Hello everyone,
Newlife 0.6.6 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 release adds a new career. While this is playable, it does not have as much content as sales yet and it'll take a number of releases to bring it up to the same level.
Major changes & additions:
Added a new career: office work. This has two events at the moment: much less than sales for now as the sales scenes have been built up over years. I'll be adding to it in coming updates of course. For now office work has only one path (admin worker to personal-assistant) but there'll be an office-manager one added later once it has some content.
Added a new random event for baby-crazy characters. This is designed to make getting baby-crazy as a temporary trait more impactful.
Minor changes:
Some internal reworks to love caps to make doormat NPCs fall in love a bit more easily.
Some new options when asking for a promotion to handle a certain rare situation that can arise from the PA stress event.
Bugfixes:
Fixed an issue reported by Saint Destiny where a passage in the nightclub scene was missing a section for the PC going commando when not wearing a skirt or dress.
Fixed an issue reported by Saint Destiny where the cooking class was showing the wrong text to the player when you flirt with a cooking instructor who's interested but don't go home with him.
Fixed a bug where one part of love calculations was modifying the PC's love values instead of the NPCs, potentially resulting in unexpected changes.
Fixed what I believe was a bug that could cause the nightclub scene to error in rare situations.
Fixed a bug where the sales boss used a boss partner effect (the one you see in the friends screen when he's your bf) even when he wasn't actually your boss.
I'm not gonna spam it on every post, but figured I should post it one more time on the new update in case you just hadn't read comments on older posts recently.
ReplyDeleteHey Splendid, I was wondering if there were any plans to add trans characters? Either NPCs or player characters(not the magical transformation start, but implementation like or as part of the female start)? Considering the estimated trans population in the UK is a minimum of around 200K it would feel a bit unrealistic if no NPC in any game was ever trans.
Hi, I'll write up a reply to this shortly - probably tomorrow as it's quite late atm.
DeleteHi there,
DeleteSo, before talking about the game I want to say that I support trans rights: even here in the "open-minded" UK trans people face shameful discrimination and we need to make a lot of improvements as a society in how trans, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people are treated.
As for the game though, this, like many proposed changes to Newlife, suffers from a big hurdle: the size of the game.
Newlife represents years of development which makes it slow and awkward to make any change that requires updates to be made throughout existing content.
Worse, as you'll see if you try reading through the hundreds of pages of custom scene documentation, the internal mechanics are very complex - probably excessively so due to poor planning on my part in early development. Additional changes of this sort pile onto this even more and make it slower and trickier to add new content in the future. This is a big barrier to would-be writers and also slows down my own work.
So, with that in mind, let's consider trans characters and how they could fit into the existing data structures.
First, the PC. The assumption for the male-start PC is that she was a straight, cis man who's transformed into a bisexual woman. However, you could also interpret them as being a closeted trans-woman given how quickly they adapt to the change.
More variety in the background isn't something I want to say I'll never add, but it falls very much into the "complexity change" category. For example, if the PC is allowed to be gay or bi pre-transformation then a lot of the malestart-specific text might need to be re-written to reflect prior experience with men. Similarly, a trans-woman would react very differently to Ivy's magical transformation and this means heavy rewrites both in the intro & endgame sections and in the genderchange text throughout the game.
I'd accept pre-transformation PC gender & sexuality options as a PMW choice, but aside from that I'm trying to push towards the 1.0.0 release without being sidetracked too much, and it isn't something I'd consider essential enough to do as part of that.
Then there's NPCs. There's 2 ways of looking at this: either having a trans "special NPC" with unique scenes related to them being trans, or trans characters included in the wider procgen NPC structure.
DeleteThe latter is probably unrealistic. Of course, in an extremely simplistic way it could already be done. You could use, say "black trans" as a character's race-string and the game would refer to her as a "black trans woman". However, there are a bunch of assumptions made about NPCs if they're to fit into existing scenes. Drop a female NPC into a sex scene and the game assumes she has a vagina and can become pregnant. Similarly, a male NPC is assumed to have a penis and be able to impregnate the PC.
Changing these assumptions would require rework of every bit of content that relies on them. Given the nature of the game, that would mean large rewrites in pretty much every significant scene. It's not a realistic change to make. This limits how trans characters could be included outside of unique scenes. Given the "near-future" game setting it's not unreasonable to have pregnancies involving trans characters, but it means that mid-transition NPCs wouldn't work: only fully-transitioned ones who have had GCS.
The other way of including a trans character would be to make them a special NPC who, at least initially, only appears in their own special scenes. This is much more straightforward because now only these new scenes need to take into account any differences between them and other NPCs. If their storyline involves them going through Ivy's machine or otherwise transitioning into a character that fits the existing types then they could be unlocked to appear in the wider game after that.
This is rather more reasonable and there's no technical reason why it couldn't happen. However, like the PC-history stuff above, it would still take time to implement and it isn't an essential step towards the 1.0.0 release. It'd be a fine suggestion for PMW or as a submission by a player using the custom-scene framework, but aside from that I've no particular plans in that direction.
If I'm writing a set of scenes where it'd make sense for the NPC to be trans then I'll consider it, if I remember at the time, but it's not something that'd fit with the NPCs I have planned for the new career.
Hi, it seems like the new event doesn't work properly. It finishes when you pick one of the three options (resist/call bf/go clubbing). And while I understand it ending when the PC resists, there's no transition to the club/bf visit if you pick the other two. Is it supposed to be unfinished like that?
ReplyDeleteHi, that's a bug that's fixed in the latest patched version.
Deletethe "partner effect" in NPC template is not correct.
ReplyDeleteIn the template I put "BOSS_PARTNER_SLAVEDRIVER"
But in the game it says "...you'd consider him a workplace sugar daddy."
I'm not sure about in-game effect though.
Cheers, I'll look into it.
DeleteHi, I've tracked down the issue. It seems to be a problem with the documentation: I added a new field ("boss partner effect") because the PC is not guaranteed to work in sales any more so the bosses need 2 partner effects, one for when they're the boss and one for when they aren't. However, I forgot to update the documentation and actually tell people about the change! I'll sort that out in the next version, but I believe the field will already be working in the current version if you add it to the custom NPC file.
DeleteThank you very much!
DeleteI'm looking forward to the next version of your great game.