Monday, December 30, 2013

Tiny Status Update

Just a small little update to let you guys know what's up: The test version of the membership website will be going up on Friday, January 3rd. There won't be a game update for another couple of weeks.

EDIT: My server went down today, so I'm set back a good bit in getting the website together. Yeah, I know, more delays. On the upside I took the opportunity to write some more dialogue for some stuff in the game. Right now I'm going to shoot for Sunday for the website. Will update if I'm not able to put the website up by then.

EDIT2: I way under-estimated the work I had left to do on setting up membership. Web programming is not my forte. Right now I'm going to not give a deadline on the website and just say "when it's done".

On the bright side, I have been making some progress on the actual game itself and I'll have the next release on Saturday the 18th. My goal is to have events working and a couple animations.

Sunday, December 22, 2013

F.A.Q.

So, this ended up being an extremely long post, with a ton of information. Hopefully it will answer a lot of questions that people have had. Go ahead and post any other questions you might have as comments and I'll see if I can go ahead and add them to the FAQ.

What are your plans going forward?

Currently I’m working on the website, which I intend to release a test version of before January. The test will go like this: anyone will be able to make a free test account. Your test account will get 100 points that you can spend on the system. I will actually take a week and fulill the results of the test voting for that week for free: basically a trial run both for the website and my ability to complete the work that gets voted onto my to-do list. If it goes well, I’ll launch the website for real, and only people who buy a membership will be able to access the voting system.

My to-do list on the website will take the top 20 hours worth of work each week, but I intend to work on the game even more than that: this will be my full time job until next August, when I’ll probably be going to grad school. After August, I’ll re-evaluate how much time I can put into the game. I may have to adjust the voting to-do list down to 10 hours worth of work each week. So, people who purchase the membership should be aware that the amount of work I take from the to-do list is subject to change when August comes. You should take that into account before you contribute any money.

Regardless of how the voting content pans out, the next things I’m going to be working on are:
1.     Exploration and Events – You will be able to go places and things will happen there.
2.     Dialog and Quests – You will be able to talk to people and they will ask you to do things.
3.     Refactoring – Once I’ve completed the two above additions, I’ll have a much better idea of how all the basic game fundamentals fit together. I’ll basically go through all of my code and rewrite everything that I need to from the ground-up. This will be a long process, but when it’s finished I’ll officially have a stable beta version, and I’ll be able to, from that point on, just directly add content. This is probably the step where the biggest game changes will occur.

Basically, up until now I’ve been hacking things together as I couldn’t predict how they would ultimately need to interact when the game was finished. I needed to get a better idea of what all of the different traits, monsters, and game aspects would have to eventually do and how they’d have to work before I could put them together. When I refactor everything, I will be able to make the game work much more intelligently from the ground-up.

Unfortunately, I don’t plan to add a lot of new gameplay content until the refactoring is finished. Don’t expect many animations (aside from those that win the voting each week), or too much storyline content aside from the content I add to test the exploration, event, dialog, and quest systems.

How do you plan to change the way stats work?

I don’t like the way that stats work in the game as it is, and intend to change them. I’m removing growth mods from the game entirely. Also, I’m changing the way that stats grow considerably.

Stats will max-out at 100. Instead of growing or shrinking every time you breed two monsters, stats will have “XP” and “level up”. Breeding modifiers will be a clearly shown number, and will tell you how much “XP” breeding with a particular monster will contribute to particular stats. There will no longer be negative modifiers (and no less than stat client requirements).

Breeding mods will no longer be randomized on new monsters (all store-bought catgirls will have +DEX only, etc), so if you want to raise a particular stat you will need to have bought a monster that raises it to begin with, but you will be able to transfer breeding modifiers between monster species through their offspring. There will also be more monster-specific traits.

Breeding and harvesting will be two different limits, STA will affect breeding and WIL will affect harvesting.

Consumables will be used for their effects, which will now vary based on the stats of the monster they were harvested from (a holstaurus with higher stats will produce milk that increases fertility higher). Obviously some of the consumable effects will have to change.

Your monsters will have “Happiness” that increases when they’re fed consumables that they like and bred with monsters that they like, but decreases when you don’t feed or breed them for a while. Happiness will govern their chance of disobeying you, or running away.

When will you put in the animation for [insert pairing here]?

I have good news and bad news.

The bad news is: I do not currently intend to make animations for every monster pairing in the game. This is something that I feared would eventually happen when I started making the game. Its basic math: every time I add a new monster or visual trait, I have to make more animations for it than the last one due to the combinatorial nature of breeding monsters together. If I were to make animations for every possible pairing between different monsters, futa versions, neoteny versions, and futa neoteny versions currently in the game, it would be well-over 200 different animations. That would be over 400 hours of work for me just on animations, and this number would go up with every new monster I add.

Basically I have two options: 1. I could keep making unique animations, but only make animations for a limited number of pairs, or 2. I could make standard animations that will fit together regardless of the pair. Personally, I think option 2 would make for boring/ugly looking animations, and I would much rather have fewer but more unique and interesting animations.

The good news is: I will pay attention to comments and posts and try to make sure I add animations for pairings that people are asking for the most. Also, if you really want a particular animation in the game, you will be able to put money towards it to request it in the voting system. This is true for harvest and cum-shot animations as well.

Also, I’m not against the idea of ever making standard animations that fit together regardless of pairing. Eventually I may have this in addition to unique animations, so that some monsters will have unique animations and some will have standard ones. However, this would take me a lot of additional work and I have no plans for it currently.

Will you put in content for [insert fetish here]?

Possibly! I try to put a diversity of content into the game, even if it’s not a thing that I’m personally into. Anything that is something that some players might not want to see, I’ll try to make as an option that can be removed.

There is, however, a list of things I won’t do.

The game will not contain: snuff, gore, ryona, vore, scat, watersports, any blood, or basically anything that I personally feel is too violent or too misogynistic for me to be comfortable with.

(Note: If you don’t know what any of those words mean, I would suggest you don’t look them up)

How should I report bugs?

Bug reports are very important to me, and one of the ways that people can help the most in contributing to the game is by submitting them to me.

If you want to report a bug, you should make a blog comment under the patch notes posted for the version of the game in which the bug occurred. The more details and specifics you can give me about the bug, the better.

