Progress Update - January 5th, 2022

Hey everyone and a late Happy New Years!

Halftilt here with a New Years update, it'll mostly be about things to come since I just got back from a New Years vacation with some friends and haven't had much time to dedicate to working on Lustiest Lair these past weeks.

But looking back on the New Year, it does feel like the mod's come a long way from when I first started Lustiest Lair in 2020, hard to believe I've been working on Lustiest Lair for two years now. I 100% appreciate all of the support I've been receiving from you on this journey and feel like Lustiest Lair's only been getting better because of it! I truly feel blessed to have all of the support that you've given me!!!

So, what's going on?

I plan on focusing this next month on doing bug fixes, cleaning up Lustiest Lair's file structure, and creating some scripts to automate some of the more tedious work that I do before every upload. I also plan on re-uploading The Slaver Standalone as The Slaver Queen on Nexus.

I've been putting this work off for a while given all the new stuff that's been coming in the pipeline -- and with all of the support I've been receiving the sprites for new monsters is coming in faster than I can code; and don't get me wrong, this is an amazing problem to have, I wouldn't have it any other way. ^^

This month's focus on fixes, cleaning and scripts should accomplish two things.

First: It should help me eliminate recurring problems that show up anytime I release an update for Lustiest Lair -- I'm always manually looking for missing files that may result in crashes, errors, or just causing some things to never show up. It isn't until these get reported or I find them later in testing that these get fixed.

A much needed improvement will be to automate all these checks, given that I'm a team of one when it comes to coding this thing, the size of Lustiest Lair is just getting unwieldy for me to manually check everything; and given my day job is as an automation tester, it's kind of silly that I don't have these checks automated already.

Second: It will make releases a lot faster and frequent for Lustiest Lair -- a good chunk of my time can be spent working on the new content instead if I'm confident that the finished work is actually finished.

Bonus: Potentially, this can help other modders in the future. If the scripts are easy to enough to use, I could release them as modding tools and give back to the community.

Also, on the topic of bug fixes, I feel there's one I should address as it's been showing up pretty frequently. The "crash on capture" bug. Essentially, if a monster tries to capture one of your heroes, it might crash. I've been pulling my hair out on this thing, contacting other modders, browsing DD modding forums and the MLD Discord and it seems the consensus is as such: "capture's broken lol"

It wasn't very encouraging given how immersive capture is to a NSFW mod like Lustiest Lair.

So, after a lot of thinking on this issue -- there's going to be two versions of all of the capture monsters in Lustiest Lair. One will remain the same with the capture ability as is. And if it works for you, that's great. 

The second version will use a workaround utilizing a "turn stealing mechanic". The monster will transform, it will play the "capture" animation, but your hero will just lose their turn while they remain on the battlefield.

And that's about it for the progress update.

Thank you all so much for your feedback, patience and your support. Lustiest Lair wouldn't be where it is without your help and with your continued support, it's only getting better.

I'm excited to see what 2022 has in store for us!