Checking In

Hello,

The team has been hard at work on the next update, so I wanted to share some of what's being planned. We are trying for a release in either the first or second week of October, and there's a lot going on to get us there. Here are a few details.

First off, the team spent 10 hours together in two more Creative Call planning sessions on our Discord server. During Creative Call, we hashed out some very crucial game design details - foremost, the story endings for all three major NPCs and plans to handle the minor characters' epilogue passages.

Now the story endings have been decided, the next step is to work backward from these planned endings to the end of existing content, and build story arc outlines connecting them. The existing story will definitely be revised in places as that progresses. Though writing all this new content will take quite a lot of time, some writing, editing and detailed story planning is already happening and we'll be putting it in as related chunks are completed.

There's also a major update in the 'behind the scenes' category: We are overhauling several core game mechanics with the introduction of Acceptance Levels and NPC Moods. These are a big revision to the way PE works, and they'll take us a little while to balance after they go in this month. But, these should allow us to overcome a major story development roadblock in PE's code.

Here's why this is important: In previous versions, story progress was tied to three stats: Daring, NPC Perversion, and isMind, and these were all fixed to certain events. While meant to keep progress checks manageable for writers, they ended up locking the main story on single path 'rails.' All new story passages were tied to that path by these stats, and the interconnections between scenes grew into a complex, chronological puzzle. It was a huge brake on branching or progressing the story.

These limits also led to story disconnects and absurdities for our player character. For instance, PC might participate in extreme sex acts and then blush about something much tamer in the very next scene. Worse, many player choices simply couldn't cause persisting reactions.

By contrast, Acceptance handles PC's progress in much finer detail, giving us more specifics about story influences and player preferences. It splits up aspects of tracking his feminization, for example keeping PC's preference for crossdressing separate from his enthusiasm for certain sex acts, or his overall sexual orientation. Finally, any area of the story should be able to add progress without breaking other scenes, letting us write parallel story lines that can better respect player decisions.

NPC Moods should also help us improve NPC dialog and actions. Without this feature, several scenes had Teacher and Guardian suffering abrupt attitude swings, sometimes from one sentence to the next. This was because these scenes are assembled by the code from pre-written options based on many different stats, in which writers sometimes could not know how preceding events played out. With NPC Moods, PC's actions could make NPCs happy, angry or disappointed, and their reactions will persist through dialog specifically reflecting it.

A huge area of recent work comes right out of feedback we got from you on Discord and the forums. Responding to the biggest critiques, we are looking to boost the interactivity of game events and story paths, shorten "walls of text," and greatly expand the number of things PC can do as part of his daily routine. We will also be finding ways to increase the impact of your preferences and choices throughout the game, such as having NPCs notice and remember your choices. While the list of ways we want to improve these is long and will take several versions to finish, we're starting with ones we can implement quickly and taking time to get the harder ones right.

I'll be back with more updates as we get closer to release. As always, you can comment here or join us on Discord, and either I or one of the team will gladly answer your questions.

Thank you all for backing us!

XOXO,

Saoirsa