Halloween Collector #2: Meline as Ophelia from Octopath Traveler
Halloween Collector #1: Princess Quinta as Emilia from Re: Zero
Iron Waifu Finally Crowned!
Only one week left until Larelle’s love quest becomes available to Squire-level ($5+) backers and higher, and so far this is shaping up to be our best mini-release yet. A fully completed quest, new sex scene for Larelle, lots of new chat dialogue, and Orange Kid’s fully implemented sex on demand menu. It’s going to be a real Halloween treat! Hahahaha… ha.
Seriously, though, it’s looking really good, and I think the new aggressive streaming schedule was great for keeping me focused and on-task. The new puzzles I think are going to be very fun inclusions, and the ending of the quest ties up Larelle’s character arc nicely. Plus, it takes the Hero and his companions back to the Mourning Wood for a revisit, which is awesome because I will never ever get tired of that dungeon name.
On top of that, all the Halloween pics are finished a week early. Nekochan did a great job this year getting them together, and I’m looking forward to sharing them with everyone.
What is this feeling coming over me… is it… a general lack of anxiety at the end of a month? Strange, I’ll have to explore this new sensation by playing Valkyria Chronicles 4 all evening and being refreshed tomorrow for doing more bonus content for the new release.
Excellent.
Back to development
So development has been going pretty well this month, while we’ve hit a few snags we’re looking forward to seeing how the mini-release will turn out! With that in mind I thought that I’d talk about what’s currently on my table of things.
First off, I’m working on the enemies for Larelle’s love quest, and I’m having fun with giving the boss a bit of extra thought into it. While the most recent bonus boss took quite a bit of fine-tuning until I was happy with it, it’s been awhile since I’ve had a lot of fun developing a sort of AI for a quest boss, so I’m hoping you all have fun with it too!
On a more code side of things, my first priority is to add something special for Larelle’s accessory from her love quest. This accessory is going to be designed to get at the heart of a lot of the difficulties people seem to run into with her, and I’m hoping that it’ll be well received but we’ll see, after all I do want there to be a bit of a surprise to it still. Beyond that I’m hoping to change up the rain system again. I’m sure there are people out there that might remember that the rain used to appear more smoothly when you entered/left a screen, and you also might not understand why we moved to a system that is a bit choppier. The reason for this is that the original system stood a greater chance of slowing down computers and all so we moved to the current system to try to reduce that, however as a result the change in rain had to help ‘before’ or ‘after’ a screen transition because of how RPG maker works, but I’ve thought up a way to change the system that should allow us to have it happen while the screen is black like it used to and even reduce how the computer usage even further. I know that RPG maker games typically aren’t exactly computer killers, but I don’t want people using especially old computers to run into the issues where the screen basically freezes everytime it rains, so the original rain system is not satisfactory to me, but this new one should hopefully be a further improvement in all directions.
Next up, we’ve taken a second look at the relationship achievements, getting in the ones we were missing, renaming a few, and might even be changing how they’re earned, so this might also be a good time to add in that progress tracker and the ‘Taste the Rainbow’ achievements that have been on my docket for awhile now. In regards to bug fixes, I’ve gotten a few reports from people who understand the madness behind my scripts in regards to the furniture system, some about some of the rooms other about some of the pieces of furniture specifically. This won’t undo anything you’ve done in your current game and you’ll be just fine continuing with that, there will come a time in the future that you might want to remove your furniture and put it back down in order to get more of an effect out of it. I’ll keep you all posted on the progress of that!
That’s about all for now, while I’m hoping to have time for some other sizable project next month, I also want to leave some room so that if I need to the rain system can be pushed back some.
Harem Collector v0.36 Public Release!
You can find the download in the usual place but if our website is too scary and/or pink feel free to get it from GameJolt or Itch.io!
Changes in this version:
-Orange Kid now has a special quest for you when her affection rating pass 100 points! This quest, Magnum Opus, comes with a new full artwork sex scene, an optional text-only sex scene, a host of treasures, and one of the most powerful “Love” bonuses in the game! Don’t miss it!
-The Southport Manor is now available, and within it you can get access to a new early game quest, A New Girl Like Clockwork. This is one of the most unique “dungeons” we’ve put together to date, and completing it unlocks a new harem girl: Pandora, the clockwork maid!
