Newlife 0.4.21

Hello everyone!

Newlife 0.4.21 has been released. 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 public version's 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 focuses on updating how Love works internally, along with new scenes to support the changes. 
This is the largest change to Newlife's internal relationship mechanics for a long time, perhaps ever. There'll certainly need to be balance tweaks over time, but I'm hopeful that it'll really improve how the relationship building is presented to the player. In fact, I'm tempted to go back in for more with the next release and give Liking some work as well.



Changelog:

Major changes & additions:

• A major overhaul of how Love is handled. The goal is to make love feel more special and give the player more feedback about it. No longer will it be something that just sort of happens in the background whenever the player spends long enough sleeping with someone.
  • The core functionality remains the same: love is tracked separately for pc and npc, and it's handled in 5 main categories (none, some, confused, crush, love). This means that volunteer & commissioned writers will not need to change how they work. Besides, I think this foundation is fine.
  • The PC can now only be in love with one person at once, and can only have 3 at crush or higher.
  • The PC's Love will start to dwindle over time if she spends enough weeks without gaining any at all.
  • The love-threshold system has been completely replaced. Previously a total love+liking threshold had to be met for love to increase. Now, there's a new 'compatibility' system that returns a maximum love-level. This is influenced by liking & attraction so compatibility can increase over time but it won't always go all the way to true-love for all men. This is to make it more meaningful to find a man who matches the PC's traits and also to lead to potential late-game decisions, such as having to decide if a boyfriend the PC has a crush on (but no more) is 'good enough'.
• Four new 'Crush Dream” scenes that can trigger when the PC develops a crush on a man.
• New decision scenes that trigger when the PC falls in or out-of love with a man. These give the player a bit more control over who their character loves as well as making it more obvious when it happens.

Minor changes:

• Camisoles can now be cropped.
• As requested by Vasmat99218, added makeout actions to expose or remove the PC's top.
• Added an ultimatum requested by Adrianna N. on Patreon where you can insist your partner go down on you even if he's refused. This must be taken the turn after the refusal and is not available for shy or low-self-esteem characters. If he doesn't comply the second time then your character will end the makeout as if the “leave me alone” action was chosen.
• Modified the relationship effects of enjoyable sex. This will now have a lower impact on liking.
• The week summary will now show some information about important love changes.
• Increased NPC liking gain from some non-sexual situations. It should now be more practical to get a man to like you without sleeping with him. Bear in mind though that liking gain from a single encounter is typically capped so you can't become best buds just from one fantastic date.
• Having a conversation with a boring man will now not drop the pc's liking all the way to DISLIKED – this should require him to actually annoy/anger/offend her, not just be a bit dull.
• Some tweaks to text & balance for conversations.
• Saur reported that the PC's reactions to a gloating impregnator NPC when she informs him that she's pregnant needed better handling for baby-crazy PCs. This has now been updated. I also restricted the choices for low-self-esteem PCs in that situation so they can no longer express their annoyance at the man.
• Made a change to cunnilingus orgasms suggested by Ammut. Instead of being capped at 2 the cap is now based on your fitness skill with +1 if you have the passionate_lover trait. At skill 95+ you can come 4 times (or 5 with the trait). Moderation? What's that?
• Baby-crazy and (to a lesser extent) maternal PCs get a bonus to love and love-compatibility the first time they discover a particular man has got them pregnant.

Changes for user-submitted content:

• Added getShortDesc methods to male NPCs. This is based on some content I wrote for the new top-removal makeout action that I felt might be useful in other scenes. It provides a short phrase describing the NPC, randomly selected from all applicable ones.
• Added a debugging section to the writing guide with a link to http://www.yamllint.com, an online yaml syntax checker that's useful in figuring out the dreaded “Error tokenizing YAML” issue.

Bugfixes:

• Fixes to text issues. Thanks to Saur, MadCat, Flanjygo, Saint Destiny, OrangeJuice and Kyle Quesom for reporting some of these.
• Added a missing line in the standing-position tickle action. Thanks to Saint Destiny for reporting this one.
• Increased the amount by which the shynessCure increaseArousalTo macro increases arousal on each recursion. This should hopefully stop MacroOverflowExceptions when the character's arousal is increased from a very low value to a high one.
• Fixed a bug reported by Eulexia where the cunnilingus “remove panties” action had badly messed up output if used early in the scene.

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Enjoy the new version, and let me know if you find any bugs!