Information that helps me the most:
- Version number
- Can you reproduce it (can you get the bug to happen again?)
- If you saved or loaded the game at any time prior to the bug occurring (and if the save is from a previous version, which version you started the new game in)
- All ranch upgrades that you owned when the bug occurred
- On menu/hotkey errors: the specific order in which you opened/closed menus and what you clicked/what keys you typed to do it
- On monster errors: the monster's type, all of its traits, the monster types and traits of both of its parents, whether or not it was a child of the player, and what consumables it and its parents had been fed with
- On animation errors: the monster types of the involved monsters, which monster was first (orange) and which was second (blue) in the breeding menu, if any of the involved monsters had default colors show up (blue hair on any monster, orange fur on catgirls, brown fur on stallions, brown wings on harpies, red fur on demons)

You don't have to give me all of this information to post a report, obviously, but it helps me more if you do.

Unfortunately, I don't always keep very good track of the known bugs, so I don't mind when they're reposted. Just make sure that the bug exists in the version that you're posting under, and not in previous versions. I may not always respond to bug reports, but I try to read as many as I can.

Do you take suggestions?

Yes, I do. A lot of the best features in the game were suggested to me by fans and people from the legendofkrystal.com forums. I read many of the comments that are posted on the blog, and in the near future intend to have an entire forum for contributors to offer and discuss suggestions.

Unfortunately, a lot of the time I don't remember who offered a suggestion, and so I can't credit them. Often I will read a suggestion that I like but not get a chance to respond to the person about it. However, I do take notice of people who are particularly helpful.

What kind of suggestions do you take?

The suggestions that help me the most are ones that will either take a pretty small amount of work to put into the game but make it a lot more fun, or will actually save me work and make my life easier. While I still like to see suggestions about what kind of monsters or animations people want to see in the game, I already have a ton of that work heaped up already, and even if I like your suggestion it will be a long, long time before I could get it into the game.

As a rule of thumb: if it doesn't require me to make new art, or do a lot of programming, then it's a useful suggestion. Things like small UI changes and small gameplay changes are the kind I can use the most.

Do you need any help with art or animation?

Yes! One of the biggest bottlenecks that I have in getting content out faster is art, as I'm honestly not as good of an artist as I'd like.

1. Landscape and environment - Landscape art is one of the biggest bottlenecks to the exploration system and further expansion of the game, as I'm not very good at it and it takes me a long time. Anyone who can make good environmental art would be a massive help to me, and if you're not used to working in vector formats don't fear: I can handle converting art from other formats or styles. 

2. Animation - Anyone who has a good handle on flash animation can very easily help me out by making more sex animations for the various pairings. I can supply you with all my sprites and all you'll have to worry about is tweening, etc. 

3. Character portraits - I'm looking for people who are willing to make dialog portraits for various NPCs and the like. I'll be giving you some basic descriptions and you can pretty much go wild with drawing them how you like, though ideally with some resemblance to my style just so that the art is cohesive.

4. Writing - People who would like to contribute dialog writing for NPCs and side quests would be very welcome. It's likely that I will do a lot of editing of what you submit to fit my ideas for the game, though, but it will still make my life a lot easier. Unfortunately, right now a lot of the specifics involving events and side quests aren't nailed down yet, but I'd still like to get in contact with people who are interested in doing writing work once I do.

As far as compensation goes, I can offer anyone who contributes art more control in the direction of the game, memberships, and voting points, and for individuals who are willing to contribute a very significant amount I can offer you a cut of the money from the membership website each month.

If you're interested in contributing art to the game, please e-mail me at HartistaPipebomb@gmail.com with some samples of your work. Please state clearly in the subject line that it's about "Breeding Season Art Help". Unfortunately, I get a lot of spam and it might get filtered out or I might miss it, if I don't get back to you right away don't hesitate to bug me on the Legend of Krystal forums or in the comments section of this blog. 

Not everyone who wants to contribute will be able to as I'm going to be kind of choosey about making sure the visual design of the game is consistent. I still really appreciate the offers, though, even if I don't feel your style fits the game.

A lot of people have offered to help with programming or game design. I appreciate the offers but unfortunately the game isn't in a state yet where it would be easy for multiple people to work on the code, as much of it still needs to be re-factored and is poorly commented. Feel free to continue offering suggestions concerning programming and game design in the blog comments and on the Legend of Krystal forums, though, as these continue to be a huge help to me.

How should I start making my own games?

Where you should start with making a game depends a lot on what kind of experience you have already. It has taken me years of learning to get to where I am, and I'm still a total novice, so if you want to go anywhere with game development you have to be ready to put tons of effort into it. The first thing you should do is learn how to program in object-oriented style. The programming language you learn to use isn't as important as learning the basic ideas behind it. I don't have any specific tutorials, but there are plenty of great programming tutorials on the internet if you spend some time on google. A tutorial focused on teaching you object-oriented programming is more important than a tutorial focusing on game programming specifically, but if you can get a tutorial that will teach you both that's the best.

Secondly, you should learn how to use an API Reference. http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionscript/3/index.html will teach you almost everything you could ever possibly want to know about programming in Flash, but you have to know how to understand that information. You should also learn to use resources like stackoverflow.com, because if there's anything you want to do, it's likely someone has tried to do something like it before you and has had similar questions.


Mostly, though, you should just realize it will take you years of constant improvement to get to the point where you can make a big game. Start with very small projects, like super small, and work your way up. Make your own version of pong, then move onto the next step, etc. Don't get discouraged if you can't make the game you want to right from the start. If you keep at it, you'll be able to make that game eventually, and probably get a ton of even better ideas along the way.


Saturday, December 21, 2013

Alpha Build 4.1

This is mostly bug fixes, hopefully there will generally be less weirdness with the Neoteny and Futa traits in general, particularly when breeding with the player. As always, make sure to let me know in comments what bugs are still around/new bugs, etc.

You can now get futa elven slave girls, and futa kittengirls.

New Sex Animations:
Male/Male:
- Elven Slave Boy/Elven Slave Boy
- Dickwolf/Elven Slave Boy
- Dickwolf/Butt Stallion

Male/Female:
- Dickwolf/Elven Slave Girl

Futa:
- Futa Catgirl/Player
- Futa Elven Slave Girl/Catgirl

Known Issues:
- A lot of the gameplay is still currently pretty unbalanced. I have some ideas for some major changes to this, as in ground-up changes to how stats and mods and what-not work. I will share them with you all before I make any changes.
- The player won't give birth on the first of the month.