-Hour of the Beasts, Beyond Good and Devil, and Finishing Unfinished Business now drop armor pieces for Yamamaya, Therese and Elaiya respectively.
-“Gilded Bondage”, Orange Kid’s latest scene, has been added to the random sex scene list. Due to a quirk in the current design, she’s currently set to unlock on any quest that generates a random scene from the list, with a priority above all other non-manor-specific sex scenes but below threesomes.
-Elf Impregnation Day now has text, and is currently the longest sex scene in the game, comprising four separate vignettes with dozens of lines of dialogue each.
-Nerys, Alina and Clementine have been spotted actually wearing swimwear at the beach while on vacation!
-More mysterious notes have been sighted adorning abandoned spaces in the Middle Kingdom. It’s now possible to collect the whole set, if you dare….
-All towns now have a small bit of introductory text, telling you a bit of what the Hero knows about the area.
-Nicholas will now appreciate quests that he gives you a lot more!
-The furniture menu will now display what room each part of the furniture is in while placing it.
-Decorating with rugs now causes your harem girls to become happier, as they look at enough plain yellow wooden slats as it is, thank you very much.
-Your horses have been consolidated into a single beast, and you no longer have to guess which horse does what.
-The new company logo now appears on startup.
-Fixed literally hundreds of bugs.
Backer crunch
(Hey, this is like from a week ago, I wanted to promoted the daily streams but Conash works hard so I held onto it, and now you get to read it because I forgot to do a blog yesterday. Yay!)
Hey everyone, it’s the last Wednesday of the month so we’ve just got to finish a few things with the backer release and we’ll get it out to you guys when we can! The past few days have been pretty hectic for NoMoshing and I as more things keep popping up just as soon as we think we can see the end, but we’re both pretty happy with what we’ve got done. I’d also like to take a moment to thank our volunteers for all the testing that they did, it really helped us out a lot to be able to get such in-depth feedback so quickly to help make the game work so smoothly so thanks both of you for all your hard work! Now, since NoMoshing’s been getting in a massive amount of dailogue (including several sex scenes) in these past few days, I thought that I’d take a moment to talk about the various things I’ve been up to since my last post from a week ago.
First off, I managed to get in a couple of the stuff that I talked about awhile back. The Furniture system will now have the green/red squares show numbers on them so that you know what ‘room’ you’re looking at, while it’s certainly not perfect I’d rather give you guys tools that help you a bit with it than not at all. On top of that I’ve managed to extensively fix it so that furniture like the Holy Diver will no longer cause bugs, you can view them in the menu and remove them safely now, but keep in mind that if it was bugged before the person who was bugged with it won’t be displayed in the menu as loving/liking/hating the furniture as appropriate even though they do, the display refused to cooperate on that front but if you remove it and put it back it will work as intended! I’ve also managed to add it so that putting carpets into your various houses will now give a small happiness bonus to everyone in that house (party members always choose the house with the highest ‘house’ bonus) so between that and another house bonus that we’ve added to the game I hope that the happiness system will be a bit easier to approach for the characters who only have a few pieces of furniture they like. I also managed to fix the bug that came about in the 0.35 release that stopped the autosave feature from working, I’m hoping this fix sticks but I thought the last one was going to as well so we’ll see…
Next up is something that has been on the docket, but long since forgotten about, since before I was on the staff. See with the addition of the Southport house we realized that we needed to put in horses for Southport and into other places to get to Southport, which would have been a lot of busy work… So now we’ve managed to get it so that there is a singular horse per house that will be able to handle all the fast travel needs as it was honestly less busy work than the alternative thanks to the magic of me not being limited to RPG Maker’s eventing system. We might be making a few changes to the horse stuff down the line, but with this change it’ll be far easier to accomplish universally so look forward to us taking advantage of having a more streamlined fast travel process! On a similar note, I’m sure that a few of you have probably noticed that several quests still teleport players to the old Northmarket manor, well a big reason that those teleports haven’t been fixed is because that running the proper checks for teleports, finding the right block of teleports to copy, and all of that just takes awhile so I decided to also make a more streamline (on our end at least) version of the entire thing for teleporting to the houses that handles all of that busy work, so while for now it’ll probably just be for the Southport quests since they need to be changed anyways, look forward to having a lot of those wrong teleports get dealt with in future releases!
