Phase 1b is officially done!

To save people reading, a quick reminder first of how releases for this game works.

The game is split into 4 Phases total, with each phase split into 3 sub-phases which concentrate on similar things. So Subphase A is Game Mechanics, B is Characters and C is Gameplay. Each subphase is roughly 3 weeks.

The Itch.io version updates for major bugfixes, and at the end of each Phase. Patreon gets updates at the end of each subphase, or if there's a major feature to test on people. The best way to keep up to date with the game is through Patreon: https://patreon.com/methodiaRascal It's also my only real source of income at the moment due to job issues, so game development is currently my full time job, so any support is greatly appreciated.

Failing that, I am constantly doing updates on Discord.

So, what's in this new version?

• Clothing System
• Female Wolves
• Badgers
• Difficulty selection
• Wardrobe inventory
• Clothing damage
• Animation Gallery
• More observant wolves
• Bugfixes

Clothing System

You'll still start off nude *for now*, but once you get into the game, hit Tab to allocate clothing to your body slots. You've got bra, panties, leggings and shirts available. Your clothing will be limited to start with, but there's something like 5 tops and 4 trousers/shorts added into the item drops, so you'll find new clothing out there.

At the moment, your tops don't do anything but be cosmetic. Trousers and panties though provide additional time to escape the wolves. The longer you struggle, the more damage they take, but you can't progress to sex until they've been destroyed. This is pretty much sex armour. Tops will do a similar thing in Phase 2 for combat. Bottoms for sex protection, tops for combat protection.

Badgers

The first of the new enemy types. For now they do the same as wolves do, but with different equipment.

Female Enemies

The next big change. There are now female wolves and Badgers. They share some of the animations with the player character, but at the moment they are immune to takedowns. What they can do is spot you, chase you and then loudly alert any males in the area. Rocks take care of them.

Difficulty

At the character creation screen, you can select game difficulty. This affects stamina damage modifier, how many struggle loops before you remain captured, clothing damage multiplier, and how fast time continues when in the inventory.

Animation Gallery

As you play through the game, you will unlock animations as they happen. Visit the barn to see them and play them. There's 9 in total.

This is a very early implementation. This gallery will eventually be situated in Pineridge, but that can't happen until the map is built and in use.

More Observant Wolves

The higher their Defence, the more chance they'll spot the plants and avoid them. This should partially fix the part where every wolf just happens to walk directly into the nearest plant as soon as  the game starts.

Bugs to Watch out for

I've done my best to test and kill as many bugs as possible, but there are a few that still exist, but aren't gamebreaking. Some of these will need a bit of tweaking and work to iron out, while others are part of systems due for imminent updates. A few of the main ones:

• Clothing unequips when changing levels
• Sometimes, the wolves just go into sex and ignore clothing
• Too many wolves orgasming at the same time can cause an error because of too many particles
• Inventory items should be red when equipped, but only works some of the time
• Sometimes character bodyparts vanish briefly
• Blowjob animation has lost the jaw movement

The unequip thing is a nuisance, but it doesn't seem to be every level change. It's something I am working on.

Conclusion

This subphase has been a bit of a nightmare. Several major features and a bunch of smaller ones around the sides. I would have liked to get more in-depth with the inventory, and the plan is to integrate regular items into it as well as adding a customisable hotbar. At the moment the inventory works, with caveats, so I'd like to get that stable and work out the kinks before making it bigger and tougher to fix.

I'd really have liked to get the female enemies their own takedowns and specific stuff, but again, just not enough time in the 3 week timespan. These should get added in Phase 2a and 2b. There's also the recovery interruption stuff I'd like to work on, but I paused that while I figure out some of the details on that one.

Phase 1c

The final part of Phase 1!

I'll be taking a week off to do other work. I've got some client stuff to do, Patreon rewards (behind on those), and an episode to batter through. After that it's on to the 2 weeks for the game, hopefully releasing on Patreon around 5th December.

• Game Prologue
• basic storyline
• Pineridge
• Starter levels
• Prompt/Quest system

This subphase should be interesting, and provide the first idea of actual gameplay. It's also an opportunity to learn about cutscenes, but for the most part is going to be a lot of modelling work. As well as doing other work since the subphase ended on saturday, I've been doing other upgrades and tests. The first of those is procedural terrain generation.

Procedural Terrain

The Paddock has vague procedural elements in it. Items and bushes will be different each time you play through, but those are set as the level loads, and are just a randomiser that decides if the placed object spawns. The dungeon IS procedural, but is still fairly linear. The game will pick a path from start to end, add rooms and branches to mix it up. What we're after is fully procedural terrain generation, which Unreal does not do out of the box, so it's something I've been looking into for a while. This is something that will benefit from a proper in-depth post when it's a bit more advanced, but for now, here's where it is at the moment.

It's blocky, but it's also a big step and the first step required.

UE5.1

Finally, Unreal released the newest version of the engine, so the game got upgraded. It went...

It's now been fixed. Hopefully, this should help with one of the major causes of lag. UE5.0 had issues with nanite not working if a model has transparency on textures. Nanite basically reduces the number of polygons and scale of textures the further the player gets from an object. Most things in the game now have Nanite active, the main exceptions are the grass, flowers and trees. The new version should fix that, so with some luck, we should get way better performance.

There was also an issue where the physical game filesize was creeping up to the 1Gb limit for itch.io. For starters, the Phase 1 release in a few weeks will have some work done to remove as much stuff that isn't needed, and optimised to help it run a bit better. One immediate fix I discovered, is that when I do screenshots for these posts, the game saves them into the RotW folder. I thought the entire folder got scrubbed each time the game was packaged. It turns out that the last few versions have been released with over 150Mb of screenshots in there. Now I know this is a thing, they will not be packaged any longer.