I plan to make another blog post later tonight or tomorrow and detail out a lot of the plans I have for the game going forward/explain some of the changes I intend to make/some of the suggestions I've gotten that I plan on using.

EDIT:
Oh, and the debug code for more gil is "givememoney".

Also, your saves from the last version should work with this version, however any monsters you had from last version will not have the new animations. Any new monsters you buy or breed will.

Friday, December 20, 2013

Status Update

The website has been a pain in the ass, but I've made significant headway on it and should have something to show you guys soon. I'm going to go ahead and put up a test version of the website that you guys can sign up as temporary members on and screw around with just to make sure it works correctly. Not sure if it will be before Christmas, but I'd like it to be.

As for the game update, you can expect it sometime tomorrow, I'm shooting for around 3:00 PM, but so I don't have to eat my words I'll say before 10:00 PM PST. There will be some animations (some M/M and some M/F), lots of bug fixes, and a bit of gameplay rebalancing. I don't think you'll need to reset your saves, but regardless on the next version I'll have a money cheat code for convenience with testing it (which will be replaced with debug mode in later versions).

EDIT:
I would say to expect the update around 5:00 PM PST. Not positive it will be then, but it will be between then and 10.

Monday, December 9, 2013

Hotfix 4.0.1 -> 4.0.3

Tried to fix some bugs.
- Game breaking issues with the Elves should be resolved
- You should be able to sell Elves to clients now
- Tried to fix some of the weirdness going on with breeding Futanari creatures, let me know if there's still problems with it
- Intro dialog should be fixed

EDIT:
- Fixed the null monstertype requirements

EDIT2:
- Fixed Save problem, but it might fuck up your saves from earlier

EDIT3:
My intention is to have the new website available for testing purposes by the end of the week, but I'm giving no guarantees on that. The next major game update will be on the 20th and will likely contain animations, bug fixes, and balance changes.

Friday, December 6, 2013

Alpha Build 4.0

I wasn't able to fit in as many animations as I wanted to this update. Notably absent are the male/male animations, sorry! I know you guys have been waiting a long time for those, I promise that next update will be super gay to make up for it :P. Also, there's a lot of new stuff that will probably break in this update, so let me know about any serious bugs and I'll see if I can't fix them ASAP.

- There's now an options menu that allows you to turn on/off different types of sexual content. If you turn off the traits your monsters can still get those traits and it won't affect gameplay, however they'll have no visual effect on your monsters.
- Catgirls can now get the Futanari trait, which allows them to produce offspring with both male and female monsters. The only futa animation I have in so far is futacatgirl/catgirl.
- You can now purchase the Demon Pit ranch upgrade and get Demons. The only demon animation so far is demon/player.
- You can now purchase the Elf Stockades ranch upgrade and get both Male and Female Elves. Unfortunately there's no elf animations yet, and I'm still working on the male elf idleanim and hair/eye/mouth variations.

Known issues:
- A lot of the gameplay is currently pretty unbalanced; I'll be focusing on rebalancing soon
- If you have Neoteny and Futanari on the same monster, it will ignore Neoteny
- Male elf has no idleanim
- If you select a breeding pair that has no animation, it no longer shows the "And then they fucked" message. This is intentional just to remove a useless window. I may also add an additional top of the screen message just so that it's easier to tell that the monsters did breed.

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Progress Update and New Voting System

I'm back from being out-of-town for Thanksgiving, and ready to start digging in. The next game update will be released on Friday 12/6, likely around 11:00 PM PDT. The options menu, elves, demons, futanari catgirls, and a couple male/male animations will be in it. The options menu will allow you disable sex animations by category (m/f, m/m, or f/f), as well as allow you to turn off visual changes for neoteny, futanari, and pregnancy. Note that this will not affect gameplay, only visuals: if you turn off futanari, the futa catgirls will look like normal catgirls and have normal catgirl animations, but they'll still have the futa trait and be able to produce offspring with female monsters.

As for the new website I'll keep you updated as to when you can expect to see it, but in the meantime I'll post up a description of the new system so that I can get some feedback:

Membership:

For $5 you will be able to purchase a one year Breeding Season membership. Everyone who has already donated to me will be given a free membership, and I'll continue to hand out memberships to people who are significant contributors to the game (like Ironvein, for instance). Let me be perfectly clear: the game is still 100% free and will remain that way forever, and all further updates I make to the game will be released for free. However, members will get some significant benefits:

  • Early access to updates: I will post updates to the game in the members-only section exactly one month before releasing them to the public
  • Access to the development blog: I will update the dev blog three times a week with detailed info on game development progress and my future plans
  • Access to the breeding season suggestion forums, which will be a members-only forum where you can post up suggestions for game changes and additions
  • 100 free voting points every month (voting points explained below)
Also, there are features in development that will be available to members once they're finished:
  • Access to "debug mode" codes that will allow you to grant yourself money, change monster's stats, and give your monsters specific traits, among other things
  • Access to a daily development stream so you can watch me making the game live

Voting System:

The system is based on spending “voting points” to comission features for the game.You can purchase voting points from me. Basically $10 is 1000 points. People who donated to me previously but did not get the features they donated on included in the game yet will be given points equivalent to how much they donated.

Features are small, self-contained, and very specific additions to the game. An example might be “Male Elf on Harpy Breeding Animation” or “The Marquis’ Mansion Exploration Area”. There will always be a comprehensive description of what will be included with that feature (basically, far more specific and detailed than before).

Each feature will have a “Base Cost” of points that have to be spent on it in order for it to get added to my “To-do List”. The base cost is based on the amount of time it will take me to include that feature in the game, multiplied by my labor rate of $15 (1500 points) per hour. So, as an example: “Male Elf on Harpy Breeding Animation” is a sex animation that will take me two hours to make, therefore it will cost 3000 points to add it to the “To-do List”. Any number of people can contribute to paying the base cost: if you want to just add 100 points and leave it to someone else to pay the rest you can do so. As soon as the base cost is paid the feature will be added to the To-do List.