That’s about all that I’ve actually gotten done so far so I think I’ll leave it at that. I’ve still got several things to finish up before I can handle over the game to NoMoshing to add in his final touches but yeah, hope you’re all looking forward to the new quests and functionality!
Weekly Streaming, Activate!
Hey, we’re almost done the v0.36 backer release, just going to need a couple hours more. But, while I have your attention….
We’re now streaming four times a week, every week!
Our usual twice-monthly voiced and interactive streams will still happen, but “silent streaming”- me just getting work done without the mic on- will now be happening every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday from 1pm-5pm(ish) Eastern time. If there are any changes to this schedule, it will be made public in a Patreon post, so pay attention to that feed even if you’re not a backer!
You can catch all our stream here.
Getting stuff done
Hello everyone! Right now we’re working on finishing up the tester’s release, so I thought that since I’ve been rather productive the past few days I’d share some information on what I’ve been working on these past few days while NoMoshing is working on finishing up the various events that he’s got to work on.
So first up, let’s talk about Orange Kid’s love quest, or more specifically the reward from it. The original idea was to have the main thing be Hero becoming immune to any effects that had a chance of causing death like from headshot, however the problem with that is that while those moves can pose a problem they’re pretty infrequent and making them common or having high chances just leads to annoying gameplay for people who don’t have that effect on at least half your party (at least if you don’t have some sort of auto-revive ability in the game). We’re still going to keep in that effect though because it’s not bad, but we’re going to expand it some, just yesterday I finished testing out and getting ready a new little feature that will allow Hero to once per battle survive an otherwise lethal attack with 1 HP. This will still trigger even if Hero is already at 1 HP, as while I understand why other games with similar systems don’t trigger it then, since this ability is limited to only once per battle I felt that in the unlikely situation that players naturally fell to 1 HP they should still get to trigger this. Now, this won’t always save you as if the story calls for an instant loss (meaning the enemy isn’t trying to kill Hero) or if they have some other way to remove him from the fight besides death (like in the Yamamaya fight) this ability will not trigger against those attacks/effects directly.
Next I also put together a little splash screen set to display the new logo that we’ve got everytime you start up the game, there’s a few little odds and ends about it that may need some tweeking but the core part of it is working. Beyond that, I got the enemies for OK’s love quest done pretty quickly and even got a brand new superboss put together very quickly. It’s still missing a bit of window dressing, but I’m very happy with how it plays out, especially the part where several of it’s stats will change to match some of your stats meaning that even if you come in at level 99 you’ll have to understand the trick if you want to win… Hey it’s a superboss, I’m allowed to pull out that sort of stuff.
And yeah, that’s really it. I do also have plans to fix a lot of the bugs that have been hanging out for awhile, setting up the Southport manor for furniture and rugs, and maybe hopefully getting in that update to the furniture system I talked about in my last post, but most of the stuff mentioned above took priority. Still, I’ve been getting a lot of things done easier since finishing up a project I had been working on for awhile, and now it just feels great to not be busy being busy.
General Art-Type Update
So with the passing of September, another harem girl’s solo scenes will be finished. Orange Kid, lovely curls and all, has been thoroughly defiled for your pleasure and can safely be put away until we need her for a threesome or something.
As for what’s on now? We’re getting the first sex scene for the new character of Pandora, the bright-coloured clockwork robot maid who will be taking care of your Southport digs for you.
Like Natya before her, we’re just doing a single scene to get her introduced, and will be giving her the full harem girl treatment at a later time. Possibly soon after Therese, if she happens to win next year’s Iron Waifu. I mean, stranger things have happened, and I think she has the personality and cute design to help her go the distance.
As for what’s next, Larelle will be the focus of our art development for the next four months, so I hope you like tsundere albinos in gothic lolita dresses. As for keep track on what we’re doing with regard to hentai scenes, we have a relevant thread on the Bad Kitty Games forums! (Warning, spoilers)
We’re also pushing out some progress on the sprite art front. Finally we’re addressing some of the stand-in character sprites and getting some beachwear versions of various characters so the vacation content is a tiny bit more robust.
So, look forward to the next public update! New sprites, a new harem girl, all sorta of exciting stuff are coming your way!