I’ve had my head shoved into digging into Android things for most of the last week. I decided that using an emulator was kind of a shonky way to really go about it, so I hunted down an appropriately low end android tablet to use as a testing device, something representative of a good number of years of potential devices people would actually end up using. Using that I ran into a couple things that absolutely needed to be fixed and then started to look into performance things, identifying a few places we could do better to make the game work better on lower-end devices – most of that work is still pending, but having an actual real device to see it first hand has helped to find things far better than wondering if its emulator jank or an actual problem to look into.

And then I had to spend most of today massaging the process through the build process to deal with all the stupid android shit that needed to be handled to get things working. Got there in the end…

Back to da codemines.

TiTS 0.9.016:

• Backer: A new enemy has been added to Zheng Shi and can be triggered in one of three ways: defeating Maike and the Forgehound, defeating 20 Bored Jumpers, or defeating the Shock Hopper. When a condition is met, an amazonian laquine will come after you, and can be a recurring nemesis on ZS and beyond… depending on your choices. (William & Leek)
• Public: The Zheng Shi OpsDeck is now available to the public.
• Public: Pudding Panic is now available to the public.
• Public: A collection of scenes for Shekka, Able and Anyxine is now available to the public.
• The first Android APKs are now available. (Gedan)
• Various other build process things have been changed to accelerate the build time. (Gedan)
• Minor tweaks to the new race scoring system to better support the starting races. (Gedan)
• More busts have been wired up. (lowercase_donkey)
• A couple of return-to-game-menu hangs have been fixed. (lowercase_donkey)
• More codex entries have had formatting updates. (Jacques00)
• Various Mitch fixes. (lowercase_donkey)
• Fixed the Wargii Hold XP and Credit rewards. (DrunkZombie)

Most of my time over the last week was eaten up by finally getting my hands into the race-determination code and reworking it extensively from the old system. The old way presented a few weird and troublesome nested conditions in order to achieve a couple of potential results from the system and it was proving ever more difficult for people to navigate the requirements in a satisfactory way to say nothing of how annoying it was becoming to add new possibilities into the mix.

The new way of doing things is a lot flatter, but it’s based on the same underlying requirements of the old way – which is a long winded way for me to say that this will probably need a lot of tweaking going forward to file off all of the edge-cases that have been left over. There’s been three core changes that I’ve made to the old requirements, which in some cases may have left certain score-identifiers very unspecific:
Score penalties are mostly gone
Where possible I’ve tried to remove specific genitalia requirements (because it was easier than ensuring the requirements were present and appropriate for all score functions)
Nested type-becomes-type tests are gone

With all the saves that I have, the results have proven to be pretty on the nose for what I expect but I didn’t want to get deep into the mines on trying to blindly fumble through messing with the existing requirements before I got some feedback from people with more esoteric player data… so it’s time to update and wait for the probable pile of bug reports.

Apologies for no new backer content this week, but I haven’t had the time to get into the backlog and get something implemented with all the time spent on trying things with the new race-score system.

TiTS 0.9.015:

• Public: Edan preg is now public.
• Player races are now determined by a new system. (Gedan)
• Jasvalla has an updated intro sequence that allows her activation to be avoided. There is also a cheat to reset her interactions back into this state for people that have already engaged with her. (Nonesuch, Fenoxo & lowercase_donkey)
• Disarming Jasvalla stops her from using her slut ray. (Gedan)
• Mitch has questlog entries. (lowercase_donkey)
• A crash during KaraQuest2 when moving the players ship has been resolved. (lowercase_donkey)
• Codex formatting has been updated in a bunch more places. (Jacques00)
• Yammi’s food menu now supports being broken up to not overflow the 15 buttons. (Gedan)
• The Rotate Minigame should now properly support limited moves and total failure attempts. (Gedan)
• A few items that only make sense to be purchased one-at-a-time have had purchase limits applied. (lowercase_donkey)
• Perdita should now only show stories you do not already own. (lowercase_donkey)
• The Punk SpecOps should no longer crash when submitting to them without entering combat. (Gedan)
• Fixed an instance of an undefined function being shoved into the event queue. (Gedan)
• Cocksocks and cockrings are now presented on the “Your Piercings” inventory tab, allowing them to be interacted with and removed. (Gedan)
• Hardlight dongs should no longer impregnate Haley (DrunkZombie)
• It should now be possible to correctly delete autosave slots. (Gedan)
• The persistent storage popup has been removed entirely. This proved to be unwieldy to properly manage under certain browsers because of how they grant the persistent storage permission. (Gedan)

Art by: ototatx (via Discord!)

Another weird week; I caught somebody asking questions about the backer-credits thing and had a sudden realization that I hadn’t gotten around to setting the system back up for the JS port. I jumped on that immediately and combined it with the thinking that we should also be doing a much better job of crediting all the people that have contributed to the game over the years. The list is in no way complete as yet, I’ve been putting the word out and letting people get back to me with the details if they want putting in the credits for any writing, art or coding that they’ve done for us.

If you’re a contributor that hasn’t got the message already, send us a word with how you want crediting in the credits page and we’ll get on it!

After that we didn’t have anything pending in the code-merge queue for new content ready to go out, so I jumped on the first thing at the top of the Ready2Code list and pulled this Love Starz expansion out. Took a little longer to get through than I had hoped, but I stumbled into a few things to tweak along the way and cleaned up a few other bits and pieces as I was getting it together.

Everybody seems to have stuck their face into big, weighty projects all at the same time so there should be some fat new content drops coming along soon!

