0.41 Reflection and 0.42 Preview

Hi, perverts! I've been held up for a few days this week by a good, old-fashioned, non-pandemic illness. While the symptoms were unpleasant, it was kind of nice, in a way, to have a cough where I knew who I got it from and that it would be over in a few days with rest and drugs. I'm mostly better now and ready to update y'all!

Reflecting on Pappy and Other Fixes

One of my longstanding sets of writing is finally done and released! I wanted a play scene with each of the major side characters, and Pappy's was the last one to be implemented. It's nice being able to check another milestone off the list.

I do notice that the last three characters to get play scenes were the three characters who weren't women, with the transmasculine character last. There's probably some internalized heteronormativity there, or at least some strategic choices around what updates I thought would be most appealing. That's something for me to keep in mind as I keep working.

This release had another less-obvious milestone reached. Characters in the game were originally "six heads tall", giving them rather cartoony proportions. As part of refining the art in general, I shifted to seven-head-tall proportions, which is closer to real life (although my art will always be pretty cartoony). 

I gradually updated character art as appropriate, and before the previous update, the sole remaining piece of art with old proportions was Dr. Harvey's, who stood out in a bit of a distracting way. In this update, I did a simple adjustment to his art that means all characters are now set up with matching framing and general proportions. 

The next bit of art to revise, I think, is Meg's art. She's had the most overhauls of anyone except maybe Theresa. She appears very early, has relatively subtle expressions, and a few other nuances of her face and body that I find hard to capture. At this point, she looks distracting compared to the other characters' improved art. I don't know just when that'll get done, but I think it's the next visual priority for the game.

Next Release

The next release, though, will have the first new horror expedition in a while! I've hinted a bit at this one, including that it's inspired in part by a truly bizarre 1980s children's fantasy/horror movie out of Canada. The connection is loose, but anyone who got nightmares thanks to the film will almost certainly recognize it.

It'll also be maybe the most explicitly queer-allegory expedition I've done. Most of them have been in some way about queerness (or general non-normative sexuality), of course, but this one's pretty on-the-nose. I'm doing my best not to make it feel heavy-handed, but we'll see how it turns out.

The other big new feature on my list, which may not make it into this release, is to implement random snippets when moving around the world, so that (for example) you'd get a very brief description of something happening in town when you arrive.

I want to give players the feeling that Barrowport is a living place and not just a ghost town with a few people waiting for you to visit them at work. I think having things happen around you will help reduce that feeling that the game world is purely reactive. However, I'm also very conscious of not having these snippets feel tedious or repetitive: I'll need to make sure there are enough different options and that they only repeat in ways that make sense.

We'll see if the new random snippets make it into 0.42 or get delayed. Beyond that, I've gotten reports of a few places where custom outfits for Theresa don't get displayed in certain older training scenes. I'm going to fix those up, and appreciate any reports of other places where little things don't make sense or match up!

As always, please keep sharing word of the game where you feel comfortable! I would love to get this project to the point where it is more sustainable, and a big part of that will need to be word-of-mouth. A casual mention in a Reddit thread earlier this week resulted in hundreds of extra views of the game, so it really does make a difference.