lot more recoil than plasma weapons.” and “I’m sure we can find some handcuffs around here…”

Furthermore, Saefia, Pirlia and Sarlé are probably going to be second after Lin and they are the contenders for further sex scenes. Annica, Ladira, and Zoela will play a smaller role – maybe 1 or at most 2 not directly sexual events. And at last, Sabrina and Rachel will probably get no events of their own and will only be present in the background at group events. Also: Yes, the enumeration of the LIs here is on purpose and represents an estimation of the amount of lines they will receive in V0.10.

Polls

Now it’s time for the poll analysis:

This time, I’m a little disappointed about the relatively low amount of votes, even if you factor in the extended time. Therefore, I’m going to include the Patreon vote as well, since it’s not insignificant this time:

After combining both polls:

I guess nobody is surprised, who made the last place… Annica is barely a character at the moment – although being officially a LI, she gets even outclassed by side characters like Funkelregen or Sara in her main incarnation alone. As you can see above I’m trying to fix that in the future…

The next lowest are the two big girls. I guess nobody is surprised again, that Pirlia is this low – we’ve talked long about Pirlia and her rather one-dimensional brand of femdom in previous dev-logs. It’s also rather easy to see, why Ladira is this low on the list – she has barely any story of her own. Either she throws a giant lore dumb at you, plays second fiddle in another character’s story or has some rather disconnected sex scenes. Also, Annica, Ladira and Pirlia have the lowest amount of Lines among the Lis:

The next lowest in the polls is Lin. Considering all the comments I got because of the femdom LIs, I expected the (currently) primary maledom LI to be higher on the list…

Sabrina and Saefia are in a healthy middle ground and I don’t have much to say about them, except that I’m not really sure how Saefia ended up so high… She has the third lowest amount of lines among the 8 main line LIs and I’d consider her a rather one-dimensional character at the moment. But this one dimension, on the other hand, is the most important one for an AVN and on top she’s the smallest LI.

And then we have our big 3: I’m glad, that Zoela is still this high on the list – same as for Sarlé our slender snow bunny. I’m guessing Sarlé’s appeal is still some echo from her very good scene/event back in V0.7. On F95 you could clearly see, that during the first day, it was pretty much a race between Saefia and Sarlé, who both got a scene in V0.7. Then overnight, Rachel easily took the pole position, as the memory from the old version faded and so the only main character with a sex scene won the poll. And on top, how could you not like little Rachel?

Since I’ve already asked this question a year ago, we can also take a look at how the opinions about the LIs shifted. Here are the results from a year ago (V0.4):

And now we can have a look at the changes:

First, the obvious losers: I had about a year of time and seemingly didn’t do much out of Annica and the two Veludra hence their drops. Saefia also has a medium drop, which I attribute to her having fewer lines compared to the others – in fact, she had the most lines back in V0.4. Zoela also had a drop, but she fell from a high horse, so it didn’t affect her much. The reason for the drop is most certainly, that Zoela had the longest and (on a craftsmanship level) best sex scene at that point in time and hadn’t had a major scene since.

The only LI, that remained roughly similar is Lintar. Actually, I expected her to increase, since I focused in the last year on her opening up and showing cracks in her tough persona. Also, I guess we’ve already discussed the reasons for Sarlé’s increase above.

The biggest gainer of them all is Sabrina - she gains a total of 5.5 %. I’m pretty sure this is because she (finally) got a sex scene since a year ago and she had the most lines as well as an emotional story arc in the latest update. Also, Rachel made a big jump since last year, which again is mostly based on her having the latest sex scene and simply being a cutie…

So all in all, we were pretty balanced last year and shifted to extremes this time. The “bad” LIs dropped further, while the “good” LIs gained, as a general trend. Furthermore, endorsement and overall line count can roughly be correlated and lastly, the sex scenes of the latest update heavily influences the poll result.

Cerser’s Moan

The quest line Cerser’s Moan is soon coming to its conclusion. As most of you have guessed, the climax of this story will be about how this chemical gets into the ship’s ventilation systems with the help of a certain voyeuristic AI. Now you have 10 to 12 people horny and completely drugged out by the Horny Gas. So what do you do with them?

My original idea was, that this event would be an opportunity to have Sara jumping on your cock. But since Patreon started mercilessly enforcing its content policy last year, the incest idea went to the scrap heap. But in the meantime, I couldn’t come up with a satisfying replacement idea…

So, what do we do?

First, the obvious answer would be a complete fuck fest and basically a giant 10-some without major story consequences… That would most certainly mean a lot of work, but I’m sure I’ll manage it – most certainly I’ll bridge some gaps with HS-stock animations…

But instead of a group event, the main dish could be fun with a single girl. Ladira, Pirlia, Sabrina, (Minerva) as well as Lin in armor could easily drag the MC into their cave and Sarlé (and Minerva) could do the same thing mentally. I know, it can be frustrating to give the climax of a quest, which almost entirely centers around Ladira, to someone else, but I want to save Ladira’s (and the other virgins’) first time for another time.

