July 23 Update

Instead of a meme this week, we have a new piece of fanart! This just showed up on Steam one day and I didn't notice until now. ^-^

I get a fairly steady stream of requests for TLS, so with less forward progress the previous weeks, I've been trying to get on top of those. Let me talk about a paired set of the requests and why I can sometimes be slow to respond to them when I'm entrenched in creating new content.

One suggestion was that Ginasta's piece of custom equipment should require a Crystal of Stability instead of a Crystallized Divinity, for lore purposes. I thought this made logical sense, but I was leery to do a fiddly change like this.

What actually changed my mind was noticing that the rewards after the Incubus War include two Crystallized Divinities... if one of those was changed, then each nation that offers a reward would offer a different permanent upgrade component. I find the symmetry of this very appealing, so that tipped me over the edge.

Naturally I had to go change the actual reward, then Ginasta's requirement. I also had to add a new compensator event so that past saves that got all the items can convert one to the other. It would have been even more of a headache to lock this event in various ways or prevent the player from exploiting this between versions, but I decided those were a step too far. This way no saves are left behind, and people can always cheat if they want.

Oh, and I suppose this post was also a necessary step, for the sake of people writing walkthroughs. FYI, as of the next version, the elven reward will be a Crystal of Stability.

Another change from the same comment was adding a certain dead character (SPOILERS) to the harem menu. I thought this was a sentimental touch appropriate to Yarra and added dialogue for it. I also got most of the way through tweaking the harem menu, which is not made to be changed mid-game and always causes new errors. I remembered to add a line to fix the image calls, but couldn't remember what needs to happen so the menu doesn't crash the game. This has happened before, but it's always so many months/years apart that I forget. =/ That crash is staying in the game (for old saves) until I remember or someone reminds me why this script always crashes when changed.

Is the game better or even significantly different because of these changes? Not really. But I think the harem menu bit is a nice emotional touch and the resources are now more evenly spread between types. They were worth doing, I think, and TLS is nothing if not the accumulation of details.