Managed to sneak in another little spooky addition just in time!

Once again I’ve found myself sidetracked with a bunch of other important things that aren’t directly associated with make game has more content or features; last week we started running into issues with people being able to download TiTS and CoC2 updates for a couple of hours. The issue isn’t that our server can’t keep up, it seems to have just been one of those general internet issues that crops up from time to time. In the process of digging into it though, I decided it would probably be prudent to start putting some thought into expanding our capacity and hopefully deliver a system that will let us work around routing issues like this in the future. It’s a technical challenge that I haven’t really had to approach before, and there’s a lot of things that I need to keep in mind with some features that we have planned for the game, and how those are going to work with whatever distribution system we end up utilizing.

Lighterflud is back in action, and is the person who smashed through the code for this extra spooky addition for this patch, so he’s been getting up to speed now that the games basically completely changed behind the scenes and he’s been contributing to the utter melee that is trying to figure out answers for technical questions that crop up when I’m not directly available. Little javascript beans learning their way through the horrendous pile of bad decisions that I had to make to get us this far, brings a tear to me eye it does.

Fen & Leek have been getting down on gluing the latest dungeons bulk content and the boss encounters together, along with rifling through a bunch of the combat code to straighten a few things up. SOON™.

0.9.023 Changelog:

• PUBLIC: A new event can occur whilst onboard your ship for a spooky trick or treat encounter! (Doots (Check out their Patreon!) & Lighterflud)
• Tweaked how ship-board controls are generated in different rooms to better handle events that don’t want to clear out the room description. (Gedan)
• A bunch of globally available functions that didn’t need to be have been cleaned up; we might have a few missing function call errors here and there. (lowercase_donkey)
• penny.short should be resolved. (lowercase_donkey & Fenoxo)
• A bunch more busts have been added and existing ones fiddled. (lowercase_donkey)
• Duplicate content that has amassed during the porting process is being cleaned up and removed, should help reduce the size of the game download. (lowercase_donkey)
• A bunch of other fixes and tweaks all across the code has happened, and I’m too tired to exhaustively list every last one. One day I’ll figure out a good way to autogenerate these patchnotes…

It’s been a busy couple of weeks for everybody on the team. The patch notes might not seem all that huge, but that’s mostly because I just don’t have the energy to dig through and comprehensively list every last little thing that got fixed up since the last update. The last build was in a pretty good place, so the burning desire to “force” another update out and potentially untip the scales back to something less stable wasn’t a lingering thought, so we’ve just been plugging away, sweepin’ the floors, keeping everything ticking over. We’ve got some old faces back again and getting up to speed with the code, and our weekly meetings have had a definitive shift in tone from ‘Getting back to where we were before the port’ to spending the overwhelming duration discussing whole new content.

First and foremost, no specific backer content this patch. We’ve got new content, but half of it is obviously time-dependant being that it’s a halloween related event, and the other stuff is a whole gaggle of smaller interactions across TONS of existing content. It didn’t make sense to try and gate it off in any way.

Backers are going to be getting a big, meaty new dungeon soon though; Fenoxo has put the finishing touches on the last of the combat mechanics, so now all that is left is gluing the content all together and getting it tested. SOON™.

I lost a week massively upgrading the build system and cleaning up things that have been bugging me about it for a while; it is much, much faster than the last iteration, which is incredible considering that in and of itself was rapid as hell. And then I lost another week to what I originally thought was a dying graphics card, but turns out to have been a dying displayport cable instead. I had no idea that a goddamn displayport cable could dead ass kill windows, but we live and learn I guess!

I might have to rapid-fire out a couple of builds to ensure some new components of the build process are working as expected across all the release types, but there should be no big goofs lingering to bite our hand off.

