Paulette by Adjatha!

Whew, this is a long time coming! There’s a lot of things I wanted to get done testing and polishing before releasing this, but with familial obligations approaching this weekend, I would rather you have your hands on this now than sit on it even longer.

A lot of my time over the last two weeks has gone into playtesting the game. Paulette’s recruitment arc starts out on Tarkus, and I wanted to play through the combat encounters to make sure they were up snuff. She also has higher level content, meaning the best way to test her would be to take a lower level (or fresh) save through the whole game. This presented an opportunity to create some proper test saves for the Kineticist class. Merc, Smuggler, and Tech Specialist all have test saves for character level to make testing content easy. The new kid on the block needed to catch up.

It has not been the smoothest sailing. In addition to doing a lot of tweaking on Paulette’s initial Tarkus tank quest to get it up to the quality levels I find acceptable, I kept finding myself side-tracked into fixing other bugs, balance issues, and aggravating content. Around Zheng Shi the Kineticist class can really start to struggle, especially if suboptimal talent selections are made, leading to me scattering a generous wave of buffs across the class. And I think they need more. My psychic babus are going to get some more higher level adjustments in the future – I just need more time to play, tweak, and test them further.

0.9.111 Changelog:

• Hotfix: Fixes for numerous crashes as a result of public builds failing to access utility functions in backer builds. (Donkey)
• Hotfix: Paulette’s sleep with scene should no longer soft lock.
• [Backers] Paulette Crew is IN. Written by Magenta Needle and coded by Leek. She has a small quest on Tarkus to get her recruited, culminating in a battle with a tank! Once onboard, she has several events on other planets and a bit of a quest…
• [Backers] New Items: “Snake Boba” & “Snake Shake” (by Madam Materia, coded by Leek). As you might surmise, snake transformations are on the way!
  • Available at a 50% drop rate from Slyveren Slavebreakers.
  • Available at Jade’s shop on Tavros Station.
  • Available from select vending machines.
• [Backers] New Item: “Lactomax Ring Piercing” (coded by Leek). You might guess that these will keep your lactation from ending. You’d be correct!
  • Available from Narc.
• [Backers] New Item: “Hardlight Fans” (coded by Leek). These are a new rare quality melee weapon that can hit flying targets without the lunge perk. (Attributes subject to change pending balance review.)
  • Available from Gabmart Threadz.
• [Backers] New Item: “Scout Shield” (coded by Leek). (Attributes subject to change pending balance review.)
• [Backers] New Item: “Electrokinetic Knuckles” (coded by Leek). These are melee weapons with stagger chance! (Attributes subject to change pending balance review.)
  • Available from Malai.
• [Backers] New Item: “BFD 9001” (coded by Leek). Despite the long history of acronym-based weapons being guns, this is a big fucking drill! (Attributes subject to change pending balance review.)
• [Backers] New Item: “Hardlight Chakrum” (coded by Leek). The likes of Lucy Lawless would greatly appreciate this ranged weapon’s addition. (Attributes subject to change pending balance review.)
  • Available from Rivet
• [Backers] New Item: “Fogcaster Rifle” (coded by Leek). A new gun approaches! This has a special skill alt-fire… (Attributes subject to change pending balance review.)
• [Backers] New Item: “Worn Out Shield Bracers” (coded by Leek). These are a new shield-boosting accessory. (Attributes subject to change pending balance review.)
  • Available from Shekka.
• [Backers] New Item: “Ganger Jacket” (coded by Leek). Transparent cyberpunk jackets are all the rage on Dhaal. (Attributes subject to change pending balance review.)
  • Available from Zaika Ganger Techies, Bruisers, Riotors, and Bangtails as a 33% drop chance.
• [Public] The Private Party
• [Public] The Nuka Rancher
• The basic grapple status is now red colored. (Fenoxo)
• Added a quest marker for the Stellar Tether encounter square on the map for Tarkus. (Fenoxo)
• The scrap shield had its level correctly reassigned to 4 (was 9) (Fenoxo)
• Improved the map connection on Myrellion for the Seeker’s shop so that it correctly appears as locked when the shop is closed. (Fenoxo)
• Several places in the game had their text formatting updated with our fancy new text animation systems, courtesy of Jacques00.
• Numerous other tweaks and improvements.