My To-do List will be a list including all of the features that are slated to be added to the game. Each week I will take the top 20 hours worth of features and work on adding them to the game that week. Once a feature is on the To-do List, you can continue to spend points on it in order to give it a higher priority for addition to the game. Features with more points will be higher on the To-do List, and will be added to the game first over others. For some features, once a certain number of points are added to the feature there will be additional time and quality added to it: For instance, for a sex animation, if the points spent on it exceed 6000 I will spend twice as much time on it and try to make it a higher quality animation than usual, possibly involving multiple positions.

Every two weeks, the last two weeks worth of features will be released with my newest version of the game. If a feature that should have gone into a release fails to make it in that week’s release for any reason, I will refund a quarter of the points spent on it and add the feature to the next week’s release. If a feature misses two months worth of releases, I will refund all of the points spent on it.

I want to be clear that unlike the donations I took previously, I consider the new system to be an actual commission, and I will make myself contractually obligated to meet stated deadlines. Points that are returned to you due to any failure on my part to meet deadlines will be eligible to be refunded for cash.

I know that previously I had difficulty keeping to deadlines and keeping fans updated. My living situation has changed significantly, and the new system is based on the things I've learned from my mistakes working on the game previously; I'm very confident that the structure of the new system will allow me to deliver updates on time. The new Features are set up in distinct chunks and I can easily predict how long they will take me to do, and the system is designed to keep me from biting off more than I can chew. I'm also going to be far more dedicated to keeping up regular blog postings to keep you all updated. If you're not sold yet, just keep checking in as over the next few weeks I intend to demonstrate a consistent update schedule based on the system.

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Alpha Build 3.9

I'm working on the game update as I post this, and will hopefully be able to put it up in an hour. The update is now up for you guys to play. Unfortunately a lot of the new content I've been working on has been acting up so the update will be a lot lighter than I'd like. Just two new kittengirl animations (one of them is pretty unfinished), two new neoteny monsters, and a couple new eyes and hairstyles. The options menu still doesn't work so you can't disable Neoteny yet. Also, I'm aware that I never got around to fixing some of the older bugs. Let me know which ones still keep popping up.

The new website is going to be delayed until next week due to some dealings I still need to have with the company that will be running the credit card transactions (apparently I'm too obscene for paypal).

Early next week I'll have the Options menu working, Elves, some Male/Male animations, Demons, and the Futanari trait working for catgirls. Most of this stuff is actually already in the files, it's just that I didn't have the time to get it all working before Thanksgiving snuck up on me, sorry about that.

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Very Alive

First of all I want to sincerely apologize for the lack of any updates or correspondence for the past few months. It was really unfair of me not to make more of an effort to keep in touch with fans of the project, particularly those of you who generously donated. I also want to say thank you to everyone who had kind words and kept their heads on while I was absent.

There's very good news for people with a vested interest in the game: The game is very alive, and more-so than ever. In fact, due to some very fortuitous changes in my living situation (my father has agreed to give me shelter and food until grad school starts), I plan to work on the game full-time for at least the next six months. As a result, I plan on ramping up the quality and professionalism of the game itself, this blog, the voting system, and my work and update schedule very significantly.

I'll be putting up a good-sized game update some time before Thursday next week, along with the new breeding season website and voting system. As previously stated, everyone who donated before for a feature that wasn't added will get the opportunity to reassign their donations with the new system. Many more details are to follow.

Sorry for the wait :(. Thanks for your support :).

Sunday, September 1, 2013

Update Delayed

I should basically just stop setting deadlines :(. I've had a few more unfortunate delays in that I lost some of the new content I've made due to poor back-ups and some "life stuff" has come up in the meantime. I won't set a deadline for the next update, because I realize that I miss more of these dates than I make. Instead hopefully it'll just be a pleasant surprise when it happens. Really sorry.

Monday, August 26, 2013

Alpha Build 3.8.2

UPDATE (8/26/13): Admittedly another less-exciting update, but the good stuff is still set to be released next Sunday.
- New Holstaurus/Holstaurus animation
- Bug fixes concerning issues with Neoteny
- Changed the way the animation in the pens works, should look much nicer now
- Other assorted bug fixes

On 9/1/13 expect:
- Options menu
- Last holstaurus animation
- Kittengirl sex animations
- Vealtaurus and Chicky (no animations)
- Male/Male animations
- Demons (no animations)

Update Tonight

Sorry, I was caught without internet access last night. Update will be up tonight at 11:00 PM PST.

Sunday, August 18, 2013

Alpha Build 3.8

HOTFIX 2 (8/19/13): A bug that broke player pregnancy should now be fixed.

HOTFIX (8/19/13): Gamebreaking store bug should be fixed now, let me know if there are any more problems.

UPDATE (8/18/13): Alpha Version 3.8

This update is relatively unexciting, unfortunately. Mostly just functional stuff. Never fear, though, next update will include a crop of new animations and ideally some more storyline content.

The Neoteny trait is now in the game. Currently only the Kittengirl is included, and none of her sex animations are included yet and she has only one hairstyle/no facial feature variation yet (other monster types can get the Neoteny trait but it has no effect). Players start with Neoteny unlocked in this version for testing purposes (though it doesn't show up on the unlocked traits menu). The options menu also isn't implemented yet, so it won't be possible to turn off Neoteny until the update next Sunday. Mostly I just want to see if there are any serious bugs with Neoteny.

As an additional bug fix, the consumable store finally allows you access to consumables from every monster type from the beginning.

Features that should make it in by either the 8/25/13 update or the 9/1/13 update:
- Options menu
- Last Holstaurus animations (finally)
- Kittengirl sex animations
- Vealtaurus, Chicky (no animations yet)
- Male/Male animations
- Significant gameplay tweaking
- Demons (also finally)

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Hotfix for 3.7

Today I'm releasing a very small update with bugfixes, and pushing back the rest of the content until next Sunday, the 18th, at 11:00 PM PST.

Here's the deal: Neoteny is being a pain in the ass currently and not working right. It's complicated because it's a trait that essentially makes your monster a new monstertype, but still capable of giving birth to monsters without the trait, and on top of that has to be optional such that it can be turned on and off. The truth is that this conflicts very strongly with the way I have monstertypes set up in the game right now, so I'm having to rewrite a lot of the code for how monstertypes work, and every bit of code dependent on monstertypes. The upside of this is that once this is finished it will support a lot of new types of traits (the futanari trait, in particular, will be a lot easier to add in, though it will require a ton of animation work). Sorry, I just don't have control over it.

