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.
.
Enjoy the new version, and let me know if you find any bugs!
Enjoy the new version, and let me know if you find any bugs!
Having a better love system is good. This model seems heavily centered on the idea of true love, which is fine.
ReplyDeleteI've heard that many people talk about a Lust-Attraction-Attachment model of love though. It might be worth considering it for Newlife. It doesn't allow for true love, but it does model many other strange love behaviors like the person in a committed relationship who wants other sexual partners, the thrill of flirting with others and being pursued, or deep romantic love suddenly dying away to a broken relationship.
http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/love-actually-science-behind-lust-attraction-companionship/
That's an interesting read, thanks.
DeleteThat sort of fundamental change from Newlife's current like/love/attraction is I think too large to be worth the implementation time at this point. I could see it taking a ton of time to update all the existing scenes & content to use a new system as well as breaking in-progress works from volunteer and commissioned writers. Better to spend the time on adding new content instead IMO.
For a new game, it'd be a worthwhile approach, although my current plan for my next game doesn't involve detailed relationship tracking at all.
These plans for a new game sound enticing! Can you bootstrap it by stealing a lot of content from Newlife?
DeleteI was actually worried before that you might burn out from working on Newlife continuously for such a long time without any breaks. Since you've come back from your medical leave, you seem to be back to making some very aggressive changes though. It might still be worth seeing if your patrons would support you going on a small detour. Newlife is great and unique but it looks like there's at least another three years of work left on it. It seems that erotic games that are able to include even simple icon-style graphics are really rocketing ahead on Patreon too.
There's little from Newlife that could be reused in game two - it's to be quite different in terms of setting and gameplay. Overall I think it's a better-designed game, but the differences mean that not all Newlife players will find it to their liking. There's some similarities (impregnation, male-female transformation elements) but also some major differences.
DeleteThe main issue is that I'm doing it in Unity. If I was working in Java & Swing again then I'd probably have a working prototype by now (albeit with another terrible UI) and be commissioning artwork, but I'm new to Unity so I'm still finding my feet there.
I'm currently commissioning Newlife scenes from several writers so it'll be interesting to see how well that goes. If the scenes are well-received and the overall commissioning process doesn't involve too much hassle then I'll look to build on it with new milestones and perhaps an opportunity to hire people to cover for me for a month so I can focus on the new game.
Not a huge fan of Unity myself. I've heard people describe it as the "JavaScript of game engines." People use it because it's everywhere and everyone else is using it. As a result, it has lots of frameworks and assets available for it. The core of the engine is hard to use and sort of shite though.
DeleteWhat are you looking to use Unity for? Are you building a more graphical game? Are you going for a more hand-crafted story or are you keeping with something procedural? Are you going to adopt a specific narrative engine for Unity instead of rolling your own? If you could describe the vague outline of your ideas, you could commission others or get volunteers to code up the basic framework that you need in Unity for you.
Since you're in the UK, it would be amazing if you could convince those Spirit AI people to let you use their Unity Character Engine in an erotic game. That would be some real next-generation porn!
Definitely much more graphical - this is why I chose Unity to hopefully avoid the issues I've had with Swing such as handling different screen resolutions.
DeleteProgress has been much better the last few days. I think I've got past the "no idea what I'm doing stage" now.
For art I've been planning to commission custom artwork once the prototype is ready. I'll need hundreds of images though so it'll probably cost me most of my savings - that's why I'm waiting for the prototype to be mostly finished so I can be confident that I know what my requirements are.
Exciting! No need to dip into savings. Demonstrating a prototype with some graphical scenes should boost your Patreon income enough to fund the art. If not, then it likely isn't worth doing. You can also get quite far with minimal art. Innoxia seems to only have icons. Crushstation just has a paperdoll. EvaKiss is visual novel style, so most of the game is just made up of a small number of backgrounds and character portraits. Insexsity doesn't have much art per se, just a lot of animation. It may even be animated in Unity itself.
DeleteProblem: my PC just simply refuses to fall in love. Like, at all.
ReplyDeleteI make my character nice, even romantic. and I make her NPC boyfriend a caring partner with a body she likes, but she just simply won't develop any affection beyond the "feels a little happy when thinking about him" stage. It's getting really irritating because I'm trying to initiate the boyfriend-jerk scene but with her affection just point blank refusing to rise, I can't initiate it.
In previous versions of the game, the only reliable way I could find for falling in love involved having so much sex and having so many orgasms every week that my hand became sore from all the clicking. Then I would discover that my boyfriend wouldn't have the right traits to trigger the boyfriend-jerk scene, so I would have to start all over again.
DeleteWhy can't use cheats anymore? Wish to increase ammount of weeks (last player ver. 0.19
ReplyDeleteThis is still available for all players, unless there's a bug somewhere. You need to complete a game before the cheats will become available (or edit your options text file).
Delete