0.6.0 Behind the Scenes and 0.7.0 Preview

Hi, perverts! It's been a stressful past week, right? You might notice that update 6 came out on Friday instead of the usual Thursday. I got a bit of burnout: in addition to world events, I was overambitious with art (with a dead stylus battery!) and also did a seriously huge training sequence. So I'm going to try and take it easy this week and get back to releasing on Thursday. Here are some thoughts!

Education and Morality

So sex and desire in general is often fucked up, and queer sex and desire are subject to social pressures that often make it take form in weird and problematic ways. Look at sissification/coerced-bi kinks, or trans folks who fetishize misgendering: when society tries to keep us down, we often seek to reclaim power over the oppression by getting off on it. And that's cool, I think: as long as we know our kinks are fucked up and we engage in them in a risk-aware way, I think it's a net good for folks to get off to messed-up stuff.

But a lot of sex games (and porn works in general) don't really seem to be approaching this stuff thoughtfully and have a sort of juvenile feel that implies the creators not only didn't have direct experience with the acts and situations being explored. That's not the sort of game I want to make, so I'm trying to include some stuff in Ruin Me that gives better examples of the hotness of understanding how genitals work and how we can fuck people safely.

You saw that a bit in update 5, where the player and Theresa have a (probably belated) chat about safe words. Update 6 has a full-on anatomy lesson, including some stuff that I wished I'd learned waaaay earlier than I did. If players get off on my stuff and also learn about their bodies and how to have better, safer sex, then I'll be super happy.

But it's still a kinky horror game. I'm not going to have every one of Theresa's "lessons" include a lecture, I won't bother with any condom-purchasing minigames, and the monsters won't check in on potential triggers. Unless I think it'd be hot.

Art Update

As I said over the weekend, I'll be redrawing the "Theresa kneeling" art from update 6. That'll probably be the only new art for this week, and will be included in the public release of update 6 (version 0.6.1) as well as in update 7. I'm using a side perspective that will be muuuch easier for me to execute without it getting super janky.

Thanks again for your patience with my growing art skills! Let me know if you have any feedback on where you'd want art cleaned up, where you would want art added, or places where it's just fine for the game to focus on text.

Next Release

0.7.0 will include the redrawn kneeling art, as said above. I'm also working on a horror expedition called The Treacherous Splay where you can have a picnic with a charming young man beside a stream that doesn't kill people anymore. This one should give the opportunity for some weird kinks. I hope they're fun!

If I finish the art and the expedition and still have energy and time, I'll probably add a play scene or two. The next big plot scene is coming up soon; once it's written, it will be accessible when all of Theresa's stats are at 2. But that's for another week.

Let me know if you have any feedback or requests! I'm especially eager for tips on how I should be promoting Ruin Me and encouraging patronage, so let me know if there's something I did that convinced you to make the generous decision to support me.

Thanks!