Ginny art provided by the fabulous Adjatha!

It’s been a hot little minute, and let me start of by saying clearly that Azra’s quest isn’t quite ready yet – but it is baking to a nice golden brown in the code furnace at this very minute. I’d estimate it’s about half-cooked, depending on how long the finishing glaze takes.

In plainer terms, a few roadblocks have slowed me down. The most recent example? There’s an optional battle at the expedition’s midpoint with a trio of cockvines that seemed conceptually simple to implement – until I actually started trying to wire it up. They weren’t set up to properly handle multi-target battles at all, let alone having multiple cockvines on the field, each with their own progressive grappling actions going on, each dumping huge spammy attacks that were often three paragraphs long. Before I did anything else, I had to go through and convert all the:

"You dodge a tentacle." 
to 
"${StringUtil.capitalize(target.getCombatName(), false)} dodge
${target.isPlayer() || target.isPlural ? '':'s'} a tentacle."

Then the hidden grapple stage statuses needed reworked to directly tie back to their points of origin and their target selection reworked to stay locked onto partially grappled targets. As I was working through it, I made numerous tweaks to reveal more of the hidden status effects to the player and improve the combat flow of the encounter. In short: cockvines had basically every part of their fight reworked to run cleaner, more logically, and format better over two days. And then I wrote shorter versions of their attack texts to keep a fight with that many bodies in it legible.

I lost another two days of potential coding to having my house’s air-conditioner replaced – the unit is in the closet just outside my office, so I wasn’t really able to smut around at my smut-minting station as I normally would. Instead I wound catching a hit of inspiration and blocked out about three pages of outline for a possible fourth Azra expedition set on the twilight cyberpunk world of Dhaal from my laptop. I can’t promise that it will come with any direct rapidity, but it’s a big leap forward from being so idea-blocked that Skom had to come in to design and write the quest (as he did for Myrellion’s expedition). I can say that I’m really happy with what I have planned for it already, as heist missions are always a treat in any game!

There was also a little side adventure into improving our blackjack user experience with Jacques00’s help (he did all the real work!), but I’ll let the improved experience speak for itself. For now I’m gunning to have Azra quest drop in the coming week.

0.9.159 Changelog:

• Known Bug: The player character portrait doesn’t seem to be updating correctly in all cases, Jacques00 is aware. I’ll hotfix when I have a solution handy.
• [Backer Exclusive] New Dhaal Encounter: Ginny, the short, stacked XO! She’s more common in the southern Stacks, but she’ll pop up in the Gyre at times as well. Written by Magenta Needle, she was implemented by Leek with a small touch-up pass to some of her combat effects by Fenoxo.
  • New Bust: Ginny, by Adjatha.
• [Backer Exclusive] Grimald Dates! Roughly seventy pages of new content for spending time with Grimald in all sorts of ways~ Written by Magenta Needle and coded by Leek.
• [Now Public] Catching Rummi
• Player Bust Updates: It should now have a variety of non-human head shapes added as well as support for some non-human body types. Ear types to come in the future!
• Reworked Blackjack Interface – give it a try! It should feel a lot more like a “real” blackjack game now. (Relentless demands by Fenoxo, actual code & work by Jacques00.)
• Reworked Cockvine battle – now features proper improved combat flow, improved status effect visibility and information, reactive anti-drone attack (and support for new “drone” types in said attack), and less random new line returns adding spaces where none were needed. (Fenoxo)
• Fixed Azra’s axe-kick not displaying damage dealt. (Fenoxo)
• Fixed a Shock Hopper attack potentially affected by the same bug as Azra above. (Jacques00)
• Removed outdated and broken ‘classMST’ parser and replaced it with a new clMulti parser. (Example: [char.clMulti smuggler mercenary engineer kineticist|I’m a smuggler|I’m a mercenary|I’m a tech specialist|I’m a kineticist|I’m none of the above]) (Jacques00)
• Assorted Frosty consistency fixes. (Jacques00)
• Fixes some issues with browser-based translation & the react framework. (Jacques00)
• Hardlight suits and power armor are no longer prevented from use by the “Priapism” effect. (Jacques00)
• The number of force darts is now properly displayed. (Jacques00)
• Amber encounters now pause navigation to prevent missing her while walking quickly. (Jacques00)
• Fixes for VR versions of the E.G.G. quest encounters. (Jacques00)
• Fixes for the Siren’s Bounty face transformation effect. (Jacques00)
• Tail transformation effects have been unified with a shiftTail() utility function, and used through most TF items. (Jacques00)
• Minor pregnancy and typos fixes. (Jacques00)
• Many small user interface improvements. (Jacques00)

Development Preview! Jacques00 has been cooking some enhancements for the character paperdoll mannequin.
A large variety of face shapes have been created (including some that don’t even match in-game options). Once we have appropriate ears added, I’ll see about getting this built out more and release it for you all to play with!

