Weekly update - Next Version, Jobs, and Saving

Hey gang,

Apologies for any typos or mistakes this week in advance, I have the flu and took some heavy pretty shit to keep working.

So barring any of us being hit by a bus, the new release will be out as planned to backers this weekend, and to the public two weeks later as usual.  The main thing in this release is, of course, the first society decision you need to make, advising the twins on whether you think a class based system, or one that prioritizes on might is the way to go. You'll have to have a good think about this, as it'll affect your relationship with other people in the castle, and have further reaching consequences.  

The release will also have its usual collection of ruler, exploration, and resource events. This is sort of a landmark release because it takes the amounts of the events in the game to over one hundred. If you've been following development since the early days, you know I wanted to make a large, unpredictable world where lots of different things can happen, and this is the first step to achieving that.

I've also been trying to find additional writers for when the patreon is doing better, so a few of the events in this release were written by NoneSuch (who you may know for his work on CoC/TiTS), and hopefully I'll be able to hire him a bit more in the future, as I like how they turned out. 

The following release will focus on adding the introduction to the job system, while allowing you to assign your first core NPC, Alexia, to work in the castle. I wanted this system to have related events, because it offers opportunities for good old fashioned lewd fun (I mean who doesn't want to see NPCs stripping in the tavern, "assisting" in the breeding pits, or "raising morale" in the orc barracks one group at a time? ;)), but I realised once you had a few NPCs, this would quickly clog up the ruler events pool. So, to solve this issue, we are introducing a new event pool, the NPC pool, that has a chance to occur at the end of the turn in addition to the ruler event. This will not only be about jobs, but other things going on around the castle when Rowan isn't there. This will allow us to flesh out Alexia more as some people think she is a bit flat, as well as the rest of the inhabitants of the castle.

Lastly, I know you guys would really like the saves between version to work more often that not, so I'm planning to hire someone to build functions to make that happen. I suspect what we need is something to check the existing saved game map against the current map and generate anything that is missing, as well as something that checks for necessary variables and sets a default if they are missing. This is beyond my skill level, hence my need to hire someone, and I can't really afford it at the moment, but as soon as the money is there, I'll try and get this sorted.