Monday 31 October 2016

Newlife 0.3.27

Hello everyone,

Version 0.3.27 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 will be going public soon. I currently don't have access to the public version of 0.3.26 so I won't be able to upload it today. I'll make it available later this week or, if there proves to be issues with getting that version, I'll upload the patron one.

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 was particularly annoying to implement due to a combination of sickness, writing difficulties and overoptimistic planning. The main addition is the ability to play strip-blackjack as a party game. You can read the rules in-game by choosing the appropriate action when the scene first starts.
This scene is by some distance the largest one to be added to the game - more than a third larger than the most recent sex scene and around 4.5 times the size of the "spin the bottle" one. While this would normally be something for me to be proud of, in this case it looks very much like bad planning. Despite its huge size in the code, the scene doesn't in my opinion provide enough benefit to gameplay to justify the time involved in writing it. 
The fundamental cause is NPC-NPC interaction, and that's something I should really know by now has a tendency to become unmanageably large, so I guess I can only apologise for this. 
I'll try to learn the lesson this time and aim to do better in the future: really I should be aiming for new content to be similar to the original stuff with a strong focus on PC-NPC interaction and minimal interactions between NPCs.



Here's the full changelog:
Major changes & additions:
  • Added a new party game: Strip blackjack, aka the most annoying scene to write ever. This is available when starting a sexy game at the house party: you'll either get this one or spin-the-bottle with a 50% chance of each. Whereas previously you could only play a sexy game once per party, you can now play each different one once. If you've already played one of the games and you choose to play a sexy game again then you'll automatically get the one you didn't play before. 
Minor additions & bugfixes:
  • Fixes to text issues. Thanks to Cubano, Megh and Kayla for reporting problems they found.
  • The NPC added in the last release can now be a custom NPC. Use the INNOCENT_SALES_COLLEAGUE trait to mark them as such – female NPCs only. The female custom NPC guide has been updated to reflect this.
  • Fixed a bug with the “tell her to show herself” action reported by Secondarian where the conditions for removing panties and lower-body clothing were reversed, potentially leading to some bizarre situations.
  • The long action description will now scroll to the top when an action is selected: previously it would scroll to the bottom which meant the player had to scroll it up to read descriptions from the start. 
Have fun with the new version and let me know if you find any bugs.

28 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  3. And, as someone throwing in $20 a month right now, I am fine.

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  5. I'm curious, are there plans for a repeat of last Christmas, where the patron version of 3.13 got posted for the public (except version 3.27)?

    Speaking of, I did find something quite strange. The cheat menu stayed active for several later public versions while I kept the patron version in the folder.

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    1. I haven't really thought about it, so I can't really answer at this stage. The several-versions thing is probably because I made a mistake in building one of the public versions earlier this year and it went out with the patron code despite being labelled as "public".

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  6. Well, you're entitled to your opinion... however, something in your argument strikes me as a little odd. You complain about there being a Patreon only version, which if you're paying him/her already, you already have access to... if you don't have access to it, it means you aren't paying, which means you have absolutely no right to complain, as you're getting a product for free.

    Me, I'm anxiously awaiting money to once again sub so I can get access to the new version, not just because I want the new version, but also to support someone who made something I love.

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  7. @CtrlAltDelicious,
    I suspect the poster doesn't understand coding at all, and/or has not read how SO has pretty much described the coding required for this game as a complete mess, and never would use the style again.

    Also I think most people underestimate how hard it can be to write stuff.

    I completely understand why people would see this update pace as very slow, and if they're a Patreon and are not satisfied with the update pace, than drop your pledge please! Vote with your dollars! :)

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  8. look, I understand that you may have been sick (literally everyone excuse, just saying) but this is currently the only realistic text adventure game with adult themes out there right now. Everything else is furry, rape or underage shit. Enough people like your content that you can pull in 58k a year which you probably lose 8k on due to paypal fees and patron fees. But shit man, that's 50k a year! The only reason why your patron is so strong with so little content is because there is really nothing out there like this. If I was you I would put in a lot more effort and try and turn that 50k into 100k! You can do it man but you have to keep on top of you updates or your patron will die.

    If another month like this goes by, and yes over Christmas to, you might loose a lot of subscribers. Good luck :)

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  9. What sorts of traits lead to people actually doing sexy things at the party? This never happens for me.

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    1. It depends on the specific action. Sleazy helps, while some things require a mix of male and female guests.