HOTFIX (8/13/13): Various small bug fixes, menus should refresh correctly/client button should work better, etc.

Sunday, August 4, 2013

Alpha Build 3.7

EDIT: Pushing it back a couple of days, sorry guys.

This is only a small update, as I've just finally got everything tied up at my work this week and can now enjoy unemployment. It means bad things for me, but great things for you guys, as my update schedule has been pushed up to once a week what with all the time I have on my hands all of a sudden. That means that the next update will be on 8/11/13 at 11:00 PM PST  8/13/13 at 11:00 PM PST.

A donor pulled out on the male/male animations, so they've been dropped below neoteny and the futanari trait for now, but once those two are done the male/male animations will go in along with elves. My plan currently is to simply grind away at all of the long-overdue donation features and polish the content that I've got in already that needs some more love, and once that's finished I'll get the donation site back up and start working on more storyline/exploration content. At the very least, all of the donation features will be present in the game by the end of the month (though they may be rough/unfinished).

Next weekend I will have all of the female neoteny monsters in the game, but they are likely to have relatively few animations.

Alright, so, this update 3.7 (8/4/13):
- Updated breeding menu. Click once to select the first monster, again to select the second, you can click the colored box or hit the 1 and 2 keys to change whether you are selecting the monster corresponding the the first (orange) or second (blue) spot. The tabs on the left allow you to sort by monster types. You still must breed a monster with itself to get it to breed with the player (this will change). Let me know what you think of the new menu

- Implemented dialog choices. Not using them an awful lot just yet.

- Messed with rate of trait accumulation. Let me know how it works.

- Hopefully fixed the bug that was causing you to have two games going at the same time when you went back to main menu and started a new one.

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Next Update

Next update will be August 4th. Absolutely no idea how much content will make it in, ideally I will finally get the male/male animations in. As always, sorry for the wait.

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Sorry About Absence

Extremely sorry for being absent and not updating you all for the past few weeks, as well for completely failing to keep up with the deadlines I've set. A lot has been going on in my life. I've recently found out that I am being laid off in about a month or so, and have been scrambling to make arrangements regarding this. Where I live happens to have pretty good unemployment support, so there's a distinct possibility that I may be taking this opportunity to work full-time on my various game development projects, at least for a little while.

I won't set any further deadlines until I know what my situation is going to be for sure. I really appreciate all of your patience, and again I sincerely apologize.

Regarding the blogger policy changes, I'm not worried about them. Worst case scenario I will just host my own website.

Sunday, June 16, 2013

The Futanari Trait and Elves Win!

The winners from the last round of voting were the Futanari Trait, with $234, and Elves, with $130! Thanks to everyone who donated. The current schedule of unfinished features to be added is:
1. Male/Male Animations
2. Neoteny Trait
3. Futanari Trait
4. Elves

You may notice that I've taken down the donation voting button. I'm making some significant changes to how the system works so for the meantime I'm not accepting donations for features. My plan is to implement a feature voting system that works like so:
Features will be broken down into smaller, more specific chunks. There will also be gameplay features added to the list along with the animations/cosmetic features currently on it. Each will have an estimation of how many hours the feature will take me to make. Each month I will take a certain number of hours worth of features (to be determined) from the top of the list to be implemented next.

When I make these changes, anyone who has already donated to a feature that hasn't yet won will be given the option of moving their money onto a different feature.

Now, to those of you who were looking forward to the update tonight I have to disappoint you. Unfortunately things came up this weekend that I wasn't prepared for, on top of a lot of paring back that I had to do from the size of the originally planned update. I decided that it wasn't worth it to release this update rather than holding onto it for a while longer.

Just to give myself time to implement everything I had originally planned for tonight's update, I'm going to push it back to next Sunday, 6/23. As a result the following update will also have to be pushed back, and because I don't want to keep doing this to you guys I'm going to give myself a lot of leeway and set it for Sunday, 7/14.

Because I've had to push these updates back so far, I'm going to not reactivate donation voting until after I have already completed all of the features that have won so far.

There is some good news, though. It is extremely probable that once August comes I will have a huge amount of more free time available to me. There is a very good chance that the pace of updates will pick up considerably once the Fall starts.

Sunday, June 9, 2013

Alpha Build 3.6

EDIT: Whoops, I realize it's broken. Give me a little bit to figure out why it's acting up.
EDITEDIT: It should be fixed now, let me know if it breaks.

Here's the relatively small update that I had planned for last weekend, before I got sick.

Thanks to Campfire for the music (there's more that I haven't added yet too)! Note that there is a mute button if you want to turn off sound (right now you'll mute both the music and the sound from animations, this will be changed in the future).

I've nerfed store-bought monsters significantly, and changed the way in which their stat caps are determined. I've also made clients a little bit easier to complete. I've halved the amount of time it takes for you to both feed and harvest monsters, hopefully making consumable use a bit more attractive.

You should no longer be able to get two different appearance changing traits on the same monster, nor should you be able to get cruel and altruistic on the same monster. There may be an issue with clients still asking for these things together on a monster.

The bug in which loss immunity traits and consumables didn't work should now be rectified.

Known Issues:
- Still not sure what's causing the save weirdness with the downloadable version of the game. Note: there's a chance that saves made with the downloadable version will interfere with the browser version in unpredictable ways. Clearing your cookies may be able to fix this. If you run into these problems please let me know in as much detail as possible.

- The mute button doesn't always correctly show if the game is muted or not. Clicking it a few times will always fix this.

Also, here's some (long overdue) rough sketches of some of the planned features. These sketches are, as I said, very rough and not necessarily indicative of what the final product will look like. Be sure to give me feedback on how you'd like me to change them.

Male Player Character

Catboy

Mannequin

Saturday, June 1, 2013

News and Next Update

I apologize for being absent for a while. Unfortunately, there has been a lot going on in my life and my day job and I've had very little time to work on the game or keep up with questions and correspondences. As a result I'm not going to be able to keep up the update schedule that I had hoped for.

In general I'm going to be slowing down the pace of updates, which is something that I probably should've done a while ago. I sincerely apologize to anyone who donated and will now be forced to wait longer for the features they were looking forward to. I also plan to do an overhaul of how the voting system works. The details aren't set in stone yet but anyone who has donated and will be affected by the change will be given the option to switch their money to a different feature once the new system is implemented, granted that they voted for something that hasn't already won.

