Merry Yule & Happy Holidays!

Happy holidays everyone!

I hope you're all enjoying yourself in-game, with family, friends, or however else you spend your time this time of year. I myself am sitting in my childhood home, watching the Rings of Power with my family, as I'm writing this. Whenever I can find a bit of time to myself, I try to get a bit of work done on the game. Knowing I'm making progress helps me relax, and I want the game ready and out on itch.io in the beginning of the new year.

I thought I'd try something new this year by doing a small "the last year in review" for the holidays.

Dynamic Avatars

We've made great progress on dynamic avatars and though we still need to finalize the model, the entire pipeline has been implemented and tested using Live2D on the test server. I have big expectations for the dynamic avatar and for a long time, I feared a number of unknowns that could have made it virtually impossible to support dynamic coloring and a vast number of unique interchangeable textures that would be required for the model. I'm relieved to have working solutions for all these challenges, and I'm looking forward to continuing work on the dynamic avatar in the new year!

Text Formatting

Text formatting was added for profiles and other places! I'm glad to see all the creative ways players have used text formatting to create interesting profiles and games within the game. It's been truly inspiring and throughout the past year I've continued to make additions and improvements so players can make even more interesting profiles, easier.

Cross-browser compatibility turned out be a lot harder than expect (or more accurately, I expected it but hoped against hope that it would be easier. What a fool I was!)

Text formatting was one of my many diversions, which turned out to be more time-consuming than I had hoped and delayed development on other features, but the fact that it was such and ordeal and feat to complete makes it all the more worthwhile and impressive to have in our humble game, and I'm looking forward to seeing players use it in more creative ways in the new year!

Linking Items & Spells

With text formatting, I also eventually added support for linking items and spells in local chat and private messages, and the ability to link items and inanimate forms in profiles. Being able to link items in chat is something many MMOs have, and I'm happy that we now have this feature as well, and in a form that makes it convenient for players to link their items in profiles as well.

Action Bars & Macros

We now have action bars and macro support in the game, another common MMO feature that I'm happy to have in the game! It's great to see people being creative with macros as well, and I love how the many new spell icons make the game UI more colorful!

We're still missing a few spell icons, but we're working on them and more for future spells that are planned for the game!

Launcher & New Website

In preparation of the game's release on Steam and itch.io, we've made a lot of improvements to the game's UI and its website, to give it a more coherent appearance and style. The game's appearance has evolved a lot since its conception and since then I've gotten better at UI design. It's no secret the original UI was inspired by Persona 5 and it was a dynamic and lively style I played around with to get better a programming interesting UI elements in HTML.

I'm glad that the game has found a style of its own, with a concise color scheme inspired by the original nature avatars. I think it suits the game well and helps it get a more professional and mature appeal.

The front page of the game has some of the oldest code and design, and I'm looking forward to launching the new website and game launcher with the release of the game on itch.io

Onboarding & Hints

With the launch of the new website, new players will be able to start playing without registering an account with the website first, which I believe will drastically increase the number of players who decide to play the game after visiting the website, giving us many new friends to play with!

Hints are another vital feature for improving onboarding for new players and making it easier for new players to get into the game and understand what they can do and how. Many of the new features and improvements to the game this year have been about improving the experience for new and existing players, and with many of these out of the way, I'm looking forward to a new year with a greater focus on adding features for new and existing content, items, and spells!

Fortune Cards, Unique Items, and Skills

I've been doing a lot of conceptual design and work on fortune cards and other ways to specialize your character in interesting ways this year, and I'm happy to say that we're close to having many of these in the game already, with most of the core features already being completed.

More than 100 fortune cards have already been prepared for the game and many of them already work in the game, though there is no way for players to have their characters' fortunes told, which still needs to be finalized.

I've also made great progress on numerous new skills, including Alchemy and Artistry, which will allow players to make interesting potions and improvised weapons. I have all the graphics I need for these skills already, and I'm looking forward to working more on these skills and items in the new year!

Unique items are also in the works, and though no unique items yet exist, as these will be linked to defeating bosses in the new PvE encounters, I have finished the system for unique items and the abilities they grant on the test server.

Suffice it to say, I've prepare a lot of content to be released with and following the new PvE overhaul that will make the game more interesting and rewarding to explore!

Emotes

Emote commands were another feature that was added to the game this year, allowing players to perform emotes that are recognized by the game. On its own, it's a pretty trivial feature, but it creates the base for hypnotic suggestions and sexual activities for the game that is currently being worked on and that I'm sure many players are looking forward to!

Sexual Preferences & Desires

The latest things I've been working on are sexual preferences and desires. Sexual preferences are similar to content filters and are settings players can set to determine what sexual content they want to experience in the game and how NPCs and other players might be able to interact with their character, sexually.

Desires are a system for pseudo consent in the game that builds on top of sexual preferences, where players and NPCs can awaken a latent desire in a player character, allowing them to force the player into sexy and kinky situations without the player suffering the indignity of having to ask for it.

Sexual preferences have already been implemented on the test server, and I've written more than 12,000 lines of code for over 700 actions and reactions related to different desires and sexual activities that together will allow players to initiate and evolve sexual activities together. When someone asks your character to give them a blowjob and they cannot refuse, will they be eager, submissive, or reluctant?

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In the beginning of the new year, I will be finalizing and releasing sexual preferences and desires together with sexual PvP actions that use both systems for a completely new and kinky PvP experience.

After that, I plan on making a small update that will release a minimal viable product of the new PvE overhaul that will do away with the current turn timer and having to wait around for certain classes to become available. All of the current PvE content will be reworked into the new PvE game loop before I start expanding the game with new content and items.

I'm also working on new inanimate forms for sex dolls and possible plushies and pool toys that could make it into the game soon, since these will all be unlocked as special actions and their conditions can already be met using existing spells. These were previously skipped when onaholes and other sex toys with human resemblance were added to the game because I imagined I wanted sex dolls to support skin colors that reflected the dynamic avatar of the student that became the doll. But now I think it's better to treat all abstract representations of an inanimate character the same, using the nature avatar and color as their base and allowing the dynamic avatar to be displayed in its tooltip to fill in the details, including skin color, when it's ready.

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Normally, posts are backer exclusive but this one is available to everyone, because I want to thank everyone who's played with us in the past years and helped us create a caring and thriving community; 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 if you are, I want to thank you for making all the progress we've achieved this year 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