Yes, I'm finally doing the public release for it. I anticipate that next month will be the last month of the release date drifting, as I'd always intended it to be the 7th, and then got impatient. So next month, 7th will be the day of release. This is done in no small part to coincide with the release of my next book, to keep my release schedule stable.
Anyway, here is download: http://www.mediafire.com/file/lf9aeru488rul0y/Shield_High_JS_0.683.7z
So what's in this update? Essentially, the ability to take some initiative on plots instead of just waiting for them to happen to you, you can now go out and make some trouble for other people. At present there is only two full plots, one for Melanie, one for Iris, and then a stub of a plot that was in there because I wanted to write something involving this idea. I'll be fleshing that one out eventually, but not for a while longer. I want to replace the event with an actual fight, which means making a new set of fight mechanics.
The addition of Melanie means there's now a bet manager. The one I made in my last attempt at Shield High was atrocious, so I learned from my mistakes and made it nothing like the last one. I'm happy with how it works for now, but it will need some tweaking in the future I'm sure. For the moment however, it works, and that's what matters.
Next release is romance plots and enslaved events. I don't know how many enslaved events you can expect, since it's going DREADFULLY slowly, but there's 5 romance plots, each of roughly twice the length of your average sex scene, so that's a good sign. I will, at the very least, get the cycle of being Karen's slave done, but I've got enough time to get escape options sorted out too I'm sure.
And finally, I have a request for a future musing. I want to talk about porn games in a broader sense, but I'm not confident that I've seen the full scope of them, and before I go making baseless accusations, I want to make sure I've seen as much as possible. As such, please throw in the comments any games you enjoy, places you go to obtain porn games(both stores and forums) and anything else that I might need to look at before I go ahead and make a fool of myself.
I hope you all enjoy the update!
Pudding Earl
Is the advanced start not currently ready? or is it a bug? every time i click on it, Shield High stops working and i have to close it.
ReplyDeleteNo it's not working yet. I will actually fix that button right this moment so it stops crashing the game. The reason it's there is because 1. I'm a slacker who won't do it unless I tell everyone for a very long time I will do it and the guilt of letting people down makes me go through with it and 2. Because I added it before I had plans to release the game again and it was just a leisure project to put in a few lines of code on every few weeks when the mood took me, and without the deadline to worry about, I'd planned to skeleton it in. Then stuff happened, I got a deadline and I never touched it again.
DeleteSo yeah. I'll probably fix it up in the next spring cleaning update or two. It might actually give me a nice, clean project for the airport next month, now that I think about it.
So for some reason, right after the Adriana fight, I can't go to class, and since I can't go to class I can't go home and see any of the new content.
ReplyDeleteNevermind. It seems you can go to class and go home, but for some reason the colors are reversed. Instead of being red and graying out as you do them, they start gray and turn red when you do them.
DeleteYeah that's an oddity produced by the event making sure you can't attend class without doing the fight. I'm...gonna look into it at some point or another to work out what's going on there. This update if I have time, next if not. I'd do it right this minute but I've been procrastinating writing slave content so much, I need to actually do it now or else it'll never get done. So yes, once it's done, I shall look into bugs.
DeletePudding,
ReplyDeleteI've trying to write this for a long time, but I always end up deleting it all. The main point of this is for you to consider recruting a beta tester, because this version is buggy as hell. The save games can be loaded, but once that happens you can't use the interact button ( at first it seems to work, but the second interaction is grayed out and not working). Furthermore, I couldn't find any new content, the only slave for claim is "ruby" but the game says I have other important things to do. Overall I'd say this is a worst version of Shield High 0.681
Well about the new content, I've found it. Instead of claiming I needed to register. Well, my bad. But still the save is bugged.
DeleteThank you for the feedback, much appreciated, however recruiting a dedicated beta tester doesn't really seem a viable option. The main reason for that is simply they wouldn't have a lot to do. I do a lot of testing throughout the month, basically whenever I add anything new I test it to see if it works. It doesn't. So I fix it and test it again, and again, and again, until finally everything is more or less functional. To that end the content is usually working as intended. Second reason is a simple question of logistics. I work on Shield High up to the very last day, and I'm not too sure when I would hand things off to someone to test for however long it takes while still getting everything out in time.
DeleteAnd finally on to the point about saves being bugged. That's something I'm well aware of, and simply not setting aside the time to fix. The reason I don't fix it is that I break saves about as often as I don't with these updates, and then I have to make some small tweaks to them to make them play nice and still work. Interactions, for instance, broke saves. However, there will be a point when I can confidently say I won't be breaking them, because all of the core features will all be in the game, and I'll be down to content and polishing. At that stage, I'm going to go through and give saves a big fix to make sure everything is in working order. For the time being, they're 80% included for my own testing when RNG needs to be repeated a few times to check it works, or I need to test down a few branches.
In the meantime, all bugs mentioned her usually get looked at and fixed as quickly as possible, because despite my testing, some do get through. Most of the bugs that slip through are ones that lie in buttons I never press because I know they don't do anything, but I forget to inform other people of that fact. So yes, thank you for reminding me about saves, I promise they're on the agenda.
Haven't played in a long time, since this was RAGs and I see it hasn't aged well. It still has the same flaws of having too many unnecessary rooms since the plot if so linear of do this action in this room now go do another action in another room. There's not a lot of player freedom, from what I've seen, that would necessitate this format.
ReplyDeleteBut the new engine compounds this by having no tooltips or UI interface to show a player where they are and where they are going, it ends up feeling like you're stuck in an open but empty environment. Doesn't help that I ended up getting stuck in a loop in the second Karen fight.
Maybe try html? Lot of good games on twine.
The unnecessary rooms are there because they are eventually going to become necessary, or at least, eventually have a purpose. At present I'm re-building a lot of things from the ground up, so every update results in me doing a sizeable amount of back-end work and very little content being added. In a few months time, once all the back-end work is done, and the game is on the content-side of things again, I'll be making certain each room serves a purpose before I add any characters to rooms with pre-existing characters.
DeleteAs for why there's so many rooms, the simple answer is there's going to be a lot of characters, some rooms are already crowded just by virtue of Sasha and Kaylee following you, and a trio being three girls. I'm trying to avoid letting rooms get so crowded that finding who you want on the list is impossible.
As for interface, each entry text clearly states where you are, and if you hover over each button in navigation it states where that button leads. For finding where you're meant to go, at least as far as classes are concerned the interact button informs you where to go next. Where to go for events is a problem, and one I have every intention of fixing before I reach 0.69 when I finally get around to implementing either a text log, or a proper quest journal. Or both.
As for suggestions to switch, I'm not going to switch to another system under more or less any circumstance. Throwing away 6+ months of work on this new engine simply because it's not yet there is absurdity, it will either result in me having to spend another 6+ months getting back to the same place, working on an existing engine which suffers the same feeling of emptiness because the content still won't be there all that quickly, or downgrading from aiming for the end goal to something that fits the content I have now, and basically preventing me from making what I actually want to make.
I'm sorry you don't enjoy the game in it's current state. I'd advise skipping some versions to 0.7, and seeing if it's gotten any better since then.
Oh my god !! ,you are back ,shield high has been one of my favorites!! , keep the good work:)
ReplyDelete