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)

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…