Newlife 0.3.2

Hello everyone!

So, from the title of this post I'm sure you've seen that a new version is out. 
However, before you go download it, I'd like to ask you to take just a minute to read my last post. 
This is quite an important one - one of the UK's largest political parties is proposing legislation that will spell an end to most free adult content from British creators if they win the general election on May 7th. 
Please read the post before hitting the download link. Even if you aren't a UK voter you might still be able to help by getting the word out. Remember - if this legislation goes through then I might not be allowed by law to let you play Newlife until I've taken your credit card information.


Well, now that you've (hopefully) had a read of that one, onto the new version:

The 0.3.2 version of Newlife is finished and I've released it on Patreon. Early-access Patrons can find it in the creations section here. The changelog is below.
I've also made the post with the patron version of 0.3.1 visible to all patrons, so those of you who aren't supporting at the early-access level can still get it and enjoy your cheat options.

The 0.3.1 release has been made public. I'll be updating the links to the right of the blog as soon as I finish posting this. The 0.3.1 changelog is here.

As usual, saved files & templates from older versions probably won't work with newer ones. 

For new players - just use one of the links to the right to get either the jar or the exe version. You only need one or the other - not both. I recommend trying the jar first.
For either version you'll need to have Java installed. A lot of programs use Java so you might well already have it. If the jar shows up as an unrecognised file type, then you probably don't. In that case you can get it from http://www.java.com/. 
The exe should tell you if you don't have the right version on your computer, but you'll still need to install it to run the game.

My next task will be writing the "getting started" guide, and then I'll get started on 0.3.3.

Here's the changelog:

• Fixes for text issues. Thanks to souldead341, dm2bf & cubano for reporting problems they found.
• Fixed a bug where you could repeat the “free trial” at the gym. Thanks to Cubano for reporting this one.
• Fixed a big reported by death25 where the action to accept or turn down a workout partner was incorrectly taking time in the scene.
• Saving a template or starting a game with a non-numeric value in one of the personality weight fields will now show an error message and use the default values, instead of throwing an exception. Thanks to Cubano for reporting this issue.
• Fixed an issue reported by dm2bf where Ivy was surprised to find you pregnant in the endgame scene even if you'd already visited her and told her about it.
• If you find out you're pregnant via a checkup at the doctor then you'll automatically discover who the father is.
• Fixed a bug reported by cubano where it wasn't possible to create an athletic outfit with a sports bra but no top.
• The orgasms stat wasn't being increased by successfully pleasuring yourself in the shower in the morning – fixed.
• Added some new stats that were requested in a blog comment.
• Changed clothing descriptions to support third-person pronouns. You won't see many differences from this (unless I made typos!) but it'll be an important step in adding female npcs.
• Fixed a bug reported by an anonymous blog commenter where it was possible to both encourage and chastise the pervy client at the same time. This led to every action being de-activated except for the wife looking in, meaning she's always appear every turn. Now, encouraging him through the “flirt” or “butter up suggestively” action un-does the effect of telling him off, and lets him go back to feeling you up.
• Some small changes to clothing stats, especially the effects of not wearing clothes of certain types.
• Added a new sexy talk action for the missionary & standing sex scenes
• Added a new scene, which will sometimes happen when you dance on your own in a club

Have fun, enjoy the new version, and please report any bugs!

Adult content under attack!

Hello everyone!


Thank you for visiting my blog, and I hope you've been enjoying playing Newlife.

However, I have some worrying news. There are plans afoot by the British Conservative party to bring in strict anti-porn laws which might make it difficult or impossible to continue making an adult game.


However, there are things we can all do to try and stop this happening. There's an election on May 7^th, and the conservatives haven't won yet!

What is this legislation?


The supposed reason behind the proposed law is to “protect children” from porn. It isn't clear what the law will define as “porn”, but previous legislation was criticised for over-blocking after the discovery that blocked sites included sex education and charities, so I think we should expect this to hit pretty much all adult material, including text-only content.


The legislation will require all sites with adult content to prove that a visitor is over 18 before they allow them access to it. This means a lot more that just having a content-warning interstitial page. The Conservative culture secretary who announced this legislation specified credit card checks as an appropriate method of age verification.


