September 22, 2021
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TL;DR Edition: Big reorganization complete. Savin/Gedan/Adjatha are all taking up some heavy lifting in the company. I plotted out the entire myrellion peace quest in bullet points, might write it soon since it isn’t smutty. We’ve largely settled on some core parts of how we would like to end the game and wrap up some plot threads. New bugfix pub patch tonight with some bust art updates. IT’S OUT! (You can eyeball the discord announcement channel as well, accessible from the chat link above.)

Full Report: After a post that I can only really describe as necessary TMI, I did a lot of soul searching and finally delegated some of my responsilibies to team members. I had the terrible combination of becoming largely sexually desensitized and then trapping myself in a negative feedback loop about not getting things done and then feeling bad about not getting things done. I had to break that cycle, and I fucking have.

This week I’ve finally blocked out the entirety of the Myrellion peace path. I know every event that needs to happen and the broad strokes of how it will proceed and exactly which NPCs will be touched along the way. The bullet point version takes up two full pages already. Also worked out were more details on mysterious NPCs like the owner of KihaCorp – who I had two full breakdowns of potential options for before changing gears to go with something Adjatha & Savin brought to my attention. Of course, I can’t share those details quite yet without spoilering future works.

One idea I slipped into the doc that I’d like to weave into the game if possible is that Celise saved Victor from an assassination or kidnapping attempt at some point in the past, which further cements why he would go so far as push her along with you on your quest. I don’t mind sharing this one since it’s so small and might not ultimately make it into the game, but it’s a nice connection to think about.

We spent two full hours in meetings today going over all of this. Adjatha is going to be stepping up to help review and make decisions on event submissions as well as ensuring the team’s writing maintains the game’s tone. Savin is going to be managing writing commissions and helping me keep the details of the lore & universe straight. Gedan is more officially being named as the code director & architect – a long overdue promotion since she has basically been doing this already. Together the big three and I will collaboratively maintain forward momentum with TiTS and manage the rest of the staff. (Also they get more $$$!)

My immediate future is going to be in the bug fixing mines. More than five pages of new bugs have piled up since my last proper pass on the forums thanks to the tireless efforts of the community, and I’m going to get them cleared. Next week’s meetings should allow us to refine our focus further, but don’t be fooled into thinking I have nothing of merit to share. Those of you keeping an eye on my twitter will have seen some previews of some of the updates from the javascript team, and I’m going to dig into those next!

The options screen is coming together really quickly, and thanks to the addition of subheadings, it no longer needs to be crowded together on one page!
You can see that some familiar controls are returning as well…
We also have the ability to order the bust artists priority to your whims – or just turn the art off entirely if you prefer to stick to your own imagination. (The blank buttons are a known display issue on chrome that will be fixed soon.)
Custom color schemes are a feature we wanted to have from the get-go, but due to my… unique coding style never got a chance to see the light of day. Now we have it functional in game. It’s possible to turn the entire screen day-glow pink if you want, and a built-in color picker should help those unfamiliar with the hexadecimal color codes when it comes to selecting colors.
Leek has a few more options he intends to wire up, after which he will be moving on to working on the level up screen.

DISCLAIMER: the below screenshot is a mock-up, not a game capture like the above.

Jacques00 is going to be doing some icons for each class to have, and some of the formatting may change, but getting these systems working in game is Leek’s next task. We talked about adding supercripted ‘?’s next to the stats there so you can mouse over and get a better description of what the stats do – I’ll need to get on writing them sooner than later I suspect.

After seeing all of that, you might ask about what Gedan is up to. That’s understandible, but the answers almost entirely land under the hood. For most of the week I couldn’t even open the game because of some changes she made to the preloader screwed with Chrome, and she’s been a busy bee chasing down legacy bugs revealed by the port and making sure that the data structures and organization will be mature enough to avoid us having to make a bunch of knee-jerk save formatting changes once it hits public hands. Also: ships. There’s a whole lot to work on there, and she’s making them work better (or at least more correctly) than ever before.

Did you know that ships were programmed in as NPCs, with the NPC stats mapped to the ship stats? So if you wanted to check a ship’s speed, it might be stored as a piece of data in the “reflexes” field. That shouldn’t be the case going forward and should make touching that content a little less painful.

Whew! This post certainly grew into proportions to rival Tank Kannon, but I’ll wrap it up here. The public patch for TiTS will catch an update tonight (probably into the AM hours…) with some bug fixes and new art, and the changelog is live! Thanks guys. For the first time in a long time, sitting down to TiTS has felt… almost effortless. Really, thanks for sticking with us.

0.8.154 Changelog:

  • New busts: Burt, Doctor Po, the Orgasmender, the Sleep Fapnea Machine, and the Dick Designer.
  • It is no longer possible for ‘tuars without a penis to get locked in Pink’s sex menu. (She’s one of the Love Starz.) It should block you outright from selecting “Sex”.
  • Bimbo Kiro should now appear nude at all times, as she is wont to do.
  • An uncoded variation in one of Ardia’s scenes has been corrected. Previously both variants would display at once with a ‘/’ in the middle.
  • Capacity checks for Kaede have been properly standardized by adding a proper statblock for her. Previously they varied from 250-370 depending on which scene you asked!
  • Some errors with the Inseminator Pro have been fixed.
  • Starchild’s tail-cock scenes should no longer error out at every attempt to describe the scene’s star organ.
  • Several smaller typos and grammatical errors have been fixed, as well as some poorly applied bold and italics in some tooltips.
  • A version with some images embedded in scenes and the ability to zoom in on character art is available, and for now, you still need a stand-alone flash player to play it. We sadly can’t pack it with the .exe wrapper we use due to incompatibilities in the coding techniques.

That’s one page of bug reports down (well, mostly. A few of them I need replies on…) and many more to go… No Patreon/SubscriberStar plug here today. I want to get more done before we resume shilling!