0.42 Reflection and 0.43 Preview

Hello, perverts! I took some time to rest over the holidays after doing a Christmas release. The weather where I am has been nasty and it's been a bit of a struggle for me to stay centered, but I'm working to get myself together. I'm not sure when the next release will be out; it could be this upcoming week or it could take longer.

Reflecting on The Pileous Retort

I'm super glad to finally get this horror expedition out! It'd been bouncing around in my notes and head for a long time. It combines a bunch of things that have stuck in my head: complicated gender feels, the nightmare children's film The Peanut Butter Solution, the apparently universal plight of the now-mostly-defunct charcoal burner, and patron Green-Eyed Monster introducing me to the huldra (AKA skogsrå or ulda) in the comments to my notes on version 0.37.

This is maybe my least sexy horror expedition. I've got a serious thing myself about head shaving on femme folks, so I found it titillating, but my initial plans for the expedition didn't have a single sex scene in the traditional sense. The storytelling around the fire served as a way for the expedition to have some, as well as giving a few more hints at the backstory behind the situation.

I don't have a while lot to say about the play scene that I added, except that it's pretty representative of the game and my priorities that it took so long to be able to have regular old vanilla vaginal sex with Theresa on demand. :p Oral and anal sex as play options are definitely on their way, too.

Next Release

I mentioned in the previous preview that I wanted to add what I'm now calling "ambience": bits of scene-framing text that help make the world feel alive. That's the main feature I'm working on for this release.

To start with, every time you enter town there'll be a high chance for a random single line of scene-setting. Some of these will be snippets of text of normal town life with random variation that can recur often, but there will also be rarer or even one-off events that might be more mysterious or memorable. I also want these to change as the acts progress so that the world gets weirder over time.

My initial goal with these is for them to make the town feel like a living place instead of an empty hub with four people that just wait motionless for you to talk to them. One thing I don't want to happen is for the ambience to feel stale or repetitive. Just in case, I also plan to add the ability to disable these ambiences entirely in the preferences.

Beyond those things, I've added a basic cheat feature that, at the moment, I plan to make available via a password to Center of Attention ($5) patrons. It'll let you gain Ken, change Theresa's stats, or advance the story. I'll try not to let it completely bug out the game, but as with all cheats, there might be unexpected behavior, so it's meant for folks who are replaying or otherwise willing to experience jank.

You can also expect bug fixes and general cleanup, as I have a bit of a backlog of things I want to fix or polish. I've started work on an anal sex play scene, but I don't know if it'll be finished in time for this release.

Let me know if you have any thoughts or feedback! Thank you so much for your support.