0.9.022 Changelog:

• PUBLIC: Sophora, Syri Sit, Squid Wallslut, Anno’s Maid Titjob, Olympia Facesmothering, Kui-Rodenian Porno and Amber Preg are all now public. (Many!)
• PUBLIC: There’s a new Halloween event available involving Lorelei. (B & Lighterflud)
• PUBLIC: The Slave Uniform on Zheng Shi has been moved out of the mines and onto the Slave Pen tile near Maike’s Shack (Where Tivf is) in the Hangar. Wearing it now acts as a disguise through the Mines & Foundry decks. Jumpers and Slyveren Slavebreakers have new scenes the player can be subjected to in order to maintain the disguise. (Will & Leek)
• There is now an integrated update checker built into the game. The first time you load up this patch, you’ll be prompted if you want to enable it, and the option to change is tucked in the options menu if you change your mind. (Gedan)
• Dizzy should now be considered potential nursery staff correctly.
• There’s been a lot of small tweaking to the formatting of the combat UI, including new overlays to better communicate enemies who have been defeated. (Jacques)
• A big overhaul of how we organize certain commonly used functions for specific NPCs. We might have missed and broken a few things, but we’ve moved a few thousand of them around probably so… (lowercase_donkey)
• There’s been a massive number of commits fixing small issues all over the place. I’m not going to attempt to dig through every one and list it, but it is a lot. (Many!)
• Seriously, it’s like a couple hundred commits of fixes. (Many!)
• There’s now a panic button to hide the game UI, bound to “[” by default. (Jacques)
• A bunch of data in the image manifest has been normalized for display. (lowercase_donkey)

I’m back out of the other-project mines now, but this week has mostly been a wash for me. I got tagged in to handle some annoying little bugs that are still being fished out of the UI menu generation change a few weeks back, but I think we’re finally at the point all of those might be squared away properly now. The rate of new stuff getting broken definitely feels like it’s slowed, so my next couple of weeks now that I’m back TiTSin full-time is gonna be about smashing through the backlog of forum reports and chopping through as many things as I can before swinging into a lot of little QoL things that I’ve got sat on my list.

Fen has been hard at work battering on his dungeon goos and getting to grips with working in the depths of the ported code to make a crazy, over-the-top eldritch abomination of code, befitting their status as gooey monsters I guess!

Sophora should have been made public this week, but I feel like we’ve only just with this patch got her properly squared away so we’re gonna give backers another week with her being exclusive, so we’re gonna stick a pin in the content rollout pipeline until next week and just release a big bugfix rollup update.

0.9.021 Changelog:

• Added some more of the completed card assets. (Jacques)
• Staggered has been buffed to a 20% stat reduction, up from 10%. (Fenoxo)
• Fixed crashes relating to the Combat UI and non-standard exits from the combat process. (Gedan)
• Fixed a few more items that didn’t return to the inventory after consumption. (Gedan)
• Fixed Skin Clears bad end process. (Gedan)
• Fixed a bunch of items that trigger masturbation scenes not properly generating menus. (Gedan)
• Fixed Grenade crashes. (Leek)
• Fixed cancelling the image upload process for avatars. (Leek)
• Made the Android app package use Fullscreen an added a dedicated close button to the main menu. (Leek, Jacques, Gedan)
• Clarified the equip button tooltips. (Leek)
• Fixed a fated name. (lowercase_donkey)
• Usual assortment of bust tweaking. (lowercase_donkey)
• SlutRay now does 5 psionic damage instead of 4 tease damage. Advanced SlutRay now does psionic damage. The Heavy SlutRay now does 9 psionic damage instead of 8 tease damage. (Fenoxo)
• Sophora has had a great many more fixes, balance changes and tweaks. (Leek)
• SynthSheath should now have proper sales limits from Shekka. (Gedan)
• Tweaked the damage output for smuggler grenades. (Gedan)
• Tweaked part of rescuring Kiro to ensure the final scene in the chain cannot be overwritten by another event happening. (Gedan)
• Renvara should no longer freeze the game. (Fenoxo)
• There is now an option to disable the “Hologram” effect used in various places of the UI (Jacques)
• Fixed the “Shopkeeper is null” error when sometimes using the drop interface. (Gedan)
• Fixed a softlock on Poe A. (lowercase_donkey)
• Fixed cocksocks not allowing target selection. (lowercase_donkey)
• Fixed a couple of unparsed variants in FarrowQuest. (lowercase_donkey)