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  10. I used to be a patron as well.. but then I stop since, in my opinion, I feel that SO does not have a good direction of where's the game going..
    for example.. there's no lesbian sex.. I meant if you were a man and involuntary turn into a woman, and then you're looking for a date, you probably looking for a beautiful woman. Unless you were a gay when you were man than this is your chance.
    Another example with the Blackjack update.. I prefer to have a different kind of party.. like company party when she got promoted, birthday party, Christmas party and so on..
    But I will become patron again probably after a couple of month if SO already added enough content.

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    1. Thanks for your support in the past. I'm hesitant to add Christmas becuase it opens a bit of a can of worms with seasonal clothing - at the moment it's a bit odd you can wear a summer dress all year round, but the clothing system is annoyingly complicated already so I'm hesitant to make it more so.
      Company parties is something I've loosely penciled in for the as-yet-unimplemented office work career track rather than sales. As for birthdays, it's something I might consider especially once NPC wealth is in and you can get expensive presents from rich would-be lovers and less-impressive ones from poor ones. A birthday party would be limited to once per year though, and I wanted the friendship-update party scene to be easily repeatable within a single playthrough.


      Lesbian content will be up for voting soon, - I'll probably run that vote in December so check back at the blog in January and you'll see the results. I do expect lesbian content to be a strong contender. The reason it hasn't been added to much detail so far is because Newlife has a bit of a focus on impregnation content which obviously doesn't fit for girl-on-girl.

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  11. there is a mistake(i supposed) in the strip blackjack event
    "You unzip your top and take it off revealing your small pale breasts. "
    where my character has a huge pair of boobs,it still display as small pale breasts

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    1. Thanks! This will be fixed in the next version. It's a bizarre one because the order of the conditions for the text is completely reversed (so each breast size gets the description for the opposite one). I must have been tired when I wrote that part, because it isn't the sort of mistake that I'd normally expect to make there.

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    2. Glad to hear that!
      By the way,may i ask will there be any exhibitionism contents in the following updates?

      exhibitionism is something the game needed,because i think most of the guys transform into a woman,would like to try to expose her body.

      Keep up the good work!

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    3. Not in the near future. There are some scenes with that sort of content there already - off the top of my head the obvious one would be the sex-shop scene and the BDSM club content might also count. It's likely that at some point I'll add more along these lines, but for the time being there are other things I want to focus on.

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    4. Yeah,i have tried the bdsm club(fully nude on stage) and the sex shop scene(sexy outfit) and i really enjoyed them,especially the bdsm club.

      But what i mean is,can it the regular activity in the week planning,it will be so cool.

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  12. Are you trying to sabotage your own game?

    The most recent update amounts to a single blackjack game that would take a competent programmer a week to write in his spare time. Then you release it in a state where the virgin makeout scene crashes the party, which means you did ZERO testing.

    Then you release a fixed version, and it turns out the odds of getting that scene at all are pretty much zero, and everything else is just shitty softcore lesbian makeout shit.

    If you're trying to ruin this game, just keep going the same direction.
    Also, stop with the fucking linear vignette system. The interactivity is a big part of this game's appeal.

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    1. Uh, nope, that's not what everything else is. Clearly you haven't played the content.

      As for the rest, the rate at which virgins appear which would willingly continue with the scene and than do a makeout is very low occurrence based on both lots of experience with how the NPCs with the trait spawn, and also the small amount of interaction with the blackjack game I have.

      Odd occurency is so small, but once more not everything else is "shitty softcore lesbian makeout shit" there is more content.

      If it is so easy, how about you make a game instead? Seems you clearly have a much better understanding of what to do and are much better and faster at coding.


      I believe SO has adressed that the original way the base game was coded makes doing some things harder than it should be. Kinda sounds familiar to comments made about Corruptions of Champions by Fenoxo and co.

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    2. You like saying "How about you do it then?" don't you? He's saying that he didn't do test before uploading, and you reply with that. You think that's a comeback or something? If he is paying at least 5$ for that new scene, he deserves to get it fully functioning.

      I know very basic coding and I can agree that a competent programmer can write that single scene in a week, spare times only. If he is not able to do so, don't you think that it's HIS fault for making the base codes clutchy?

      And if you compare this game to some other wip games with patreon, you'll see that SO is really taking his time with these little updates. It might start to go downhill though, I mean look, even in comments people say that they stopped being a patron.

      As someone has commented already, this game is this popular because it's an unique idea but I think that can only get so far. I think people'll start to lose interest soon if it goes like this. He's getting like 5k every month, why isn't he putting that money to good use? Maybe hire other people, Idk. Whatever it takes. Hell, maybe quit his current job to work on this game, so he would make more updates, and thus get even more patreon money.