TiTS 0.9.014:

• Backer: A weighty expansion to the Love Starz is now available. Once you’ve worked your way through the existing events, the group will split up and head off for their own little vay-cays that the player can stumble across. (Fr0sty & Gedan).
• Backer: A buttstuff scene for Anyxine as a bonus! (Savin & Leek)
• Public: Jasvalla is now available to the public; a Dzaan Alpha stalker seeking to make the player her beta. The player can submit outright, make her earn the right to collar them, or have her dealt with by the proper authorities. If the player chooses to submit to her, they will be invited to her home to undergo repeatable training events and eventually a Bad End. You can kick things off by bumping into her in the Tavros elevator, after visiting Mhen’ga at least once. (Nonesuch & Leek)
• A credits screen has been built to handle all of our staff, contributors and backers. (Gedan)
• RotateMinigame beams can now properly reach the far edge of the right and top sides of the board when passed into a 4-way-open node. (Gedan)
• More Dhaal busts should be working and wired up appropriately. (lowercase_donkey)
• Inseminator Pro should ensure an absolute minimum cum value that won’t potentially break things. (DrunkZombie)
• Cleaned up some more combat things, including a reworking of Charge Shield that should better format its output. (Fenoxo)
  • [Fen wrote ‘dis part] – Previously charge shield would simply wedge a damage pop-up into the text of enemy’s attack, often with the descriptive output suppressed. There were some real confusing moments this would cause where it would look like you were getting hit harder than you were. I made it proc once per turn max and made it show up in the end of round procs with full descriptive text. I also change the combat initializing code to assign every combatant a unique number so that the charge shield statuses can better “remember” who set them off.
  • [More Fen] Urbolg’s combat will now end if you defeat him, even if his drone is still up.
  • [More Fen] Cleaned up a number of issues with the Queensguard/Taivra fights.
  • [More Fen] Adjustments to HP made via “changeHP” should properly output the HP change in combat.
• Gabilani Chemists should no longer progressively increase the amount of loot they’re carting around. (DrunkZombie)
• Roxy should no longer break the buttons during her first encounter. (DrunkZombie)

Hotfix rolling out to fix some stuff. Check the bottom of the post to see what!

It’s been a bit of a weird week behind the scenes. I’ve had my head deep into standing up Cordova for a variety of reasons, and in the process I’ve decided to do a bit of outstanding cleanup on all the processes going on to generate builds – a lot of annoying little problems that didn’t have good, easy solutions to hand have built up over time, so I decided to pull the bandage off entirely and just get it all done. None of this really makes the process more reliable, it’ll just make it much easier to continue expanding it over time with additional build configurations as and when we need to add more.

As for Cordova – it’s essentially the Android version of Electron. I’ve realised that, even if the PWA work I’ve been doing works 100% perfectly, it’s still not going to be as convenient for some people as just having an APK they can download and slam onto a device. I’m not fully finished with getting it all working yet, but it’s already coming along. Though I am kind of thinking I should get a Real, Actual Device to test it on rather than just continuing to rely on emulators to do the needful.

Dealing with build process stuff always eats up time, so it gave me ample opportunity to think through the specifics of how I want the autosave system to work in practice.

And then I built it.

Android APKs technically work right now, but I haven’t had much opportunity to test them fully, so they’re not releasing yet. Another week or two, depending on where I can squeeze time in to messing with it some more.

Some more details about the autosave system:
You can find it under the usual data menu.
Hitting the button on the sidebar labelled “Autosaves” will flip the slot display to showing the current autosaves that have been made.
The buttons at the bottom will allow you to toggle its state and set the duration between saves.
The system simply keeps 14 autosaves, and when it attempts to make a 15th, will eject the oldest autosave to do this; to aid this, the saves are shown in order of ascending age. Slot 1 will always have the most recent save.
Autosave slots have no direct relation to the regular save slots, which means this works with saves loaded from file too!

The sidebar menu there looks a bit barren for now, but there’s a few other things that I’ve roughed out that I will be polishing up over time that will extend this menu with a few more features; I’m not totally sold on the layout being like this, but I’m more concerned with getting it working and worrying about the details later, once we have the full lay of the land around what needs to fit together.

TiTS 0.9.013:

• Backer: There’s a new little thing for stumbling over SyriCrew watching movies aboard the ship that the player can stumble over. (Savin & Gedan)
• Public: Verusha’s lover expansion is now available; the merc goes on a little job and has a few revelations about things in the process. (By Doots!)
• There is a new Autosave system available. Find it under the usual data menu! See above for more details!(Gedan)
• Dhaal extrameet events got some fixes (DrunkZombie).
• Some Verusha scenes were erroneously clearing themselves out when merging, leading to only half-scenes sometimes being displayed. (lowercase_donkey)
• Initial work toward cleaning up how we handle formatting in the codex has started, now that we have access to actual HTML formatting rather than the janky actionscript kinda-sorta-a-bit-of-it we had to work around in the past. (lowercase_donkey).
• There’s been some more work put in around Jasvalla and Dzaan addiction in general. (Leek)
• Some fixes to Carrie and Cora. (lowercase_donkey)

TiTS 0.9.013 Hotfix, builds 2331+:

• Public downloadable builds should have their images working properly again. (Gedan)
• Disarmed should no longer block switching item types other than weapons. (Gedan)
• Shield generators have been properly marked as not usable, so the inventory UI should never improperly display a use button that would immediately make the game crash. (Gedan)
• Some minor content tweaks for Evening, Saendra, Kiro, Shizzy and Cherry. (Gedan)
• Melee and Ranged attacks built around the default attack implementations should properly handle default accuracy values. (Gedan)
• The autosave button should properly update to display its state as soon as it’s clicked. (Gedan)
• The elevator up to the Ops Deck should be properly disabled in public builds rather than crashing if you attempt to go up there. (Gedan)