For now, the voting will remain unchanged and on June 15th the two top features will go onto the list to be implemented exactly the way they have up until now. Then I'm going to freeze the voting system for a month while I finish implementing the features that have already won and add in the new system. After I've added in the new system, anyone who has donated money to a feature that hasn't won yet will be given the chance to move their money onto a different feature.

To give you guys an idea of the new schedule:
6/3: I'm going to put up a relatively small update that will be mostly bug fixes and gameplay changes
6/16: Male/Male Animations, Demons, new breeding menu
6/30: Kitten Girls, Chickies, Vealtauruses (male neoteny creatures to come later), faction reputation, dialogue choices, exploration, and event system

Also, my hope is that after the 6/30 update the back-end of the game will be complete enough to be able to allow saves to transfer between versions.

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Alpha Build 3.5

UPDATE (5/19/13):
Thanks to CoyoteRedMoon for his Kala art (sorry for scribbling on it, it's just for this scene I promise :P)

As ever, game breaking bugs are very possible in this version. Also, saves are will not transfer. One of my goals is to allow saves to be transferable by next month.

- Cumshots: All of the male-female monster pairings should now have cum-shot endings. They'll cum outside unless this breeding produces offspring, in which case they'll cum inside. The animations are still very rough and unfinished, so bear with me (final animations will include much more movement). The player does not yet have cum-shot endings for her breeding animations, but she will in the next update.

- New dialogue: Included some new dialogue teasing at the further storyline of the game and introducing you to some more characters. All the new dialogue will occur within the first few days. Much more to come on that front.

- Stat growth has been significantly changed, thanks to Werefrog for the equation, and Lonewolf and the rest for helping out with the math discussion. This may seriously affect balance, let me know how you like it.

- Other balance changes: made breeding modifier transfers harder, made human intellect a stacking trait

Known issues/intended fixes/changes that didn't make it in yet:
- Demons are not yet implemented, removed them from the monster type count to make people stop searching for them :P
- Unlocked traits that are species specific do not show up in the unlocked traits menu (Too Stronk, Greased Lightning, etc)
- Store monsters still accrue traits too quickly
- Animations/names in the monster pens are still a bit screwey
- There are some shenanigans that occur if you attempt to sell to a client while the game is asking you to release a monster

There will be another update on 6/2. If I can help it I'll do another update inbetween but there's a significant chance I won't be able to. I'm going to try to update the voting features and add sketches ASAP.

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Male/Male Animations and Neoteny

Winners were Male/Male Animations with $170 and Neoteny with $165. As ever, I am incredibly grateful for your donations.

I was hoping I would be able to give you the 3.5 update tonight but unfortunately things didn't go as planned and I ran into some issues. I'm pushing that back until Sunday 5/19. I really apologize to those who have been waiting for this and/or donated to see the cumshot animations. I promise to make sure this update is extra awesome just for delaying it so much.

The timeline for the new features will be Male/Male Animations on 6/2, then Neoteny (definitely the catgirl, hopefully the harpy and holstaurus as well) by 6/16. And, of course, both features will be optional and toggled from the options page.

Sunday, May 12, 2013

HELP WANTED and general updates

UPDATE:
Unfortunately, there's more bad news in that the game update isn't coming tonight either. Sorry to keep stringing you guys along :(. I uncovered some big changes I'm going to have to make before things will play together nicely. I'm going to push the update back all the way to this Sunday just because I don't want to set another deadline I can't keep. Also, I will declare the winner of this week's voting tonight at midnight PST.

I'll be uploading a game update later tonight (EDIT: Eek, I lied, the next update will most likely be tomorrow night) that will have rough versions of the all the cum-shot animations, among other game changes. I think that I've discovered that a schedule for implementing donation features that should be feasible to follow every month is: Top donation winner will be added around the 1st of the month, second-place donation winner will be added around the 15th of the month.

My priorities for the next month (not including the donation features) are going to be:

1. Bug fixes and game balance - As always

2. Redo of the breeding menu - It's kind of awful as-is

3. Storyline - Implementing exploration, branching dialog trees, and faction reputation

4. Butts - 'Nuff said

Another thing I'm going to try to start doing is adding sketches/more information about the various donation features so you guys get a much better idea of what you're voting for.

These are very rough sketches that don't necessarily represent what the final product will look like, but they should give you a better idea of what I'm going for. Here's some examples:

Alarune - In this case, this is actually the unfinished art for the alarune already in the game


Neoteny - Here's an example of what a Kitten Girl would look like
Bunnygirl - This sketch is super rough and likely to change the most: I actually most likely intend to have a "from behind" shot for the bunnygirl pose

And, of course, if you donated already and don't like the way it's turning out, let me know and we can work together to come up with something more to your liking.


HELP WANTED

Thank you so much for the donations guys! You've all been extremely generous. It's not an exaggeration to say that I've only been able to keep up with the game due to your support, and you're a huge part of what's keeping this project moving instead of dying.

In fact, I'd like to pick up the pace of the updates but I'm having difficulties doing so due to a serious art bottleneck. The intermittent problems I've been having with my tablet haven't been helping much either. As a result, I'm looking for help from any artist who's willing to contribute. I'm looking for people who can do any of the following:

1. Landscape and environment - Many of you may have noticed that the town looks awful :P. Landscape art is one of the biggest bottlenecks to the exploration system and further expansion of the game, as I'm not very good at it and it takes me a long time. Anyone who can make good environmental art would be a massive help to me, and if you're not used to working in vector formats don't fear: I can handle converting art from other formats or styles.

2. Animation - Anyone who has a good handle on flash animation can very easily help me out by making more sex animations for the various pairings. I can supply you with all my sprites and all you'll have to worry about is tweening, etc.

3. Character portraits - I'm looking for people who are willing to make dialog portraits for various NPCs and the like. I'll be giving you some basic descriptions and you can pretty much go wild with drawing them how you like, though ideally with some resemblance to my style just so that the art is cohesive.

As far as compensation goes, I can offer anyone who contributes art more control in the direction of the game (possibly in the form of "donation vouchers" you can use on the voting page), and for individuals who are willing to contribute a very significant amount I can offer you a cut of the donations each month.

