December Status Report 2024

Disregard it's already 2025, it's time to talk about December! Cause I didn't want to make one of these while I could be working on the v26.7 update, which didn't come out until January as mentioned in the earlier public post. And the extra time buffer did let me test more and catch bugs that none of you needed to see! But there was still a few that managed to sneak by, hence the recent bug fix update.

Anyways! Start of December was getting things back into motion further from the month prior, and finishing up the Ancilla CG implementation and edits on the Ghost Trio writing Val did, then I went into implementing Nara's CG, and then realized the layers weren't separated properly for the guy parts to be recolored so I had to get NickBeja to tweak that when they were able.

So with that partially done I did some mild balance considerations for the game that led me to tuning the HP values on two of the harder bosses in the game to be more in line with each other, and hopefully make a certain one of them less of a progression wall. The Iabel tweak was a no brainer once someone mentioned her getting out of hand on her floor, so her last encounter will be less punishing if you make mistakes on the lead up. Then I decided it was finally time to do something about Demon Layer which has been horrifically overtuned for a long while, and hopefully it sits in a healthier spot now and also isn't useless, I have some longer term ideas on how to make it more engaging to use as well as more options for it, but I'm not going to rush into doing something like that. Which then led me into tuning a bunch of MP costs given how lenient the MP economy is for skills in general, especially for some skills in the INT tree, which given INT gives you MP, I figured it would also help disincentivize people from cherry picking them for their non-int builds. Though INT might need a bit more MP to compensate potentially. This also means the higher cost skills scale more punishingly with Paralysis' current iteration, which may also still get changed again. Also less Goddess' Favor because it was way too much of a get out of jail free card for little investment.

Then it was into editing the start of the Lovol and Ampere stuff Val has started working on, then back to finishing up the Nara CG implementation, and then more editing. Somewhere in there I also added in the Kaia short cut, but I don't remember specifically where in the timeline. Maybe I should take notes or something.

So about this point it was getting close to the halfway point of the month, and had not gotten back to the Livewire encounter I started, so I went over the scene interactions I did the month prior, cause they definitely needed a second pass, and then passed those to Val for editing. And before I started into the fight proper I sat down and took a hefty chunk of time one day to think on the capital location itself to better finalize how to properly execute the connective tissue to all the things I want to do in it, given I still had too many ideas on how to go about the capital, as well as finalizing some of the character encounters I have for it that had been floating a more nebulous state than I realized. So now I'm very confident in how I'm going to proceed with some of the other districts and how to tie the different mechanics I had in mind together. Without it ending up a Jenga pile, or needing to spend too long on a single district chunk. But designing it as its own sort of dungeon may still need me to shuffle some locations around from my initial draft map, but that's not really an issue.

Then from there it was a myriad of back and forth on the Lovol+Ampere edits, and me making the Livewire fight and sending its parts for edits. There were some small changes to my initial draft of the fights mechanics as I went, but nothing too major, Rebellion Circuit definitely was an addition to it. Said fight also made me finally make an Icon for Crit Debuffs, and make a tag for stackable buff/debuff status effects. While overall the fight's nothing super complicated (they are a generic encounter not a boss fight after all), they are definitely a bit more involved than the Salarisi fight, and as a group encounter it always adds a bit of extra work. But I'm very happy with how the Livewire fight turned out. I also think the change in workflow also helped with making it, as I did interactions/attacks by category rather than all at once, so eg titfuck skills>titfuck dialogue>titfuck orgasm lines>titfuck stance escape lines, rather than what I used to do which is all skills>all skill dialogue> all stance escape lines> all orgasm lines. I think most people who've modded the game for a fight can tell you that doing all the stance escape lines is kinda pain. I may have also done this workflow for the D.P. fight but I don't remember tbh.

So once the fight was done I went and did the loss scene, then the toll paying scene, val did the double titfuck loss scene. And by the time all that was said, edited and done, plus a bunch of testing and fixing over a few days, it was the end of December, and between overworking to do the out of combat interactions when wearing a livewire accessory, cutting them for a later update and putting out the update immediately, or pushing it back to the end of that week, I picked push back so neither me nor val ended up overworking, and I could test things more. Then after more testing, writing, editing, and new years, update was out on last Friday!

I'm pretty sure if I didn't take Christmas off I might have been able to get it out sooner, but rest on holidays is important.

So then after that it's been rest, then bug fixing, bug fix post, and going through all the assorted monthly house keeping like making this post. Which given we're getting deeper into January I'm unsure if update will be fully ready by end of this month or not, but we'll have to see on that one. But I think v26.7a is the only bugfix patch I'll NEED to do for now. I think.

For the next update I'm thinking of setting up the 'outline' for the Starlight and Aphrodesia Districts to show the way movement will work, as well as another one of the Generic Capital fights. And I do want to stress I mean outline, not the entire districts in one go, so they'll likely be pretty barebones in the first updates with them and get fleshed out in proceeding ones, which is preferable to me putting doing one off due to the interlayering of content or thinking I won't have the time to get the chunk done that month.

And I think that's everything! I think this might be the longest write up yet maybe? Hopefully it's somewhat intelligible and not a rambly mess, and thank you very much if you read the entire thing. :D

Anyways once again I hope everyone has a wonderful new year and looks forward to the next update.