The law will apply to both British and overseas sites. British sites will no doubt have to comply under the threat of fines or arrest. Foreign site owners obviously won't have to fear the UK police, but they'll find their sites blocked at ISP level for everyone in the UK if they don't comply – an approach that the Sex & Censorship blog described as "Chinese-style internet censorship". 


What will this mean?


It should be obvious to anyone who knows the internet that this plan is moronic and has no chance of success. What it'll do is drive legitimate adult creators out of business, while dodgy fly-by-night websites will spring up to provide unblocked free porn, along with a much higher risk of viruses and other malware.


This is bad for pretty much everyone reading this:

• British adults who enjoy erotic content will find it much harder to access it, especially if they don't want to pay before seeing so much as a free sample.
  
• Many British creators will likely be shut down – something which has already happened to many who have fallen foul of existing laws against adult video-on-demand.
• People outside the UK will lose access to those British creators, which might include Newlife, and adult content creators outside the UK who don't implement credit-card checks will lose access to UK fans.
  
  

It seemed strange to me that these measures are so well supported by politicians. After all, a huge number of voters enjoy adult content.
However, there's been little talk about it online outside of sites dedicated to civil liberties, and I haven't seen it mentioned much on adult forums. Perhaps this is because only a minority come from the UK.


What can we do?


Well, first of all, if you're in the UK – vote!
The election is on May 7^th, and analysts believe it's going to be the closest one in recent history, with either big party in with a good shot of winning, and a high likelihood of some sort of coalition. This means that your vote really matters!
I sometimes read comments from cynical people who think that not voting sends some sort of message. Not at all! The politicians care about winning the election, and they don't care much if turnout is low. The main message not voting sends is that your opinion does not matter. This is why politicians focus so much on older voters – they are statistically more likely to vote than young adults.
Even if you're in a safe seat, getting out and voting for a party with a good track record on civil liberties will show politicians that those ideas are becoming popular. Besides, just because a seat is supposed to be “safe” doesn't mean it's impossible for a big shift to happen. In fact, safe seats often have lower voter turnout. I bet if every non-voter who enjoys adult content actually voted this time then we'd see some startling shifts.


Who to vote for?

The obviously bad party here are the conservatives – they're the only ones who've outright promised to bring in this legislation.
However, Labour also have a bad record with this sort of thing, and a lot of our current anti-porn laws have been fully supported by them.

I sent an email to activist Jerry Barnett, owner of Sex & Censorship. Here's what he had to say:
“Labour aren't any better in this area than Tories, although I prefer them in other areas of policy. The Lib Dems have a reasonably solid record of defending liberty, and they've stopped some Tory laws, such as the "snooper's charter".
I think the best realistic outcome is a coalition involving Labour, lib dems and SNP. Hopefully the Lib Dems would act as a restraining force on Labour.”

So there you go. If you're a single-issue voter like me then get the Libdems into power if you can. If you can't then vote whichever way will see the tories miss out on your seat, and if you're in a safe seat them voting for a party with a good record on civil liberties will hopefully send a message.

Update:
While browsing the web, I've come across this article in Wired in which a Labour spokesperson talks about how they're in favour of the Conservative's plans. Obviously this is bad news and means that I can't really recommend voting Labour over Tory on this issue.


What about if you aren't in the UK?

Well, you can still help by letting people know about this. I'll be posting on the various forums where I'm a member, but I'm not a full-time campaigner, and there's countless places where I won't be posting.
This seems to be flying under the radar and isn't being given much prominence in the news, so I expect a lot of voters simply don't know about this change, or haven't taken the time to consider what it'll mean for them. We can really have an effect if we pull together and get the simple message out: vote against the tories if you enjoy adult content.
Why not open up a tab right now, go to a forum you're a member of where people discuss adult content, and make a post letting them know? If everyone who reads this makes just one short forum post then we could get the word out all over the place.


Thanks for reading, and thanks much more if you can help!

Thank you for reading this. The election is in a week. I'm hoping to see a good outcome, but just hoping isn't enough. I'll be voting too and I'll also be trying to get the word out to other voters.

I can't make much of a difference on the election just by myself, but if you help out and rally adult communities together then all together we definitely can. After all, there's more people who like adult content than there are who vote tory!

Newlife 0.3.1

Hello everyone!