0.9.111 Balance Tweak Changelog (All ‘Noxo Baybee):

• The Kineticist Class received numerous buffs (and more are coming!)
  • Entropic Leech now restores more energy as the player character’s energy nears rock bottom. This should make fights at inopportune moments more winnable and improve how the class feels at higher levels.
  • Force Darts now shoots an addition dart at level 6 and level 12.
  • Vortex Brand lasts 5 rounds (up from 4).
  • Debris Field lasts 6 rounds (up from 3).
  • Numerous status effects had their icon selection improved and their status colors correctly assigned.
  • Thermal Sunder and Kinetic Burst both got a little more level-based scaling and some extra damage bumps at level 6 and 8.
  • Thermal Sunder and Kinetic Burst’s status effects now last longer.
  • Smaller scaling buffs to some of the higher level abilities.
• Tainted Rusher got some nerfs at lower levels.
• Nyrean Praetorians now only stun for a single turn.
• Taivra now only stuns for a single turn.
• The standard headbutt attack now only produces a 1 run stun when used on player characters.
• Slavebreakers now have a grapple cooldown so they cannot keep re-grabbing you.
• The Rats Raiders encounter received numerous tweaks.
  • Their weapons no longer have inbuilt stun-chance on hit.
  • Reduced shields by ~45 (varies by rat)
  • Reduced HP for some rats.
  • Blind duraction reduced from 3 to 2 rounds (and text tweaked to notify better).
  • Headbutt attack and stun gun attacks now have a shared cooldown. (And the attacks should display a bolded stun notice)
  • Cleaned up extra per-rat description entries that weren’t really used for anything.
• Reset encounter proc count on reaching Maike. This will prevent a random enemy attack from immediately occurring after the boss fight.

Behold, the prize for getting Kiro’s panties – by ToonNik.

Right here! …but also our TiTS have been a little saggy and deflated this month for a variety of reasons, bullet pointed below:

• Our lead artist and project reviewer had a vacation.
• Another artist / coder also took a vacation.
• Fen’s upstairs A/C went out during September’s last hot days – Fen’s work PC and office are upstairs. ($800 later, and she works again!)
• Fen’s gout flared up and took him out for ~1 week. It was a rough week but resulted in dropping 10 pounds and a real change in his drinking habits for the better.
• Fen & his wife overnighted in the emergency room because one of her chronic health issues decided to level up and prevent her from being able to intake water.

It has not been pure idleness, however. Leek is deep in the butthole of a 100+ page character expansion that should be nearing completion – as soon as it’s ready, I will be patching. Gedan too has been busy – she’s been rebuilding how the image pack is delivered and install to function properly on OSX, which has been a nightmare of permission hells. Once she’s got it all ready, the higher resolution images should be easier and more reliable to install. And we do have some updates and tweaks that I’m going to push out the door right now.

0.9.110 Changelog Hotfix #1:

• A hotfix is rolling out to address the new dracow busts not displaying. An error in the image manifest was addressed, and errors in the bust calls for the characters were corrected.

0.9.110 Changelog:

• [Public] The Dracow family expansion is now public.
• Phaedra II got its first chunk of room descriptions. (Fenoxo)
• Vagina parsers were rebuilt. I found the existing adjective selection for the vagina descriptions to be a little too cringy for my own tastes, so when Nonesuch requested access to individual parsers for a vaginas looseness or wetness I saw an opportunity to address it. The new system utilizes a commonality system for words so that more outlandish, “purple prose” should come up much more rarely, while common terminology appears much more frequently. Please be sure to let me know if it starts describing your vagina in absolutely insane ways (and note that wetness level descriptions elevate with increased lust values). (Fenoxo)
  • Added pc.vaginaWetnessAdjective parser to output an adjective indicative of the vagina’s wetness.
  • Added pc.vaginaLoosenessAdjective parser to output an adjective indicative of the vagina’s looseness.
• New CGs: Kiro Panties, Penny Panties (ToonNik)
• New Busts: Chia, Yzi, and Bixia – the Dracows. (Adjatha)
• Various small fixes.

She’s out to kiss troublemakers and chew bubblegum… and she’s all out of bubblegum!

Yeehaw, pardner! Even away from New Texas, we can’t help but rustle up some back-home country goodness for yall to enjoy – this time in the form of Nuka moisture farmer, penned by our very own head artist, Adjatha!

0.9.109 Changelog:

• [Backers] The Nuka Rancher is now able to found on Phaedra! This puffy-lipped cow-poke shows up as a random encounter on Phaedra’s glassy wastes. In the future she may find herself relocated to a smaller subsection of the planet’s hazard tiles where she can be more reliably found, but all things in good time. (Written by Adjatha, coded by Leek)
  • This tough fight summons up clones of herself to tease you from multiple directions at once! Her intended defeat path involves clearing her psionic additions to stun her for a swift defeat, but please let us know how the combat feels for your particular character in the comments. I was able to reliably defeat her with my level 12 tester after a handful of nerfs and adjustment to the base implementation. (Fen)
• [Public] Suze!
• Fixed an Ardia crash. (lowercase donkey)
• Rewrote the scripting for a PowerBoner combat event to avoid triggering warnings. (Fen)
• Implemented a system to manage panty CG display. (lowercase donkey)
• Added an artist filter for the art gallery. (Jacques00)
• Added some improvements to our save & bug report systems to better identify bugs that occur as a result of improperly modified saves. (Gedan)
• Fixed an art gallery crash. (Jacques00)