Have a sneak peak at the first encounter on Azra’s upcoming expedition: a male Nyrea with a penchant for gambling.
Art by Adjatha

I’m still cooking Azra’s quest (trust me, I’m not happy about it being unfinished either), but I couldn’t keep putting off a patch while I’m stuck ass-deep inside it, especially when there’s a backlog of community-submitted items and NPC to put in your hands!

0.9.160 Changelog:

• [Backer Exclusive] Giallo the male-presenting Rahn! You can find him hanging around New Texas. Written by badbreadpuns and coded by Leek.
• [Backer Exclusive] New Community-Authored Items: Antigrav Bottoms, Psyker Robes, Star King Tattoo Wrap, Clingy Tee, Tank top, Jacked Armbands, D-strings, Rectangular D-strings, Pixel D-strings, Dragon Tattoo Wraps, Woman Tattoo Wraps, Armor Tattoo Wraps, Muscle Shirts, Gun Control Armbands, Cowboi Boxers, Leather Vest & Chaps, Bodyshape Shirt, and the Bodyshape Shirt Plus. They’ll scattered around on a variety of clothing vendors across the game. The bodyshape line of shirts also include some actual resizing effects, for players who want to appear as a different thickness – or have a shirt that passively trims off any gained, excess thickness. (Coded by Leek, improved transformation texts & some tooltips rewritten by Fenoxo)
• [Backer Exclusive] New Community-Authored Transformation Item: Zhat Zhing! This item is sold by the Seer on Myrellion and transforms the imbiber into something called a yinglet (with permission from the creator of the species). Written by Jarylan and coded by Leek.
• [Now Public] Velika’s Expansion
• [Now Public] The Space Leviathan
• The Arctic Rescue Nurse Outfit was reworked. It’s no longer sold and is instead a rare drop on Uveto. The tooltip was rewritten to better fit the universe’s lore and the stats adjusted (generally buffed). The “self-rez” effect was slightly nerfed, reducing the amount of HP & lust recovered from 50%ish to 33%ish. Low-quality activation texts for the self-rez were also rewritten. (Fenoxo)
• Gas Greandes reworked: they now display individual messages for each NPC on the field instead of lumping the damage together for a single number display. The texts were also tweaked to be more straightforward. (Fenoxo)
• Pussy Plumpness has been reworked. A number of descriptions were only checking for the specific “slightly_pumped”, “pumped”, and “hyper_pumped” part flags, even though other effects have been added since that increase overall puffiness by one step (like the equine vagina type or a temporary effect like “Soak.” Description functions and appearance screen texts were updated to properly refer to the overall plumpness level (and also make sure not to use the “pumped” adjective unless you’ve actually been playing with the pump).
• Adjite Piercings were not causing their intended effects. They have been updated to cause swelling on certain body parts when equipped (penis, balls, vaginas, clits, breasts) and also increase the fluids produced by the associated part while worn, with certain piercings having stronger effects. A new Adjite piercing has also been added (but is not yet available – pending Azra’s 3rd expedition) with the strongest effects of all.
• The Survival Instincts perk should output more clearly and concisely when it activates. It was also adjusted for NPCs to make use of as well. (Fenoxo)
• Numerous combats with “survive X turns” as a victory condition had textual addendums added to more clearly signpost that your goal is simply to survive long enough. (Jacques00)
• Pregnancy improvements with the Gryvain Agent. (Jacques00)
• Breed N’ Brute and TamaniCorp Breed Ring should now trigger more reliably. (Jacques00)
• Fixes for the mannequin not rendering correctly.

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.