Dev Blog #101 - Moving Parts

Greetings everyone!

Well, it's officially summer and we all know what that means! That's right, Seaside Bellona's FINALLY coming back into rotation along with Karin's summer skin! Now maybe I can finally be worth a damn in GW offense and... I've veered off course... Today's devblog is gonna be pretty brief and has nothing to do with my gacha habits, so let's just jump right in!

The Update... Update

First the good news. Update 3.3.0 is coming along quite nicely! Several things are getting addressed, broken, and quickly fixed, and the backend is quickly shaping up to be something I'm not horribly embarrassed about! The "bad" news is that the update itself is shaping up to be quite the ordeal in terms of reining in the far reaching impacts of every change being made. To be honest, it's really great seeing all these things come to light as it's a great opportunity to finally clean up some of the game's core systems that have been either causing issues or impeding progress for some time now.

So it probably sounds like I'm building up to a delay announcement... Well not really!

Update 3.3.0 will release to backers next week, on Thursday July 2nd. However, due to the tidal wave of destruction this update is set to wrought upon a wider audience, I'm expecting to keep this update as a backer-exclusive release for an additional week so as to track issues prior to a public release. This could always change in the event of an unexpectedly smooth launch, but I'm not quite so optimistic on this one. As always, I'll keep everyone posted in the days following the backer release as to how we're looking in that regard.

With that out of the way, let's run through the player-facing features of the coming update, shall we?

Update 3.3.0 - The Maintenance Update

Since this is primarily a maintenance update, the majority of changes made are on the back end and not immediately apparent to players. These changes are made so as to improve performance, stability, and expansion opportunity. That said, some new features are being released in Update 3.3.0 for players to experience!

• New Wardrobe System and Paper Doll
  • Updated player paper-doll assets added to game
  • Individual clothing items replaced with complete outfit categories
  • Players can set outfit, underwear, bra, and "accessories"
• Relationship / Corruption Redesign
  • Relationship and Corruption now scale from 0 to 200 for all applicable characters
  • Reaching milestones in these stats unlocks new outfits to purchase at Ash's store in the mall
• New Coin Shop
  • Along with the revised stat system comes the new coin shop, part of Ash's store
  • Once the shop unlocks, you'll have access to a limited inventory that will expand as your relationships do
  • This store is designed as a long term money sink, so get ready for some sticker shock!
  • *This is the first pass on the coin shop and may not have a complete inventory for all characters until the next update
• Image Enhancements and Outfits
  • All images in the game are moving to the new image pack system
  • Character portraits now reference the image pack manifests
  • Default images for characters have been updated and expanded
  • New outfits from the coin shop can be applied to characters from a new scene in the MC's bedroom. These outfits will replace characters' default images, portraits, and notebook image
  • Image pack size has been reduced by approximately 90%
• Odds and Ends
  • Event handling is getting improved for better event targeting and formatting
  • Transformation factors getting re-balanced
  • More story variable pruning and Javascript utilization to improve speed and performance
  • More boring details in release notes!

That's it for this week, I told you it would be brief! Next week will see the release of what may be one doozy of an update... or maybe it'll be fine. Either way it'll be interesting and will be doing a lot to pave the way for the impending Ava and Dakota update starting development immediately after release! Until then, thank you all for your continued feedback and support!