Progress on v0.3.0

So I've mentioned that I wanted to add more things in the game to spend G on. My idea was that you could hire a party of people to basically go and collect ingredients for you on expeditions. Different types of people (witches, bandits, or travelers) would collect different types of things. I also though it'd be fun to have a little self-contained progression in this system, so the party members could level up and the player character's "leadership" or whatever would increase and your maximum party size could increase, too (along with the costs and loot).

The idea is that you'll pay and send out the expedition, and after about a week it will come back and you can collect your loot, level up your party, hire and fire members, and send it out again if you have the funds.

Who could have guessed this would be complicated to implement?

That's facetious, I obviously did know that this was a bit of an overcooked system when I started working on it. I thought it would be more fun to try to gamify this and introduce progression instead of having just a simple rare ingredient shop or something, and it fit the theme of commerce and servants that this update has.

This system, and some technical problems over the last week or two, have slowed development a bit for me. What does this mean? Well, not really that much, thankfully. I wanted to target October 1 for the release of v0.3.0, but I never announced that or set that in stone, and it was always a little bit of an optimistic date. I expect the update to probably come sometime closer to October 8.

As I have mentioned, I think this update will probably end up being smaller in terms of raw word count than v0.2.0, but it should cover more story ground, so I think it should still be a rather compelling chunk of content, and it may even wind up longer in terms of gameplay because of that.

On a more positive note, lactation is in the game and I think it's pretty hot. I still need to add more supporting content to it, but all the mechanics work fine. You can take the potion to begin lactating and it builds up over time like urine. You can lactate at home (or in public with the correct perks) to collect milk, and you can use potion magic to feed off of and collect milk from most female NPCs.

I've also added several other potions and perks, and even some all new categories of growth (preferences and experience types).

I'm gonna hunker down and try to plow through the expeditions system this weekend then get back to writing as much content as I possibly can. Expect an update preview before this month is over, or very early in October at the latest. I'll announce the release date for the update then.

I'm going to try to get the next devlog done soon too, but I don't have a solid date for that yet. I'm thinking maybe the 28th. It's about half done, but I don't want to give up dame dev time to finish it, so it's gonna have to wait until I have free time but can't work on the game.