If you're interested in contributing art to the game, please e-mail me at HartistaPipebomb@gmail.com with some samples of your work. Please state clearly in the subject line that it's about "Breeding Season Art Help". Unfortunately, I get a lot of spam and it might get filtered out or I might miss it, if I don't get back to you right away don't hesitate to bug me on the Legend of Krystal forums or in the comments section of this blog.

A lot of people have offered to help with programming or game design. I appreciate the offers but unfortunately I don't currently have much work I need done of that nature. Feel free to continue offering suggestions concerning programming and game design in the blog comments and on the Legend of Krystal forums, though, as these continue to be a huge help to me.

Also, donors or potential donors should never hesitate to contact me through e-mail at HartistaPipebomb@gmail.com or through private messages on the Legend of Krystal forums with questions or suggestions. If you're sending me an e-mail, though, please make sure that it states clearly that you are a donor in the subject line, as this makes it easier for me to spot and reply to.

Monday, April 29, 2013

Alpha Build 3.4


HOTFIX 4: 3.4.4
- Should fix the issue where traits were not being correctly recognized by clients.

(LESS) NINJA HOTFIX 3: 3.4.3
- Hopefully fixed trait unlocks via clients. Let me know if it works correctly.

NINJA HOTFIX 2: 3.4.2
- Altered how store monsters were generated to hopefully make clients less trivial. Also upped the cost for the ranch upgrades.

NINJA HOTFIX: 3.4.1
- Fixed a bug that was making gold clients not fulfill correctly and letting you spam it for infinite gil.


UPDATE (4/29/13): Alpha Version 3.4
Still a good possibility of game-breaking bugs. Let me know right away if you find any.

Player Pregnancy- The "first draft" of player pregnancy is now in the game! The player has a 1/15 chance of getting pregnant when you have sex with a male monster (this can be increased by fertility increasing consumables and traits). The player will carry the monster through a 7 day term, at the ending of which the new monster is born. The monster will be the same type and appearance as its father, with a very high probability of retaining its fathers stats. There are two rare traits that can only be obtained through player pregnancy. Currently there is no option to turn off pregnant animations, but this will be included later. Let me know how you feel about the very exaggerated pregnancy.


Status Screen- There's now a menu for viewing information about your player and the traits that you've unlocked.


Let me know if there's any bug fixes that I've missed. There's still a fix incoming for the weirdness with the way the hover-over works inside the monster pens.

Saturday, April 20, 2013

Delay in Updates

Sorry I keep pushing back my expected updates. My tablet broke again so I need to repair it again. Unfortunately I won't be able to release the pregnancy until next weekend (the 27th) and likely the cum-shot endings won't be able to go in until 5/4 . The fix for the recent gameplay changes might not come until next weekend as well. I apologize, just a lot of unforeseen problems have been cropping up, both with the game itself and my schedule. At the very least, I can absolutely promise that both the player pregnancy system and the cum-shot animations will go in before 5/15.

Monday, April 15, 2013

Alpha Build 3.3


SOUND WARNING: Some of the animations have sound


UPDATE (4/15/13): Alpha Version 3.3
There's a high probability of game-breaking bugs in this version, so let me know if you spot any ASAP and I'll try to hotfix. There have also been some big balance changes that haven't been thoroughly tested so let me know how it is. For the most part this update is pretty small. Also, the tutorial is now out-of-date in many places, sorry.

- Reputation has been removed, and replaced with a system that determines the stats requested by clients and possessed by store monsters based directly on the stats of monsters that you've raised so far.

- Delilah raises her demands based on how much money you've made (this system is still a placeholder, right now she just asks for an additional amount equal to how much you have left over when she comes for the check, so it can be avoided by going on buying sprees right before she comes).

- Clients have been changed (thanks to Ironvein for the suggestion): Ranch upgrades are no longer unlocked through gold clients and instead are all available at the start of the game as long as you have enough money to buy them. Instead, when you complete a silver client a new trait will be unlocked, and when you complete a gold client you have a chance to unlock a rare and powerful trait in addition to the chance to unlock regular traits.

- Consumables now increase MOD by twice as much and are worth half as much money. There are also new traits that, once unlocked, can give a monster the consumable effect of another monster type in addition to their own consumable effect.

- A number of minor changes to how various traits and stats work.

- One unfinished cum-shot animation :P

Also, since some are wondering how the implementation of the pregnancy and cum-shot animations will work:
Player Pregnancy -
The player has a rare chance of being impregnated by a male (or futa, once added) monster. This chance will be increased by special traits and consumables. The player will be pregnant for seven days (subject to change) during which she'll take longer than usual to perform actions and will be visibly pregnant in her animations. At the end of this period she'll lay an egg (with animation, time permitting) that will hatch into a monster of the breed she was impregnated by. This monster will have special traits/appearance. In the future I may make it so that special hybrid breeds are only available this way (ie, player can breed with a dickwolf to get a wolfman).

Cum-shot Animations -
When you breed two monsters together you will be able to view a cum-shot finish. The monster will cum inside or outside depending on whether this breeding produced offspring.

EDIT:
Additional Notes:
- The day changes instantly now instead of there being a night animation. In the future I might add some little thing to indicate to you that the day has changed as it's a little confusing
- I'm aware of the weirdness with how the name flickers, etc, when you hover-over monsters in the pens, it is currently a work-in-progress

Player Pregnancy and Cum-Shot Endings Win!

The first round of donation voting has just finished. The winning features are Player Pregnancy with $120 and Cum-Shot Endings with $90! Thank you so much for your incredible generosity, guys. This money helped me pay for repairs for my tablet and buy some time off of my busy schedule to be able to work on this game, and your support has really made a difference in my ability to continue working on it.

I intend to have player pregnancy in the game by next weekend on the 21st, and the cum-shot endings should all be in by the 28th.

The next round of voting will end on 5/15. Currently Threesome Animations are in the lead with $65, followed by the Futanari Trait with $55.

I'm going to be putting up an update to the game later today. This one will be primarily minor changes with a big impact on the gameplay. Saves from the last version will not transfer over. Sorry for making you guys restart from the beginning with all of these early updates. Soon I hope to get to a point where I can have the saves transfer between releases, but it's still so early on that too many things change between versions to make that possible.

