This update marks the beginning of a push toward better customization content, although it does have one major gameplay addition. The "Strategic Advantage" system now activates upon starting Loop 12 of campaign mode (and there's also a new single play scenario featuring the system for those who want to give it a try immediately). When Strategic Advantage is enabled, dealing damage to the Chosen will grant the player points which can be used to seize objectives in the city. Each objective gives a different unique bonus, like causing some of the damage dealt to the Chosen to carry over into the next day. This should make for some more interesting gameplay decisions when it isn't yet possible to inflict a new level of Vulnerability Break on the Chosen, but a new objective is still in reach to be seized.
The majority of the work for this update went into flavor content. There are some new story scenes, including a series for Victory's boss fight to match the one that Splendor already had. Chosen and Forsaken can now refer to each other with personalized nicknames and titles - this includes both nicknames set by the player during Chosen customization and nicknames they decide to start using depending on events which occur during the game. Friendly Chosen can pick nicknames depending on personality, family relationship, and on the vignettes they experience together. Rival Chosen can pick nicknames depending on the negative Vulnerability Break scenes that turned them into rivals. I think this does a lot to make the characters and their relationships feel more alive, and there's more that I want to do with this system later.
Finally, this update includes some very brief preliminary work on tracking characters' asset sizes, complete with simple Mendelian inheritance mechanics happening under the hood. Only breast size, hip size, and penis size are currently tracked, but it will be very simple to add more traits in subsequent updates. They also only show up in a couple of places (Chosen sex stats screen and Forsaken customize body screen) and can only be influenced in a couple of ways (experiencing first pregnancy, and the Satisfied Curiosity vignette added last update). More customization options and gameplay interactions are planned. And for players who prefer for asset sizes to remain up to the player's imagination, this can all be toggled off in the content options menu.
The next update will introduce another major gameplay feature, because I want to add a quicker way for experienced players to access lategame campaign content without having to play through a bunch of loops they've already cleared before. But aside from that, I want to continue to focus on customization and flavor content for at least one more month. As excited as I am to push forward into the next stage of campaign mode, I think it's important to make sure that the journey there has plenty of content first.
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- Content: Added the Strategic Advantage advantage system which appears starting in Loop 12 of campaign mode and in its own new scenario.
- Content: Added story scenes to the Victory boss fight and to the start of Loop 12.
- Content: Added asset size tracking and inheritance.
- Content: Added custom nicknames and titles between characters.
- Balance: Chosen who took comparatively large damage in the previous battle will now be more selfish about picking more sinful downtime actions than their partners.
- Balance: Surrender to Instincts now has double the effect, provides Hypnotism progress twice as fast, and is more likely to be used.
- Interface: Information about different traumas' opening level conditions now appears more prominently in-game.
- Bugfix: The portrait sidebar no longer becomes untoggleable on saves with existing save files.
- Bugfix: Resolved a crash that could happen with T3 sinful actions performed at very high damage levels.
- Bugfix: Resolved some issues with the Rampancy Distortion during the final battle and as Forsaken.
- Bugfix: Triggering the Aversion Distortion will no longer allow allies to escape to the sky before they should.
- Bugfix: The "Ghost Buster" achievement will no longer cause increasingly unstable downtime behavior with every level.
- Bugfix: Resolved a couple of crashes that could happen when trying to generate genetics for bodies without owners.
- Bugfix: Resolved a crash that could happen when Chosen who reach full friendship or enmity try to assign nicknames to each other.
- Bugfix: Hitting the buttons to customize body parts for Forsaken and Demon Lord bodies will now correctly display the current customization state.
- Bugfix: Created Demon Lord bodies will now correctly initialize with reasonable asset sizes.
- Bugfix: Resolved an issue where relatives of Chosen were bugged such that trying to generate relatives of theirs in turn would cause problems.
