Release 66: Mechanization

With this release, we're once again pushing deeper into the gameplay features which will be needed in order to finish campaign mode.  And as the first step on that push, Mechanical Chosen have now been added to the game!  Mechanical Chosen have a pretty diverse set of abilities, and Mechanical Forsaken will introduce several more, so I ended up opting to focus purely on the Chosen side of things for this update.  The Mechanical Clash scenario has been added to single play mode, but facing Mechanical Chosen in campaign mode (and making use of their Forsaken counterparts) will have to wait for next month.

The theme of the Mechanical Chosen is that they represent human ingenuity and proactivity.  As such, they don't need to wait until the final battle before trying to destroy the Demon Lord.  Mechanical Chosen conduct "Operations" which count down, day-by-day, to the destruction of the Demonic hive (which means game over).  Furthermore, each Operation grants powerful bonuses to the Mechanical Chosen or to her team as a whole.  Operations can be disrupted by breaking the Mechanical Chosen's Vulnerabilities, but if you aren't careful, you might end up in a situation where the buff granted by the current Operation prevents you from progressing her corruption in the way you had planned.  More than any other species up to this point, Mechanical Chosen require you to plan ahead, so you should read up on what their Operations do and decide which ones you want to trigger!

Because so many of the Mechanical Chosen species were explicitly designed to be indistinguishable from humans at a casual glance, the number of new faces added to the default portrait pack is a bit smaller than usual.  (That said, the "inhuman"ness of the remaining ones is pretty striking - I got a lot of questions about what Mechanical Chosen would look like in the leadup to this update, and I hope those who were interested in this sort of thing will be happy with the result.)  In any case, this freed me up to go back and add more portraits to Animalistic Chosen.  The "songbird" Animalistic subspecies no longer just uses regular human portraits, so this should help people imagine how they're meant to look different despite their lack of animal ears.

This release also has a decent chunk of content commissioned by Kalloi!  The orgasm denial fetish vignette now has a continuation, and that continuation unlocks a new Forsaken tool, the Maid's Cage, which the subject can use to subject other Chosen to more of the same.  Furthermore, the orgasm denial fetish itself has also gotten a bit of new functionality, so that Chosen who have it maxed out will take extra PLEA from related actions in custom sex scenes, and the edged orgasm can end up so intense that it actually knocks them out.

In the coming month, I'm going to be working on the "minigame" that Mechanical Chosen will introduce when converted to Forsaken in campaign mode.  It'll be possible to start doing some pretty crazy things once you have Mechanical Chosen improving your hive.  Once this has been fully implemented, players who are interested in playing beyond the end of campaign mode should have some options that let them do so.

Click here to download.  Mirror.

• Content: Added the Mechanical Clash scenario to single play mode.
• Content: Added 12 new faces to the default portrait pack (10 for Mechanical Chosen, 2 for Animalistic Chosen).
• Content: Added one new vignette.
• Content: Added one new Forsaken tool, the Maid's Cage, unlocked by that vignette.
• Content: Added the orgasm denial vulnerability effect to Chosen with a maxed-out edging fetish for custom sex scenes.
• Interface: Clarified the trait transfer display when using the Velvet Key.
• Bugfix: Spared Forsaken will now correctly have their deployment in battle immediately cancelled.
• Bugfix: The item selection for Loop 15 will no longer break the random seeding in campaign mode.
• Bugfix: Resolved some cases where swapping Forsaken positions around wouldn't immediately take effect.
• Bugfix: Species-determined outfits (previously just mummies always wearing the cloth strips outfit, but now also armor pilot and robot maid Chosen) are now consistently applied.
• Bugfix: Resolved some crashes that could be caused by missing Favorite Forsaken smalltalk.