We got a new patch today with some fixes and some pregnancy, a great start to Mayternity, even if I’m not an ardent subscriber to this month’s festivities. I’m very much more a “May is for outdoor fuckin’” kind of fella!

Today has been a fun one, since it started with a very simple and quick crash fix and then ballooned into a complicated series of corrections across multiple game systems as I attempted to verify my original fix.

0.9.198 Changelog:

• [Backer Exclusive] Added preg content for the new venus pitcher. She can be impregnated and she can impregnate Steele. She must have moved into her house before either is possible. (Coded by DrunkZombie! Since we got this one in so fast, it will be unlocked for the public at the exact same time as the rest of Venus’s content.)
• Critical Notice Adjustment: In an effort to de-dupe duplicated critical hit notices, we wound up losing critical hit notices for some attacks like the cybernetic combat tail. I’ve flipped the “alwaysShowCrit” variable to be on by default which corrects this – it could potentially cause display issues with elsewhere in the game that will need to be corrected. My bet is that it won’t – but I may iterate on this a bit more still. (Fenoxo)
• Strict 9 Fixes: a number of fixes were applied to Strict-9’s encounter. (Fenoxo)
  • An attack meant to punish tripped foes was only used very rarely, even on tripped enemies. This has been corrected.
  • A crash caused by the aforementioned attack lingered for far too long, probably because the attack would only very rarely occur, and only for the most inattentive (or uncaring) of players. It has been fixed. (Thanks to lowercase donkey for bringing it to my attention.)
  • The damage of the aforementioned attack was reduced somewhat, though it is still very powerful.
  • Strict-9’s buff that triggers from lust no longer occurs at 0 lust. It also no longer occurs repeatedly, as it would have no effect.
  • Added stagger & stun bolded text notices to an attack that can stagger or stun.
  • Fixed her trip attack placing a tooltip of the trip status of “2”.
  • Strict-9’s shields were raised by 180 as Paulette and my tail were easily dropping her while my test PC waited every single turn.
• Combat tail targetting fix: the drone targeting menu should now be usable without a separate pet or drone to enable the menu. (Fenoxo)
• Paulette attack formatting: I cleaned up some extra spaces in her attacks to make them format more like rest of the game. (Fenoxo)
• Paulette’s E.G.G. Quest Access Fix: A conditional on the planet check was inverted, so it should be properly accessible as intended now. (Jacques00)
• Minor crash fix: Fixed a crash related to personalizing the display mannequin. (Jacques00)
• Fixes for Zero Plus’s fluid quantities. (Jacques00)
• Tweaks for Kiro’s dress. (Jacques00)

…and finally, a quick update on my health. Ears and sinuses are doing pretty good after finishing my antibiotic course – but something’s still fucked with the front-left side of my throat near my larynx. There’s swelling that makes every swallow feel awkward and a little tight (a lil mild pain too w/e), but after a celebratory alcohol drink on Tuesday night it decided to start rioting into the night through Wednesday morning – more swelling and discomfort aplenty. Aleve did me a solid and wrangled it back down to a far more tolerable level today. Unfortunately it will be until the 19th before I can get to my appointment at the local ENT. If things stay as they are (and I avoid the devil’s delicious, delicious beverages!) I should be able to keep cranking on TiTS work just fine. After all, this is a mere fraction of what I was dealing with my sinuses and ear were part of the illness-fucking tag-team.

New patch day! Check out the changelog for the new hotness – the next couple paragraphs are an update on Azra development and my health.

Art for the lovely Venus provided by Adjatha!

First off: Azra’s third expedition. Authored by Skom, it’s around 150 pages of content, and I took another pass through to check up on my last set of corrections and requests. The first go had been fairly brutal – I’m picky about Azra since I wrote most of her content myself (recruitment to most of the two followup expeditions) so I’d like to avoid any significant variance in her personality or the way the her expeditions flow. I’m happy to say most of the issues I had with her characterization have been resolved. One of the NPC encounters (a male Nyrea) still requires reworking to match their biology as defined by their codex. Skom had some neat ideas that he thought were kind of hot (and to be honest, I do kind of think would be interesting on different species) that didn’t quite mesh with the established lore. I also rewrote some of the early epilogue content for characterization, even though I slipped into doing something I had asked Skom not to do in my previous rewrite request! (Sorry! I’m a pain, I know…) I’d like to start working on the coding for finished portions  of Azra’s third expedition this week, and hopefully have it in your hands in 1-2 weeks from the time of this post – HEALTH PERMITTING.

