Merry Yule & Happy Holidays!

Happy holidays everyone!

It's time for another year in review, and I hope you're all able to find some time to relax and cozy up during the holidays; maybe while you're reading this post. I myself am sitting in a comfy chair in my living room, nurturing my feet after a devastating fall I had yesterday. I slipped down a small flight of stairs, and because I slipped instead of tripping, I managed to get my toes twisted underneath me in a way where I effectively dropped a tenth of my weight onto each from 8 inches or 20 cm of height multiple times. So, today I will stay put and do the most Christmassy thing ever, and write about my porn game to our amazing community, starting with what we managed to do this year!

New Website & Domain

The website received a big upgrade this year, both in appearance and technical implementation, and it now features a centralized game launcher on the front page that has also been developed and tested for itch.io and Steam. We also finally left behind the old battlemageroyal.com domain and name, moving forward towards a new future where the game isn't confused for a battle royale game. I'm really quite happy with how the website looks now. I think it's a lot more professional-looking, and it does a much better job of introducing players to what the game is about and setting the right expectations. We also added support for playing the game without registering, which has made it easier for new players to try out the game with less of a commitment. Because this is an adult game, simply the notion of having to create an account was clearly making a lot of potential players uncomfortable.

Steam Client

The Steam client is pretty much done and ready to be launched! I have been rigorously testing the game inside the Steam client that uses NW.js, which is essentially a standalone Chromium browser coupled with Node.js. Audio support was also added to the game, since players will expect the game to have audio when they find it on Steam. Audio is much less expected of browser games, and most players don't play browser games with audio is are often put off by a game suddenly making sounds, though I presume some of this also stems from audio often being terrible in browser games.

I have a friend who is a video game composer who will also be helping out with music for the game in the new year! It's the same person who has written and composed the music that plays in my streams and indeed also the same person who helped me set up the voice-to-voice system I use when streaming! It hasn't been a priority to flesh out the game with sound effects yet, but I expect we'll get around to it in the coming year, and I am also pondering the possibility of adding voice-over to the game!

Desires

The new desire system and turn-based actions are probably the largest and most complex additions that came to fruition this year! Features like this one are the most fulfilling to work on as a game designer and programmer, because of how unique the cases are, and the challenges they bring cannot be solved by simply finding the answer online. It takes experience, research, inspiration, careful planning, and time to create these systems that uniquely fit and add a soul to the game.

Desires and sexual preferences are also fundamental to the PvE overhaul that is underway, and already incorporate a system for fantastical body part sensitivity and erogenous zones that will be utilized by fortune cards and spell effects to enhance sexual fantasies.

Choice Bar

The choice bar was a new addition to the action bars system that was necessary for supporting the many actions and reactions related to desires, and incidentally it also opened up for new features, like a more intuitive pipeline for spells that require confirmation, the potential of spells with options that I have yet to utilize, better way of displaying complex actions for items such as sex toys, and the ability for inanimate players to interact with and react to their owner.

The ability for inanimate players to cast spells on their owner, in particular, has been something I've looked forward to having in the game for a long time, and I was pleased that this gave me an excellent opportunity to add it! The ability to cast spells on an offline owner required a little bit more work, but I also thought it was an important part of the fantasy for inanimate players to be able to play tricks on their unaware owners, and it was well worth the effort!

Text Formatting

Text formatting was also expanded this year with support for floating images that allow players a bit more control over how text is wrapped around images in their profiles. Text styling was also expanded to local chat in-game, so players can write bold, underlined, and italic text in their messages. This and more have also been implemented for authors to use when writing PvE content.

Anti-cheat Measures

This was also the year when I decided to implement stronger anti-cheat measures in the game, which wasn't something I hoped to do or liked doing, but something I realized I had to do in order to keep the game fair for everyone.

Dynamic Avatars

This year, we decided to halt work on dynamic avatars, for the most part, to focus our efforts elsewhere, like the Steam client and PvE overhaul. Once the PvE overhaul is ready, we'll resume work on the dynamic avatars in full effect!

The dynamic avatars are exceptionally advanced and need to support a great variety of assets and traits that can be altered and changed in part or in full at any time and for no reason. For the time being, we've focused on the challenges this design poses and how we might solve these challenges.