      That's why people are paying for patreon, they are trying to help the game be completed faster, so I think he owes working hard to them.


      (I'm not a patreon if it matters, because I don't think paying 5$ for a single extra scene every month is not worth it..)

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    3. I am a senior programmer, and I program little sex games in my spare time. Though I have not yet played this strip blackjack scene, I can tell you that a scene like that not only takes longer than a week, it is beyond the skill level of many game programmers. It doesn't matter how many months you would give them, most junior programmers would not be able to program the hundreds of variations needed to get the scene to work.

      Assuming that Splendid Ostrich did not write a custom code generator for the game, then the inherent design of the game means that it will be hard to write new content. There are so many interacting systems in the game like clothing and personalities and virginity and pregnancy and appearance that any change will have weird interactions with the other systems. In hindsight, things like the clothing system or appearance could have probably been simplified, but people would notice if the clothing system suddenly disappeared one month. Splendid Ostrich has already admitted that working on a strip blackjack scene was a mistake when there was lower hanging fruit that could have been tackled instead.

      NoOne ButMyself's response was tough but fair. I don't care how much someone pays on Patreon, but that doesn't entitle them to be rude and abusive to the creator.

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    4. Hi all, thanks for the supportive messages and... less thanks for the abusive ones.

      I am considering just blocking comments on the blog as most productive discussions have moved over to patreon or the forum threads on a few sites such as tfgamessite. It's especially annoying here because I need to get notifications on blog comments so I can delete spam ones that pass the filter and this makes it difficult to just ignore trolling or rude messages without getting stressed out over them.

      To the OP: if you are a patron then PM me on patreon. I will refund your last pledge and then cancel your patronage. This generally applies to anyone in a similar position of being furious over the latest release.
      To be clear - being rude does not get you special treatment. This isn't a new policy and I'm generally very open-minded about refunds, although despite making similar offers to rude posts in the past I don't believe I've ever had anyone actually follow-through and request a refund on patreon for those reasons.
      I have, however, been contacted in the past for refunds due to technical issues and I've offered them to patrons who'd run into financial issues. If any patrons reading this find themselves in a situation where they lose your job or otherwise are in a bad financial state then they shouldn't hesitate to contact me about it.

      As for the OP here's specific complaints, I've only skimmed them and I don't intend to read them in detail, answer them or especially to take any action based on them. My policy in these sort of situations is that I will not set a precedent that bullying me into things with rude, angry, or insulting messages is a way to get me to do what someone wants. I normally don't even reply, but in this case I wanted to highlight my refund policy so I've made an exception.

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    5. I'm sorry if I came out rude, my main point was that people are paying for patreon so that the money would be put to good use, so SO should put the money to good use by using it on making this game, hire other people or work on this game as a full time job, or something else.

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  13. I feel it'd be a loss to totally toss the comments over a couple of idiots. They happen on the internet, frankly.

    What I can say is that although I'm not a patreon currently (I'm also a bit disappointed in a lack of content, and am hence only signing up after a few updates accumulate, but I'm not going to abuse you over it), I do sometimes find productive discussion here... it's just that there's so little discussion at all, good or bad, that it's hard to tell.

    As for the blackjack: Minigames where actors take actions as the game progresses can actually be extremely difficult. One of the best authors in the AIF genre, goblinboy had games (one truth or dare, one spin the bottle) where the predefined characters all had their little actions as the game progressed.

    There is a reason he was considered one of the best in that niche field, and being able to tackle tough programming problems like that is why.

    Tough programming for a hobbyist, that is. That's why anyone who bitches about the supposed gravy train should go out and learn how to do it themselves. It actually is within the realm of reasonable expectation to challenge you to do it better, since again it's hobbyist-level programming.

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  14. What I don't understand is how many people get butthurt over how much OTHER people are paying the author. What do you care, if it's not coming out of your paycheck. Only subscribe every few months if one month of work isn't worth your 5$. That's what I'm doing.

    Yeah, I'd like more content too. Yeah, I'd probably pay more attention to an author that has the same quality but more frequent updates. You have one in mind? Comment. But otherwise, consider that all he has to do to avoid the stress is pull up stakes and abandon the project. He can do that.

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  15. Just wanted to say that this game is very enjoyable to read and youve done a wonderful job with the details. I never cared much for text-based games before, until I happened to give this one a try. Keep up the great work and hope you finish it someday.

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