Hi, everyone! Welcome to another week's developer's diary.
Warning! The developer's diary may contain uncomfortable content. Please avoid reading it when eating.
First, some bad news here. The weather is getting quite high and my air conditioner is dead. It's almost like deja-vu from last year. I'm pretty sure I wrote something like this before. Alright, anyway, please enjoy this week's developer's super hot diary.
The Saint
A new side quest has been added in the Egypt area. You will help slaves trapped in a cave to find their freedom from the cultists. You will find a relatively benevolent ancient Egyptian god hiding in plain sight. In a world of all the eldritch horror, maybe it's time to add something different for a change.
The Sinner
Two new faith tenets have been added to the game. The Ritual Cannibalism and the Carnal Exaltation. I admit, I committed the sin of stealing those sinful ideas from Crusader King 3. Well, to be fair, the entire faith customization system is more or less inspired by Crusader King 3 and Godhood. :D
So, let's move on to some more details.
The Ritual Cannibalism
After tasting the human fresh for the first time by using the skill of "devour corpse", you can unlock this tenet. It makes the "devour corpse" skill recover more HP and even adds some devotion to the believer. Bon appetite.
The Carnal Exaltation
It's a relatively simple tenet. You make love and you gain devotion. But, I don't know why many people consider sexual content in games more sinful than even cannibalism. In decades, we can have all kinds of violence in games while it takes a long time to allow a girl to wear a bit less, both in real life and in games. This is not a hentai game. But, we do have sexual content. And I hope people enjoy it. You certainly deserve some naughty fun with Kristin after developing a relationship during your adventure. You certainly can have some eye candies when the world is falling apart, just like those people in Unlucky-13 Motel did. But, it's not advised to do it with a certain succubus, as she usually unintentionally kills her partners in the process until we find a way to fix this later.
Meanwhile, this update also carries a special meaning on this day. One of the best Japanese adult game developers “Illusion” just declared their cease to exist next month. They have been making adult games with a lot of sexual content since 30 years ago. I confess to you this, I played their game even when I was far under the required age long ago. I believe many people did the same. To avoid being caught made it more exciting. Those are good memories. But, now, isn't it sad that whenever you open those games such as "Honey Select," "VR Girl Friend," "VR Boy Friend," or "DES Blood," and cannot help but realize the developers once brought you so many sinful fun is gone. What makes things even worse? People who live in heavily censored countries may never taste such joy in their lives without even knowing how much they missed. Once again, I hope one day there will be no censorship in this world. I mean, we eventually all grow up, we eventually learn. This game itself is more than 19 years old now. What's the point to hide the truth from people with a censorship machine to tell people what can see and what can not?
The Infinity
Congratulations! You just passed through the paragraph about my daily complaint about censorship. (Please excuse me because I live in China.) Now, let me reward you with a very cool new system! The functions of the Wonderland Travel Agency have been implemented this week. You can pick different randomly generated locations, fight randomly generated enemies, with endless repeatability, and farm specific items you want like there is no tomorrow. It's an upgraded version of the escape simulation mini-game you previously found on the Foundation's Site Demeter. The new system can generate maps that match different themes, with different sets of enemies, procedurally combined together. You can see the details of each location such as environment and enemy types before you enter. You can reroll endless times till you like the playground you get. Even though this system is still in an early stage as it just comes live late this week, it already covers 4 different environment themes and two sets of undead enemies. More will come. And the combination can be infinite. I may even add some new environments, enemies, and pets there before the story covers those areas. It's essentially an infinite dungeon system.
Something else of this week's updates:
1, Expansion of the Floor of Language of the Grand Library.
You can find a new faith tenet that empowers your language skills, making it more possible for you to shout your enemies to death. :)
You also get some control switches to decide which types of language characters may spawn on this floor. That mostly benefits people who want to use this floor to seriously learn some Japanese.
To some people just want to slaughter their enemies, those language characters now have a drop list with some nice items.
2, Skill icon improvements.
Thanks to the summer sales on Steam and everywhere else. More art assets have been acquired to add to the game so that we have some better skill icons.
3, New furniture to make nice gates.
Those are also new art assets I bought and some code support to support some furniture that can be passed through from its center.
4, Cluster Smoke Bomb
What's better than a smoke bomb that covers you from the detection of your enemies? A lot of smoke bombs! This new type of smoke bomb can cover a large area of 5x5. That shall be big enough for you to "sneak" through a lot of enemies as long as you don't accidentally step on another enemy who is also inside the smoke. Plus, the word "cluster" sounds quite exciting recently. :)
That's for this week. Endless new adventures await! (After I fix the air conditioner. :P)
A side note on the main story:
Everything in Egypt is done. But, there is still a small part of the main story in the safe house. I can finish that part relatively easily. However, that will be the official conclusion of Chapter 2 of the game. As per the price policy of the game, that means a price increase after about one month of the finishing will happen. The last time we did something like this is at the end of Chapter 1 last September. But, I feel it may be quite weird to announce something like that right after the Steam Summer Sale. Thus, I am delaying the finish date of Chapter 2 to August so that the price increase will take place in September. Nobody gets hurt in their summer vacation season until people start to get back to school and work. :)
Meanwhile, we can have some polishes on other parts of the game and some new game systems.
Today's changelog:
############Content################
[Wonderland Travel Agency]Wonderland Travel Agency now provides five random locations with names already generated to allow you to pick from.
[Wonderland Travel Agency]You can see the details about that location such as the environment of the location and the hostile entity types of that location after selecting one. (Only Undead right now, but they can have different sub-types.)
[Wonderland Travel Agency]Randomly generated locations now can dynamically spawn enemies that match the hostile entity setting of that area.
[Wonderland Travel Agency]The enemy spawn mechanics are the same as the ones used in the Grand Library's Floor of Language. Thus, you can encounter an endless amount of enemies if you want to stay there to farm something.
[Wonderland Travel Agency]Water Caves and Ice Caves may now appear in randomly generated cave settings.
[Wonderland Travel Agency]Fire caves now have a "hot" environment tag.
[Wonderland Travel Agency]Ice caves now have a "cold" environment tag.
[Wonderland Travel Agency]Reduced the traveling cost to those random locations from $5000 to $500. Have fun to keep regenerating those random caves till you are happy. :D
############System#################
[Map]Added a layer over the map_info hash table. With this new layer of encapsulation, game maps can overwrite a map's name without changing a lot of existing code.
[Map]Changed the loading order. Pre-load events can now affect a map's environment settings.
[Map]Added a very early version of the map name generator.
[Save/Load Menu]Mouse/Controller can now use the up/down button on the right to wrap around the top save file and the button save file to be in line with the keyboard behavior.
############Debug#################
[Map]Fixed a graphics issue in one of the cases of a procedurally generated cave start location.
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