The 0.3.1 version of Newlife is finished and I've released it on Patreon. Early-access Patrons can find it in the creations section here. The changelog is below.
That also means that the 0.3.0 release has been made public. I'll be updating the links to the right of the blog as soon as I finish posting this. The 0.3.0 changelog is here.

As usual, saved files & templates from older versions probably won't work with newer ones. 

For new players - just use one of the links to the right to get either the jar or the exe version. You only need one or the other - not both. I recommend trying the jar first.
For either version you'll need to have Java installed. A lot of programs use Java so you might well already have it. If the jar shows up as an unrecognised file type, then you probably don't. In that case you can get it from http://www.java.com/. 
The exe should tell you if you don't have the right version on your computer, but you'll still need to install it to run the game.

0.3.1 Focuses on UI improvements, but there's also new content for you to (hopefully) enjoy.
You've probably noticed that this release took longer than usual. I think in the last month or so I've been over-ambitious when planning new versions. Back last year I had a simple plan for each release - one large change or two medium ones. 0.3.1 has five significant changes (the gym, advanced character creation, in-game help, UI rework, alternative start) of which several could be considered large. 
I don't want future versions to take this long, so I'm going to try to get back to my original approach starting with the next release, which I aim to have out before the end of the month. 

Here's the changelog:

• Fixes for text issues. Thanks to souldead341, dutchheathen, death25 & cubano for reporting problems they found.
• Fixed a bug reported by souldead341 & by pm from a patron where the home date scene was ending a turn late on returning from some other scenes. This meant it could end the same turn you chose an action like “serious talk” that prompts for a follow-up selection.
• Fixed a similar bug with the nightclub scene reported by death25.
• Fixed another timing but reported by death25 where the scene at the client's home could run out of time just as you're about to have sex. It now won't end while you're facing a decision of whether to let him push you into his bed, or while you're deciding whether to accept his offer to get him off for a sale.
• Choosing the Childcare as work experience in character creation now increases your starting skill. This should have been in the last version, but I completely forgot. Oops. Thanks to Orangejuice for prompting me to talk about work experience in a forum post, which made me remember about it.
• Fixed a bug reported by souldead341, cubano and also by pm on Patreon where the check for showing the father was missing a NOT so it was appearing as “Unknown” when the player had had a paternity test.
• Ivy's ill-fitting clothes are no longer considered suitable for going out. Go and buy a nice dress if you want to date!
• You can no longer go on or off the pill in the middle of the week using the character screen. This is still done on the same screen, but the button will be disabled except when you access it from the week planner.
• Newlife windows will no longer “jump around” when switching between screens, a change first requested by tfgamessite user mke back in November when the last version was 0.1.3. Well, when things get put on the todo list they do get done. I never said they get done quickly.
• Reduced the size of all screens so they should work for people using 1024x768 or 1366x768 resolutions.
• Improved scrolling on the action list.
• Removed the “random outfit” checkboxes and moved Random Outfit into being a choice in the outfit dropdowns, as suggested by Mugunghwa in an impressive UI mockup on Patreon. The default selection is now to pick a random outfit.
• Added an advanced character creation section to the female character creation screen on the patron version. This contains some cheats & special customisation options, although more will be added in future releases.
• Alternative start with no fewer than four ways to get a game-over in the intro. Because I know that's what you really play the game for.
• When you get dumped the guy will delete your number, which means he won't ask you out again unless you can charm him into exchanging numbers again. If you're the one who dumps him then he won't delete it, and you might get pestered by your ex asking you out on dates in the hope you'll get back together.
• Standardised work experience bonuses to +30 skill points for those that have an effect. The exception is military which is expected to be split across fitness & martial arts, and so only gets half its effect for now. This means that sales & customer service are slightly better than before (+30 instead of +25), but fashion is significantly worse (used to be +50).
• Added the fitness skill, but for now this has very little effect on the game. Maximum fitness skill is affected by your body type – only toned allows you to reach a skill of 100.
• Straddling your partner in bed now has a failure chance based on how helpful he is, his weight (heavier partners are harder to roll over and get on top of), and your fitness skill. The push off / push away actions already had a failure chance, but they now also have a bonus based on fitness – or a penalty if your skill is negative.
• Athletic outfits can now be created, and some athletic clothes have been added.
• You can go to the gym on weekends or in your free time.
• Added an in-game help screen with information for new players.