This year, I added support for WebP, which is a format that combines the benefits of lossy compression commonly known from JPEG, with the benefits of an alpha channel for transparency commonly known from PNG, to create an image format that is ideal for sprite textures in games. The game was running into a storage issue because of the many different images that are required for every item in the game, an issue that would become exponential with the introduction of dynamic avatars, and so we had to find a solution, and we did. In order to add WebP support to the backend, however, I had to upgrade the PHP version of the website, which required me to make adjustments to a great deal of the backend code for the website; it was in dire need of a refactoring, regardless, so I'm glad that I took the time to upgrade the PHP version to a more recent version, and I welcome the improvements it have brought.

In the past month, I also did a bit of research into dynamic coloring of clothes on dynamic avatars, and I've learned that with a bit of clever coding, I can efficiently perform the image processing on the user's GPU before passing the result into Live2D for the dynamic avatar to use, which means I won't have to store images for each color variant of an item for the dynamic avatar, and no extra data will need to be downloaded when a part of a player character's attire changes color; it will simply recolor the parts of the avatar that needs recoloring using the existing assets, drastically reducing the amount of data that needs to be stored and downloaded for player avatars!

Authoring Tool

Support for Twine as an authoring tool was also completed this year, though it hasn't been made properly publicly available yet. The documentation for AineScript, a SugarCube-like language that can be used inside Twine to write for Battle Mages, can be found at the link below:

https://test.battlemageserotica.com/aine.php

PvE Overhaul

Preparing the game for a Steam release and a broader audience has been a big priority this year, which includes the new PvE overhaul that I wasn't able to bring to fruition this year. Despite of it, many components of the new system are already live on the test server, and the entire pipeline for writing and playing PvE content has been designed and mapped out in fine detail to be executed upon. Some of the finished components include a new way of traveling around campus using a map, a favor system that doubles as a PvE reward and a means for PvP players to earn rewards outside PvE, game logic for whether a player is exposed and how, room selection during PvE so players have more control over what challenges they face and what rewards they find, and finally, the basic backend logic for tracking PvE progress and challenges.

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In the new year, I will continue to work towards a releasable version of the new PvE overhaul. As to not postpone its release more than absolutely necessary, I will attempt to release it in part, starting with only what is necessary to support what is already in the game and the core game loop of the new PvE system. I've made excellent progress on the PvE overhaul this year, and I'm particularly excited about how the cards that will be used for anything from room selection to fortune cards and bad effects have turned out inside the game, and I'm looking forward to sharing it with everyone in the new year!

As always, December is a difficult time of the year to find excess time to work on the game, but I will continue to work on the game whenever I can. Right now, I'm spending a lot of time helping some friends who are also my primary employer finish up their game. I owe them a lot for the work and opportunities they have given me through the years, and if not for them, I ultimately wouldn't have been able to spend this much time developing Battle Mages, as most game studios and companies in general detest the idea of a developer that only work part time, seeing as most would prefer you to work overtime with no pay.

My greatest regret this year is that I didn't prioritize finding the time to stream more. This is a recurring regret of mine, because when I'm pressured for time, it's one of the few things that can give when something has to give, but I think it's tragic to give up on something that makes you happy and allows you to connect with other people, for the sake of efficiency. So, this year, my New Year's resolution will be to start streaming again and keep streaming regularly, so even when it's difficult to find the time to work on the game that I think it and its players deserve, I will still be able to connect with the community in a meaningful way and share my progress with everyone!

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Normally, posts are backer exclusive, but this one is available to everyone, and I would like to thank everyone who's played with us this year for being part of our journey, the game's history, and making this community what it is; thank you ❤️

If you're not already a backer, I hope you will consider supporting the game's development and help us make the game even better in the new year, and to everyone that are, I want to thank you again for your incredibly support and I am tremendously thankful for all the new players and backers that have decided to join us this year, and for all the loyal supporters and players that keep coming back to play with us year after year and making all this possible ❤️

I wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, and I hope to see you all for the January Dev Log and my next live stream, which I promise will be soon!

Happy New Year!

— XOXO, Tinon