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Alpha Build 3.2

First of all, thanks so much to everyone who has donated! The response has been fantastic so far and way better than I could have hoped. I really appreciate you guys helping support the game. I've already begun working on some of the high-ranking features (though I may switch my priorities around depending on where the donations go). This round of voting is going to end on 4/15, so expect those features that win to be implemented within a couple weeks afterwards.


HOTFIX 3.2.1 (3/18/13):
- Fixed lock-up issue with the Consumable Store buy/sell menu
- Added a button that you can click to leave the donation page
- Fixed a problem that temporarily disabled hotkeys

Known Issues:
- Closing the breeding or client menu with the monster type selector combo box open will cause a crash (silly problem, but I need to make some changes to how menus are handled to fix it)


 Alright, lots of new gameplay stuff in this one, not too much new art or sex scenes (just a couple of holstaurus animations, still no harvest). Unfortunately I've been working on adding things all day so I've had barely any time to test it. Let me know if you guys find bugs and I'll try to fix them quickly.

 I've made huge changes to the balance of the game, but like I said I haven't been able to test them yet so it may be entirely out of whack. Don't be surprised if the game becomes impossible or EZ-mode out of nowhere.

 - Stat Caps: Monsters now have stat caps. Monsters will always inherit the greater of two stat caps from their parents, as well as an additional amount of stat cap growth. A monster is stuck with its stat cap forever: if you want to get high stat creatures, you're going to have to breed or buy monsters with higher stat caps.

 - Trait Stacking: You can no longer get duplicate traits. Instead, certain traits can stack (ie, breed a monster with Added Value 1 to another monster with Added Value 1 and you might get a monster with Added Value 2, additionally if you were to breed a monster with Added Value 2 to another monster with Added Value 2, you could get a monster with Added Value 4). Traits can stack up to 10. To counteract how potentially powerful this is, HERP-DERP has another horrifying consequence: it will remove all other traits.

 - New Traits: Tons of new traits. They all SHOULD be working, but there's a high chance that some of them might be buggy. Let me know if you find any. - Species-specific Traits: Some traits can only be found on specific monster types (for instance, Greased Lightning can only be found on Catgirls).

 - Increased Client Difficulty: All Clients will now scale up the number of demands they make with your reputation. They also now will request certain stats to be UNDER a certain value. - Debt Payments: Now at the beginning of every month you must make debt payments to Delilah or you'll get a game over (currently there's no penalty with just continuing on after a game over). She starts at 2,000 gil and then doubles her demand each month. It's not necessarily intended for you to be able to keep up with her, as this is just a placeholder for how the actual debt system will work. It's also technically possible for you to beat the game now (and I even added an ending!) if you pay off the entire 10,000,000 gil that you owe to Delilah. I don't actually know whether this would be any fun to do, though.

 - Bug fixes: Tons and tons of little bug fixes and convenience additions. Some things (out of many more):
     - Scrollbar for Clients when their demands fill the entire box
     - "Sell All" button in the Consumable Store
     - Breeding Modifier colors fixed at high values (BMs should also cap at bright green and not get any higher)
     - Hitting SPACE with no windows open will return you to the RanchMap
     - Moving between locations will close all windows
     - Various duplication bugs should be fixed I am sure there are still plenty around, though. Let me know which ones I missed.

 Things that just barely didn't make the cut into this version:
- Shortcuts for the Interaction Menu
- Tooltips to let you know how long actions will take and warn you about incest
- The ability to see your monsters' fertility and pregnancy chance

 Hopefully I didn't forget anything. (Oh, and sorry for the annoying opening plug :P)

 EDIT: Knew I was forgetting something! The animations are frozen in the various monster pens to look like snap-shots. This is intentional: the monster animations were causing lag problems. It does look kind of weird, so this might just be a temporary solution until I come up with a better idea.

Update Incoming

Hey, 3.2 incoming, expect it at about 10:00 PM PST.

Also, people in 4chan: Yes, it is me.

EDIT: Gonna knock that time up to 10:30 PM.

Saturday, March 16, 2013

Donate to Vote on New Features!


Hey, sorry for the lack of updates for a while. I had an unfortunate busy(/lazy) spell.

However, there's good news! I should have a new game update ready later on Sunday. This will include some changes to the Traits system as well as the addition of heritable Stat Caps. Ideally, these Stat Caps will make breeding an even more important part of the game, while extending the amount of gameplay you can get out of the game. Unfortunately, your saves will not transfer over between versions yet. Depending on how much I can manage to get done, there might also be additional Holstaurus animations, and just maybe a sneak peak of the next monster. Maybe.

In even more exciting news: I have finished putting together the Voting Donations Page! Now you can support the game while also shaping the direction it moves in by putting your donations behind the features you'd most like to see included. Every month I will take two top rated features and put them in the game. If your feature doesn't win, don't worry: your money will remain backing the feature you picked forever until it gets implemented, and everything I've put up on the donations page is a feature I intend to have in the game eventually (emphasis on the eventually).

If there's something you'd like to see added to the list of features please head over to the legend of krystal forums to suggest it, or post it right here on the blog. I will periodically be holding polls on LoK to see which features seem most popular and are good candidates for adding to the donation list.

Also, the donation system is something I half stole and half hacked together, so if there's any issues with it be sure to notify me immediately; I should be able to get them sorted out pretty easily.

Also also spread the word! Feel free to upload the game wherever you please and post it up on forums and message boards, so long as you make sure it all leads back here to the blog. Let me know where you put it up or if you happen to stumble upon it elsewhere: I like to be able to see as much feedback as I can.

Friday, March 1, 2013

Alpha Build 3.1


HOTFIX: Made a change to Holstaurus Milk that should hopefully make it work better.
EDIT: Oops, accidentally posted up my cheater version with all the monster unlocked. Fixed now.
 NOTE: You can use SPACE to close menus quickly and skip through dialogue.

 UPDATES:

 -A lot of bug fixes: most of the older major bugs should be sorted out by now. Saves should work reasonably well now. If they're still a problem let me know.

 -NEW MONSTER: HOLSTAURUS. Most of the animations are still missing though, sadly.

 -New animations were added for the Butt Stallion, please enjoy them.

 -A tutorial has been added. It's a little crappy, but it'll do for now at least.

 -A terrifying new punishment has been added for too much incest