Update - Twyla at the mercy of the amazon

tl;dr - There's been progress on LMO and AotNM, plus I'm making some changes to the balance of PAL for AotNM.

This week's image

I think at best this is an image that I include to demonstrate some of my limitations. :) I've got some way better pictures that I made this week (one of Twyla performing a titfuck - look forward to that) but for one reason or another I didn't think it was a good idea to show them right now. I've also got plenty of good pics in reserve, but for whatever reason this seemed like the right one for this week.

Speaking of that, kind of, I often have to avoid showing elements of a particular shot because I just can't and this is an example where I've had to be very careful about the framing of the picture. Here Twyla's just been caught in a rope snare; I hope that's reasonably clear. At least the text will help make it clear. :/ I don't have the props to show much of this (I bought some especially, just to get this far, but other things I'd want just don't exist and I'm not a 3D modeller) and the character models don't like being upside-down.

By the way, the buff girl is a character you won't have seen yet: Ashera the amazon. There are more characters coming in the LMO endings that you haven't even seen yet. I don't know if you've noticed but we're trying to develop a kind of interaction between the elements of different endings; what you see going on in one ending might not be fully explained, but you'll get more info in a different ending. Ashera is one of those elements. I'm planning to bring in Ashera with the next update.

The poll on the spells

Thanks for participating in the poll this week! This was an interesting set of results. I'm altering some of the spells in certain ways to make some of them a bit more useful, but I wanted to know first what would be the ones people aren't using or liking. Mostly I could have predicted the more and less popular ones; I could have guessed flare would be popular, for example, and even though it's not especially powerful I expected cure to do well. I was surprised that people aren't using remedy - that one's great! But since it's effective I likely won't improve it; it'll be a little treat for those who discover its value.

Here's a few changes I'm making:

• Iku will get a boost to cure at high levels. (+10 points)
• Iku's holy will do more damage (x4 hand rather than x3)
• Iku's strength will now increase the target's attack damage for ten turns (rather than three), or it can be cast without a target to strengthen the whole group for five turns.
• Kim's bind will now unbalance the target in addition to reducing critical chance. It can also be cast multiple times if you want to get the unbalance again.
• Kim's fire will now do x3 hand, rather than x2.

The other two least popular ones were Kim's bio and weaken - I haven't decided what to do about those yet. I don't know whether this will make people use the unused spells, but so long as they make you stop and think about what might be useful I'll be happy.

Combat changes in AotNM

Further to that, I've made a couple of fairly significant gameplay changes. Combat can now only be done in the morning or the afternoon (no after-dark battles), but it will not consume a time period. You can only do one per morning or afternoon, but you can go and do something else as well. This will mean you can't cram in a bunch of hard battles early quite as fast as before, but you can go to higher levels later.

You'll also find that Kenji will now start at 1 in each stat (rather than 0) and can get to 15 in the skills, rather than 10. To combat those higher stats unbalancing the overall time management gameplay I've put a limit on the number of one-on-one sex scenes you can get in one play through. You can now only get 4 girls in a run unless you've got the harem code in. Before that was about all you could do anyway, but now it's theoretically possible to get more, so I've put a hard limit on it to prevent exploitation. Basically, all these changes should make the game a little easier overall, but there's more to see. Since there will be more post-sex scene content I want you to be able to get the one-on-one sex scenes a little earlier.

Progress!

I've finished the pics for the new Hiroshi scenes. I actually thought I'd finished making the pics several times, each time deciding, "no, it'd be better if I made another one here." There's some nice ones in this set so I think if you're into these scenes you'll be happy with the results. I think the writing has turned out well too, although I'm not quite finished that yet I've done quite a lot of it.

The plan for this month is to put out a v1.1 of PAL, so I need to have a decent number of updates to make it worth noticing, even if it's not an Attack of the Nega Maids release. At the moment it's largely a graphical update, combined with the combat and balance changes I've mentioned above.

I've also been making some general progress on LMO's next update; I've been editing EFon's writing, plus adding some writing of my own, doing some programming and making pictures. In the next version you'll be able to have Twyla titfuck Lug, as I mentioned above. I'm hoping to add two more endings, too - I need to get to work on that. :) Those endings are partially done, but they need editing and I need to finish the pictures.

This was quite a long update! Do you think the picture is okay, or should I go back to the drawing board? Do the combat changes sound about right? Do you have any more suggestions about the spells? Or any other questions and comments? Let me know below!