It’s been a couple weeks hasn’t it, woof.

As part of the last post I pointed out that I wanted to sledge some time into the layout of the sidebar. I didn’t yet really know where I wanted to go with things exactly, just the general feedback that I wanted to take on board and how best to try and glue all of the things together in a way that I think could work, whilst also keeping in mind the desire to improve the usability of the UI on touch devices.

I threw a week into cleaning up some partially implemented ideas that I’ve had sat around for a few months, things I did to prove out the capacity for the new version of TiTS to handle in a satisfactory way. First and foremost, autopathing for the map. I’ve added an option that allows you to click or tap on a room displayed in the map, and the game will step-by-step move you toward that target. I think it needs a little bit more work, like potentially a stop button squeezed in somewhere, and there might be a few things that end-run around when it’s supposed to stop you when events occur, but I think it’s like 98% there in it’s current state.

With the time I spent working on that, and messing with the sidebar in general, it gave me time to crystalize the things I wanted to achieve for the overhaul, things that I think are gonna be problems to watch out for, and exactly how I think we can make it better for touch input. Jacques then took a lot of that and cobbled together a few potential layouts, the best of which I’m gonna squeeze here now as a preview of the potential.

The overlay of controls on the map is another thing I’m thinking about implementing in addition to the Autopathing option (hence why it is an option!) that’ll allow us to get rid of the seperate movement control buttons, freeing up a little bit more space to squeeze stats back into the bar, but the design and sizing of everything is still very much an idea and not how things are going to play out. This moves most of the controls down to the bottom corner of the screen, which imo is perfect for one-handed tablet use. If we then make the sidebar side an option too, so you can left or right hand the UI, depending on preference. Add to this a couple of ideas to remove the need for the button tray to run across the entire bottom of the UI, at least as an input system – probably still keep it for layout purposes, but add an extra way to interact with those buttons that can be done without moving your hand from the “control corner”…. Groundwork has been done for a bunch of this, but it’s gonna be a while yet before it’s ready for public consumption.

Then I realised everybody else was in some state of sick/busy/on holiday, and we had nothing major in the hopper ready to release. I grabbed something off the top of the pile and set into it, but the deeper I got into implementing it the more I realised it needs a lot of reworking and polishing to bring it up to our standards. I was hoping to have at least some more backer content ready before a christmas patch, but I didn’t want to hold off on updating any longer. I might still get it out before Christmas, it depends how over the top I get on wanting to rewrite a bunch of room descriptions and combat attacks in the process.

Back 2 da mines.

0.9.029 Changelog:

• Public: Amber has a new X-Mas date! Made public because it’s an other seasonal event! Requires Anno and Amber to be crew, to be docked on Tavros and Amber not to have partaken of any Dumbfuck. (WritingDen & Leek)
• Public: Dhaal’s Dungeon is now available to the public!
• Public: Una’s Expansion is now available to the public!
• New tech for bust priority selection: Screen now shows the number of busts each artist has in the game (shoutout to Adjatha with 839 busts) and has a ‘sort’ button which sorts artist priority by this number. This tech should also make the artist list complete (31 -> 47). (donk)
• Ensure artists are always spelled the same so the above works well. (donk)
• Autopathing map input now works. It’s enabled by an option under “Controls”. With it enabled you can click/tap on a room on the minimap and the game will move you room-by-room to the destination, stopping when events crop up. (Gedan)
• Reaha, crew Eitan, wall 🦑, XO variants for each corp, Harru, Gwon, bots for the Crash dungeon (Adjatha)
• New busts for Sera (22 of them!) (Shou)
• Updated some Riley jumper art with corrections (mehLewds)
• Updated Holiday (the character) art with latest versions (Damnit)
• Rats raider bust fixes (donk)
• Room descriptions for Short Stacks (writes: Adj, codes: donk)
• Gobtown Zone is green on the map once more (donk)
• Fix a bug that was hiding the “no” option for giving Ardia a horsedick. Cowards. (donk)
• A lot of groundwork for Zaika Gangers (they’re still not out yet, though) (donk)
• Fixes for players not receiving red myr dildo. (donk)
• Fix map bugs for Sera party and PuppySlutMass (donk)
• Fix for ghost cock dream. The game was adding a cock to what you had, but growing and ultimately removing your first cock instead of the ghost cock. Spooky! (donk)
• Kattom will no longer loiter on stairs (donk)
• More fixes for player movement being locked or unlocked in error. Keep reporting these! (donk)
• A lot of text fixes, typos, etc. (donk)
• Fixed a few internal ballsize values. (Gedan)
• Cleaned up a few bits and pieces with Ambers preg events when boarding the ship when she’s not crew. (DrunkZombie)
• In an effort to avoid a few issues with getting stuck in loss-loops, the depth suit used for the Uveto Bioloab will lock on when entering the area so that it cannot be removed whilst in the danger zone in such a way that you could then save without the suit and immediately enter combat, softlocking the save. (DrunkZombie)
• The Slavesuit and Chamelon Armor should no longer bug the drop menu. (Fenoxo)
• Added a trader you can run across in Gabtown that can exchange loot from the Dungeon. (Fenoxo)
• Also added a few extra items to look for from the Dhaal Dungeon. (Fenoxo)
• Fixed a softlock in the Decorate menu. (Jacques)
• Cleaned up a bunch of old UI calls from the AS3 version of the game that were left placeholdered during the conversion process. (Gedan)
• Deduplicated a couple of other placeholder things that existed to get the very initial JS builds to run. (Gedan)
• Yet more tweaking to the OmniSuits special equip processes behind the scenes to try and make it properly equip itself. (Gedan)
• Added a keybind display for the button to switch sides in the drop menu. (Jacques)

Sneaky hotfixes that have rolled out:

• Tweaked the Anno christmas event buttons to not get stomped by the decorate button. (donk)
• Buttsluttinator should be properly accessible once installed on the ship. (donk)
• Globally corrected the spelling for “Raccoon” (donk)

Bit of a weird week all around. Things have mostly been focused on cleaning up the new Dungeon and digging in to quality of life things around the game. We snuck out a good few hotfixes over the last week-and-a-bit to that end.