Which brings me to my next topic: my health. I’ve caught some flack with previous posts about my recent health issues being manufactured, but that is sadly not so. After sliding back toward the gutter bit last weekend, I went to urgent care on monday. The diagnosis? Post-Covid bacterial sinus infection and impacted earwax in my left ear. Given the difficulty they had extracting the blockage Wednesday and the fact that my left side ear has felt a bit off for a while, I suspect that was impairing me for a rather long time. I’m now in the last half of my antibiotic course with a clear ear, but I worry that there’s one more issue to chase down. During the end of Covid, I started getting shooting pains into my neck while blowing my nose (especially the left side), as I often had to blow quite hard on that side. Well, the pain in my neck persists on and off even as my sinuses and ear are returning to normalcy. My worry is that the overpressure may have torn or herniated something around my larynx. I’m hoping that with my sinuses cleared (and avoiding pressurizing myself) I can take it easy on those tissues and recover naturally, but if I’m still having issues when I run out of antibiotics later in the week, I’ll be trying to source an ENT (ear, nose, and throat doctor) to help me get it sorted ASAP.

I don’t think it’ll slow me down too much unless it winds up being something that needs surgery. I’ll keep you posted.

0.9.157 Hotfixes:

• Venus’s first encounter is now in the middle jungle (around the plantation and near the probe) or in the deep jungle (the darker green area) where venus pitchers and their elders can be found.
• Venus’s repeat encounters should now be found anywhere except the the vanae-occupied region.
• Fixed a potential crash with Venus encounters.
• Fixed a Paulette quest crash.

0.9.157 Changelog:

• [Now Public] Paulette’s second quest is now available! Are you a bad enough dude to save the zaika? Or will the nefarious Dr. Ovvi’s inventions spell your doom? (D-O-O-M spells doom!)
• [Backer Exclusive] New NPC: Venus, a venus pitcher that becomes ambulatory after an accidental encounter with Captain Steele. She can be repeatedly interacted with and eventually moved into Esbeth as a proper resident! Right now she can be encountered in the first, easy jungle zone, but I’m going to be repositioning her encounter to the middle and deeper jungle zones where other venus pitchers can be encountered in the next patch or hotfix. (Written by Somechuvak and coded by Leek.)
• [Backer Exclusive] New Extrameet Encounter on Tavros: Deenya, a muscular kaithrit looking for a big strong submissive who likes to struggle a little before giving in. (Written by Melonear and coded by Fenoxo)
• New Item: Kiro’s Dress, obtainable during her quest. (Jacques00)
• Some fixes for Kiro’s quest’s cheats. (Jacques00)
• New Busts: Venus (clothed & nude).
• Numerous fixes for Jana and nursery content. (Jacques00)
• Improved virginity-taking messages in Fisianna’s content. (Jacques00)
• Minutes consumed by movement should now consider the movement cost of the room being left as well as the room being journeyed to. (Jacques00)
• Updated some encounterText() to use encounterTextGenerator() and make them compatible with the Combat Description toggle option, hopefully reducing the number of commonly repeated long texts in some fights. (Jacques00)
• If the “Display Reputation Changes” toggle is on, changes to personality should be visibly displayed. (Jacques00)
• Added an option toggle to disable current lust level from impacting appearance descriptions of vaginal wetness. (Jacques00)
• Under the hood work to prepare for the player mannequin to display ears and tauric body shapes. (Jacques00)
• Huge amounts of typo fixes, particularly in Paulette’s second quest. (Thanks Jacques00 and our fearless forum bug reporters!)

(Breast Boobily by Adjatha)

Work continues~ Today I’ve got a new ship encounter (albeit one gated behind a very specific content path) and an expansion for Velika. With those out of the way and my health and focus continuing to improve post-Covid, I’ll be working on getting the submitted Azra expedition up to snuff for the immediate future. Given further text revisions may be needed, it may not be available for coding rapidly, but I’ll keep you posted. There’s a number of smaller one-off scenes I’d like to tackle as well, when the write-juices are flowing this coming week.

0.9.156 Changelog:

• [Backer Exclusive] Velika Additions: Dom Her (if you play your cards right…), new PC-Blindfolded Scene, new dialogues, and smaller tweaks across a broad swatch of her existing content. (Written by Somechuvak and coded by Leek.)
• [Backer Exclusive] New Ship Battle: The Space Leviathan! This encounter is unlocked by taking a specific path during Paulette’s quest. It is intended to be a far more difficult fight than just about any other space fight in the game, so prepare accordingly! Turning it in to the UGC will earn SIGNIFICANT credit rewards… (Written by Magenta Needle, coded by Fenoxo)
• New Bust: Breast Boobily, by Adjatha.
• VR access to Paulette quest content should be properly accessible this time for real-real. (A roadblock had been accidentally left in, originally meant to allow Leek more time to review.) (Jacques00 & Leek)
• Accuracy modifiers on ship weapons no longer apply to global accuracy with all ship weapons. (Fenoxo)
• Ship battle AI should now better utilize onboard weapons – incorrect power cost values were being checked for ship weapons, resulting in many NPCs attempting to fire unpowered weapons they otherwise shouldn’t. (Fenoxo)
• Ships without an image should display a placeholder ship icon instead of a placeholder person icon. (Jacques00)
• Fixes for several VR scene repeats that included transformations to have more correct text output. (Jacques00)