Have fun, enjoy the new version, and please report any bugs!

Upcoming UI changes

Hello everyone.

I think I'm done with almost all the UI changes - just the week planner and main menu left to mess around with, and that's just a matter of moving the text box around and resizing buttons.

Here are some screenshots. From the comments on the last few posts, I know that people like different things and I'm sure these won't be perfect for everyone, but unless there are any really critical issues I'd rather stick with this set for 0.3.1. I'm a bit behind schedule after some issues with the outfit screen, so I think I'd better finish off the UI work so the release won't be delayed too much.

Scene UI, as you can see it's influenced by mugunghwa's mockup:

Although the main text window might look a little short, you can resize the window and the text area will resize with it, so you can make it longer if you have a big enough monitor.

The main menu. I'm not entirely sure that the button bar looks good. Should the button sizes be standardised perhaps? Also, check out that Help button. From the next release, if you can't figure out what button to press to Load a Game then you can click Help and it'll tell you.

The outfit screen. Marvel at how it looks pretty much like the old version. The layout code has been almost completely re-done, so it took ages to get it looking like that.

And a teaser of the new 'advanced' character creation tab for patrons. There's only a few cheat options there so far, but I'll add more in future versions.

There you go. Shouldn't be too long before you'll get to actually play with these screens yourselves. Hope you're all having a good week :)

Help

Hello everyone! 

I trust you're all suitably panicked by the dramatic post title. Well, the time has come for me to actually write a help section for new players. There'll be a button added to each page and they all need their own help topic.

That's where you come in. I sometimes get messages from people asking if they can help with development, and I usually turn them down. This time though, I think it would be helpful if I can call on the community to assist.

So far I've done all the coding and I've written two help pages and started a third. That's the main menu, scene viewer, and wardrobe screen topics.
If people want to contribute to Newlife, then it would be very helpful if you could write up a help page similar to (or better than) the example in the screenshot below and either message me with it or post it as a comment.

Help pages I need include:
- One for every screen except the help one. Remaining are the character screen, relationship browser, character creation screen, male character creation and week planner.
- A simple "getting started" page with advice for new players on starting a game. I'm going to write up a blog page with screenshots and link it from this, but there should also be an in-game help page for people without internet access.
- Maybe some pages for game concepts, although I might hold off on writing these for the first release. If there are specific topics you think that new players will want to know about though, then by all means write me a page for them!

Help pages are just written in html, so no need for Java code. The above set are the ones that need to be done before the next release, so if any haven't been submitted by the time all the other changes are ready then I'll write them myself.

Thanks for any help you can give, and of course it's fine if you aren't able to contribute. Have a great week :)

One more screenshot.. for now

Hello everyone. I've just got one more screenshot for you for now, mostly because my hatred of UI work means I've been focusing on the other changes. Also, I should point out that the screenshots in my last post hadn't actually been 'shrunk' to the new sub-768 size, so this one will be a little smaller.

This is a bit of an experimental one where I've completely ditched using a layout designer in favour of actually coding the layout by hand. This is a bit time-consuming, but gets around some problems with using the tools. 
An advantage for you is that you can resize it and it'll change the size of the main text area instead of just adding useless empty space.

With this particular example, I've taken Mugunghwa's suggestion of putting the buttons horizontally, and Lost Trout's request to have the action lists in a vertical column.

Let me know what you think.
Is this good or would the action lists be better in a horizontal strip as they were before? If you like them vertically, are they better like this or on the left? What about the other buttons? Do you like them in this strip along the bottom, or should they form a third vertical column, leaving the main text area to cover the entire height of the screen?

UI changes - better or worse?

Hello everyone.

Today I've been starting on some UI improvements. One important change is reducing the window's height so it won't cause problems on screens with 1366x768 resolutions.
I've also done a bit of research and it seems that the text lines in Newlife's scene viewer were longer than usability gurus recommend.

So, what I've tried to do is reduce the width of the text window, and save a bit of height by moving most of the buttons to a column on the side of the screen.
Looking at it though, I'm not sure if it's better or not. I've put a few screenshots below, one with a size limit on the buttons and one where they use up all the available space. What do you think, and if you don't like it, then what would you recommend as an alternative?