After the last couple weeks effort with new keybinds for some of the most used interface layouts, and then a bit more tweaking to better support tooltips for touch interfaces I wanted to spend some more time trying to improve mobile performance on lower-end devices. I have both a deece iPad and a cheap-as-possible Android tablet to test things on for really reals to get a handle on exactly how things are working. All I can say is the iPad mostly seems pretty dang good, but the Android is really struggling. I know there’s things I can fish out to improve things, but I think the biggest problem is simply the sheer size of the game and how much thicc code we’re asking the device to handle. We’ve made some non-optimial choices with how we’re abusing the UI to do the things we want it to do but I think I’ve scraped the bottom of the barrel in terms of easy performance wins there.

At any rate, I think my next challenge is going to be reworking the entire sidebar. It’s always been kinda placeholder whilst we built up all of the individual components that makes it up with a view to cycling back around once everything was working to redo its layout, taking into account the feedback we’ve seen and polishing off a few of the things that we’ve tested over time, like the ability to move via the minimap directly.

As for the rest of the team…

DZ has spotted something that interests him in the code-queue.
Will has parked some extra juice for Extrameet in the backlog.
Jacques is still living in card art hell.
Slabin is returning to slab and working on his next big character quest.
Adj continues delivering sick bust art.
Donkey is giving me too many commits to review, as is the style.
Fen is working on some shiny new items to plump up the rewards for the new Don Jon.

0.9.028 Changelog:

• Backer: Malai is now available to backers. A big boy rask with a weapons shop at the south-end of Gabtown. (Doots & Leek)
• Fixed a few crashes with new keybinds. (Gedan)
• Jasvalla art has arrived and been implemented! (Adjatha)
• Fixed issues with a Stormguard scene. (lowercase_donkey)
• Fixed issues with a Pippa scene. (lowercase_donkey)
• Fixed an errant empty combat text container involving stuns. (lowercase_donkey)
• The usual assortment of bust fixes. (lowercase_donkey)
• Tweaks have been made to Bess/Bens menus in various places. (lowercase_donkey)
• A bunch of cleanup has been done for the new Dhaal dungeon – too many little things to exhaustively list.
• Attempts have been made to recover frosty’s custom name from older saves. (lowercase_donkey)
• The ability to refund perk selections has been enabled as a cheat. (I think Leek originally made the UI, donkey wired it up as a cheat)
• Final cleanup of Sophora issues; a few combat tweaks, a bad end properly implemented. (Gedan)

I spent a bunch of time getting down and dirty with the race-determination code that I overhauled a couple of weeks back. It should be working far better now and a bunch of the edge-cases and wrong-results have been fired out of a cannon and into the nearest sun. I wanna see where this lands before I implement the next stage of things, by allowing you to pick a “sticky” race from the top of the list of potential scores, allowing you to somewhat bypass hyper-specific scoring scenarios to get the race you want and leave room for flexibility to turn your Steele into exactly what you envision for them.

This week meeting was good all around; we’ve got a lot of fresh content lined up to be completed over the next couple of weeks, so expect a return to form for backer content over the next couple of patches. Somewhere in the next couple of weeks you should expect the next dungeon to drop, now that Fen and Leek have gotten together and made lots of code babies over their two halves of the implementation process. Fen just has a couple of final touches to rope together and it’ll be DONE. SOON™.

Now I must go and clamber back into the codemine.

0.9.024 Changelog:

• • [BACKER] Una has a new series of facesitting scenes, along with a potential bad-end for good boys who prove they know their place under her booty. (William, Nonesuch & Gedan)
  • Bakhar’s menu being funky has been fixed. (lowercase_donkey)
  • Fixed a handful of character names not being consistently displayed in the UI. (lowercase_donkey)
  • Fixed a couple of oversights with parser tags in lovestarz content. (lowercase_donkey)
  • Fixed where the displayability of the update notification message is determined which should ensure it can be consistently displayed across different build types. (Gedan)
  • Fixed milk thief crashes. (lowercase_donkey)
  • Fixed Credits always being listed as the currency during a shop checkout process, even when another currency is being used. (lowercase_donkey)
  • Improved the parser to support literal arguments. (leek)
  • Tweaked all of the current race scoring parameters to more closely align with expected results under the old system. All of the starting race options should now properly result in half-race outputs as expected. Where possible, the new system avoids using specific genitalia as a scoring element and instead relies purely on other appearance factors but there are a handful of cases where this is impossible or clearly does not make sense to avoid. (Gedan)
  • Tweaked all of the different ways the player can acquire Kiro’s ship for themselves, hopefully resulting in a more consistent experience. (Gedan)
  • Deduplicated a bunch of old content as well as cleaning up the scope of a lot of functions across the codebase. (lowercase_donkey)
  • Undo states should be properly created in more instances when the parser has been provided temporary parser tags. (Gedan)
  • A variety of scene and tag fixes, along with the usual assortment of bust tweaks have been performed. (lowercase_donkey)