6.0 - Added Value

Greetings everyone!

I'm happy to report that October has proven to be a fairly productive month! New pre-alpha builds are coming out regularly and Chapter 3 is shaping up nicely. Not only are we moving forward at a steady pace, but a lot of things are getting cleaned up and polished along the way. In fact, that's what I want to focus on today.

While the focus of Alpha 6.0 is to further along the main story, there's still a lot of opportunities to make some tweaks to the existing content. One of the most obvious ones players will notice is a reclassification of a few values.

Bringing Back the Oldies

When I introduced Love, Lust, and Dominance, specifically Dominance, I added a certain layer of semantic confusion to the game. Functionally, the values worked the way I needed them to, but they're a little misleading in terms of their functionality. So, I decided to make some surface-level changes.

Love is now simply re-branded as "Relationship". It means the same thing, it tracks your relationship with any given character, but it removes the romantic implications. Going along these lines, I can more comfortably add breakpoints or milestones to relationship values to clarify when a character is being pushed into romantic territory.

Lust worked well enough, but in reality didn't reflect how lusty the character was but rather how corruptible that character was becoming. For this reason, I'm bringing back "Corruption" to replace "Lust". Again, functionally identical but hopefully more clear in its intent.

Additionally, both Relationship and Corruption will scale from 0 to 100 to bring them more in line with everything else in the game.

Finally, Dominance. This one stat has caused an endless deluge of "How to I make this character more dominant?" and "Why did dosing this character make them less dominant?" and many others. The reality is, Dominance isn't really tracking dominance at all. There's no mechanical difference whether a character is extremely dominant or completely submissive. What this is really tracking is how easy or difficult it is influence characters actions, as well as what actions they're more likely to take in a given situation. What Dominance is really tracking is a character's Willpower, which is exactly what it's going to be called in 6.0.

My hope is that these simple labeling changes will help clear up how certain aspects of the game are intended to work. Additionally, all references to these stats have been updated to be made more understandable as well.

Tracking Tasks

So as long as I'm running around renaming everything, let's throw a new one in there as well! In Chapter 1 you're tasked with creating a batch of CMD-1 before a certain date, and in Chapter 3 you'll get a similar task. Both of these events are optional, and they're something I intend to add more and more of to the game. A current shortcoming is that there's been no way to track these option actions. While not a huge addition, I'm hoping everyone will be happy to see that a new tracker for these Tasks will be added to the sidebar! Tasks work dynamically and independently of each other, mean you'll always see your open tasks and whether or not you've fulfilled their requirements.

This functionality has been added to the latest pre-alpha build, and everyone will see it go live with Alpha 6.0!

Hey, Remember Chris?

For those of you who don't know, Chris is a character in The Company. Honest! In fact, he's getting some meaningful additions in Alpha 6.0 and Chapter 3!

For starters, I've recast Chris with a new actor. Those clamoring for some BBC content in the game should be pretty happy with the change! The new actor does a better job of portraying Chris' personality, as well as adding some needed diversity to the cast. The character itself remains unchanged, and he will still (eventually) become a romantic option for players looking for some healthy male companionship.

His integration, however, has received a minor overhaul. The option to call him has been removed entirely, at least for now, and all of his events are now timed events that will trigger at Night on every Thursday. Now, instead of having to remember he exists, you'll be prompted to go spend time with him. Additionally, all of his existing events have been polished up.

You can expect to see a lot more of your old friend in the next update!

Still Moving

And with all this let's not forget that Chapter 3 is still chugging along! In game, as in real life, we're about halfway through October and those in the pre-alpha tier should be pretty excited for the big series of events coming in the next few updates! We're also closing in on the big Halloween event and, I need to specify given the timing, that's Halloween in game and not Halloween as in two weeks from today! Either way, it's been fun writing it and I hope everyone enjoys playing through it.

Finally, for those interested, I should have a new art preview posted in the near future!

That's it for this week. As always, thank you all so much for the continued feedback and support.