A prime contender to get the climax in this situation is Annica. She fulfills the archetype of the “childhood-sweetheard” and she is the late joiner among the LIs. We could give her a usual (slow-burn) arc with the standard LI progression and escalation in sexual acts. This would also mean, that Annica would always limp behind the main line LIs in terms of her (sexual) relationship.

On the other side, we could quickly bring Anni up to speed – an event, that “forces” the MC and Annica to have sex and afterward they realize the attraction between them, which catalyzes the sexual part of their relationship… so forth and so forth. Also, if you don’t want to “waste” Cerser’s moan on Annica, I have one or two other of those catalysts in mind…

And I guess, this is one of the events, where we simply ignore the tentacle monster in the basement…

Showers

I think I’ve mentioned it before in another dev-diary, but I planned to tie the gallery to an in-universe explanation i.e. to the paranormal abilities of the MC. And as you probably know, it took me until the end of V0.8 until the MC gets blasted in the face with the time-travel-goo. Until that point, the showers were supposed to be a “soft” gallery. After you talked me into (already) making a gallery for the current version and since the wibbly-wobbly timey-whymy stuff is really starting in the next update, it is time to talk about the showers…

First, the most basic question: Do you think, it is necessary to continue the shower scenes? To me personally, it feels now like a chore or an afterthought to make the shower scenes. They are almost exclusively an inferior rehash of an existing scene, that you could find in the gallery. In the showers, the masturbation animations are HS stock animations and only three animations (Rachel thigh job, Pirlia cunnilingus and Zoela handjob) are unique animations, that are not directly sourced from the main scenes. Every other animation in the shower is copy-pasted from the corresponding main event with simply a swapped background and the wetness slider is pushed to max. So to say it bluntly, why would you visit the showers, if you have the same animation but longer and better in the gallery? Or maybe you like the utility of the “give me a random short sex scene”-button but maybe I should put a little bit more effort into it… For example, the next edging scene with Zoela will be hard to transcribe into the shower with just one background-swapped animation.

Also, the sorting algorithm, that determines which scene is actually played, is coming to its limits, but restructuring it is mostly my problem… maybe I scrap the affection dependencies…

Furthermore, I’m thinking about removing the first layer of randomness, that determines, which LI you encounter. At the moment, whenever you enter the showers, there’s an eight (or nine) sided dice, that determines randomly, which LI you encounter in the shower with no correlation to what the LIs are actually doing. I’m also certain, that many of you walk past this little room on the minimap for hours without knowing, that this room spits naughty scenes. Maybe one LI at the time could (randomly or periodically) break out of her day cycle and go to the showers. So you would know, who to encounter there and that you will find someone there in the first place.

Breakfast

At the moment, the breakfast events are quite linear. For example, here is the algorithm, that determines which event is played for the Veludra:

As you can see, the primary factor is the variable “cafeteria_veludra”, which counts up every time, you finish a breakfast event for the big girls. Additionally, there are also some cross-dependencies with other events. For example, event number 5 is dependent on pirlia_gym_2. In almost every dev-diary I have been able to empirically demonstrate, that Pirlia is one of the most disliked LIs and I’ve got players who vowed to ignore her and her events as much as possible. These people would have their progress frozen at breakfast event number 5.

One idea to rework the breakfast algorithms would be to change them from a linear progression to simply “Give me the earliest event, for which I have the requirements”. This would help with stuck progressions, which could also occur from Sara or other characters not being permanently on the ship. On the other side, the non-linear approach would mean, you’d run out of breakfast events more quickly if you don’t play update to update.

Animations

When making the gallery for the current update, I had to go through some of my older scenes and animations… Especially during V0.5 and V0.6 I really felt like the animations were quite bad. I gave myself way too little time and rushed the animations and I think it shows…

Therefore, I want to focus more on quality than quantity in the next updates. First, I will reduce the average number of animations. The main scenes in V0.9 will therefore have 4 animations per scene with the exception of Zoela… this girl can apparently not be satisfied with average numbers…

I think, head movement and face articulation (as best seen in the 4 intercourse animations with Judy or the last one with Rachel) are going to stay permanently. Also, I want to incorporate more variations within the animation and refine my style in other ways as well…

Keywords

Congratulations, you successfully fought through my wall of text and probably already forgot the start of it. So here are the main keywords, I’d like to have your opinion on. Of course, you may comment on anything else:

• Weird pacing or other suggestions while reworking the progression system
• What to do during the climax of Cerser’s Moan
• Annica: Slow-burn ↔ bring her up to speed
• Thoughts on the showers
• Breakfast: Linear ↔ earliest possible event