Version 0.3.25 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.
The previous version is now public. You can download it using the links on the right-hand side of the blog. The 0.3.24 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 a zipfile containing Newlife. Once unzipped, you'll see a folder containing .jar and .exe files. Either one of these will run the game.
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 java to run the game.
There's a guide for new players here which includes some troubleshooting tips for installation & downloading.
This version adds a new large sex scene, using the cowgirl position as chosen in a vote on patreon. My general approach is to add one per major update, and this is the one for the 0.3.x releases.
The new scene itself is definitely the largest one in a new release, and might even be the biggest in the game outright, despite most of the other big ones having been built up over multiple releases. It's hard to be sure though as some of them are split over several files. Considering that there are multiple new scenes in this release including the fairly-substantial new makeout one, this makes it an absolutely massive update.
While I'm hoping you'll be pleased with the large amount of new content, I don't plan to make updates of this size a regular thing.
In this case a mix of over-optimistic planning, the mutli-participant nature of the new scene and the need to put the sex and makeout scenes in the same update contributed to its size, but that's a combination I will need to avoid in the future.
I've said in the past that for a game that's funded on a monthly basis I consider the minimum release schedule to be one version per calendar month unless something really critical happens. That's still been met with this being the update for August. However, the time between releases was about five weeks which is obviously not sustainable - perhaps once in a rare while for an exceptionally large release, but not as a regular thing.
Fortunately, the next two or three updates will be putting the finishing touches to the friendship update rather than adding new major scenes, which tends to be the most time-consuming thing to do. This will include a few new small and medium scenes as well as improvements to some of the recently-added large ones. Those updates certainly shouldn't be as large as this one, and so I'm expecting them to be out in less time.
Here's the full changelog for 0.3.25:
Major
changes & additions:
- Added a new full sex scene.
- Added a somewhat-simplified makeout scene that leads into the new sex scene.
- Added 2 new socialisation events that can lead to the new scene.
- Added a new path to one of the house-party actions that's the third and (for now) final way of getting to this scene. Other ways into it will be added in future releases.
Minor
changes & bugfixes:
- Fixes to text issues. Thanks to DrGong, Max Musterman, pgiac6, Jayjay78, Death25, Joram78 (any relation to Jayjay or is 78 a popular number?) & centerflag982 (shouldn't that be centerflag78?) for reporting problems they found.
- Disabled NPCs will no longer appear with Name: Not Set in the custom NPC test output. Instead, the name field will not appear for them.
- Fixed a bug reported by death25 where requesting rough treatment from one partner at your house party would cause all future partners in that scene to also be rough.
- Modified the text for some of the gallery scene actions when the pc had her first time with someone she loves as Jayjay78 had quite correctly pointed out that the what the pc said didn't always make sense for the action the player had chosen.
- If YML parsing fails then a disabled placeholder custom NPC will be created with an appropriate error message. This won't affect actual gameplay, but it means that the Test NPCs function will show output informing the player of why the NPC isn't valid, instead of showing nothing because the process errored before creating the custom npc object.
- Automatic outfit generation is now significantly more likely to include underwear for athletic outfits if the pc has large or medium-large breasts, as otherwise it's difficult to work out without a bra. Automatic outfits will now always include one in that circumstance if possible unless the pc has the sultry trait, and the chance is quite a bit higher even for sultry girls.
- Automatic outfit generation can now create athletic outfits using only a sports bra as the top.
- Added a new cheat option that doubles the number of clothes for sale in the shop.
- Rewrote the simple “man caresses you during sex” action following a report by death25 that it wasn't correctly tracking the player's clothing status – in fact this was an old-style action like those in the original 0.1.0 version that had just a single line of text that showed up in all circumstances. It now has tender/rough/normal variants as well as actually checking the pc's clothes before describing her as “naked”.
- Following a suggestion by Cubano, added a small action to the end of the art gallery scene where the pc goes back to experiencing the art as previously the scene ended rather abruptly. I also gave refined characters a small stress reduction, seeing as the scene is in an art gallery after all.
- Female NPCs can now go on the pill and have a fertility cycle similar to the player's, although their fertile/safe weeks won't necessarily be in-sync with yours. This affects text and dialogue relating to impregnation-risk. However, female NPCs will not actually become pregnant for now.
- As requested by Drew on Patreon, when playing through a scene you can now double-click an action to take it.
