Yes, that's right, it's the 7th, and that means it's time for the new version of Shield High. This one added romance options and slavery content. Only one of which has been truly tested. The other one didn't receive any comments saying it DIDN'T work when I put it on Patreon however, so I can only assume everything is sunshine and rainbows on that front. So, to give you a proper list of what's new, here is the patch notes as given on Patreon.
BUG FIXES:
I fixed the following bugs (off the top of my head)
-Passing the weekend on Saturday no longer allows Jessica to travel back in time.
-Weekends in general seem to work better
-That annoying little flash in combat got too much for me. It's now gone.
-Advanced Start no longer crashes the game. Instead it does nothing. This is an improvement largely because people who do not know it is not a feature yet will stop telling me it crashes the game.
LOVE:
The following characters have super cute first dates:
-Angel
-Melanie
-Iris
-Josie
-Jillian
Jillian's date is currently inaccessible owing to changes to how the plot...functions. I'm going to add progressively more ways to start relationships with characters in future updates. Next week will include flirting, to let you get a date with Jillian.
Other dates might be broken. I'm only confident in Angel's.
SLAVES:
You now can be Karen's slave, with actual content. There's 6 random events that are chosen from each day. Five are simple, visit Karen, recieve sexy dialogue sort of events. One is visit Karen and get ordered to be a whore. In that case you have to walk around and let girls who are interested grab and fuck you. The current ones wil be phased out of fucking you as more girls get added and I can more accurately reflect the politics of the school.
There's currently only one way out, which is asking for Angel's help. You need to go and get all her friendship points up. Well, you need 40, you can get 43 right now. Then you just ask her for help with your Mistress and it behaves like getting her help with Andriana.
So there's that. Game can be found here: http://www.mediafire.com/file/d0v9k4yp7zxnd8v
And now on to some other news. The fifth book in my on-going series came out today, and this one is a bit more relevant to everyone's interests as it contains lesbians. Technically all of them have contained lesbians, but only the second one really talked about it before. This book however actually has some proper beginnings of lesbian romance. Also the giant mech fights, as always. In case anyone has been kind of interested in what I've been up to and just holding out, you can find the new book here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XFY3FY5
There's also now a facebook page for said book which, if you don't mind it being in your feed, you could follow, even if you don't actually ever read the books, it's a good way to hear things that I'm up to that I don't post here. You can find that here:https://www.facebook.com/MechanicalInstinctBook/
And as a final point on that, if you're interested in the books but hate ebooks, I'm planning on putting out the first 6 in a compilation for paperback on Amazon, when the 6th book comes out in May. So that's a thing, in case it matters to you.
Anyway, thank you all for your support on Shield High even if you don't care for my books, it's a strange feeling realizing this is my sixth month being back at work, and seeing how far my Patreon has grown in this short time, and how many people are back and commenting regularly, it really means a lot to me. So I hope you all enjoy the newest version.
Pudding Earl
EDIT: Copying from Patreon fucked many things. Have fixed them now.
So, I don't know if this has been a long-standing bug or not, but you can talk to people multiple times as if it's your first time talking to them, or at least as if they're in the past.
ReplyDeleteOnce you do the Sasha fight, for instance, you can talk to her at school to redo that fight. However, when you complete it, the game crashes. Or, you can talk to Jillian, I think it was, to re-register yourself. Or your other follower to get the dialogue as if you just met them (talking about going to their 'first class' together).
Other than the crashing it can cause, it can be game-breaking in other ways. I was able to talk to Karen after losing (while in the same day) and was able to redo the fight. If I won, I could actually take her as my slave (even though I lost the first time and should be HER slave).
Also, I don't know if it's intended, but I can't get past Friday. Once I go home, the option to go to school or the mall are both greyed out. Am I missing something? And related to that, sometimes if you load the game too many times (I did this while trying to get Karen's different events while a slave to her), sometimes you won't be able to go to any classes or go home.
I was able to go on the date with Iris just by talking to her once after finding her in the school (before the Karen fight anyway). I don't think it actually changed how anyone talked to me, but I could see the event. It was kind of cute, standing up for her. :P
I think that's all I've noticed, anyway. The scene when Karen takes you home was the hottest one so far, IMO. :P
Regarding Sasha fight, I have indeed found that issue, since I'm doing some cleaning on the first story line and I made the Sasha problem worse, which lead me to finding it and fixing it. I'll go through and make sure Karen is all cleaned up too.
DeleteAs for getting past friday, as is the usual fashion with Shield High, it's there, just poorly explained. Go upstairs and into your room and you can sleep. If you've got a romance plot going it should run then. Otherwise you need to go to the mall before sleeping again. I plan to add alternatives to the mall as time goes on.
Hey, nice to see things coming along.
DeleteFor the weekend, there's a button highlight bug. The bedroom 'interact' button isn't green showing you it's an option, so easy to miss. But if you click on the blank outline anyway, you do get the Sleep option that will allow you to advance.
Dang, can't edit. For the repeating events, it happens in many cases. Without even interacting with characters. Sometimes you go to class and you'll get the last event text (like some of those one off encounters). Then in class 2, its says done class 1... and will stay one behind.
DeleteNot sure if that's just text, or if the game triggers are now off.
Oh yes, the text thing is less a bug more a case of messy code. At no point do I clear out the old text on the dialogue manager, so when it opens and isn't given a new text to display, it keeps the old one up. This is...actually a really easy fix. As for the classes, that's a case of classes having text but automatically closing themselves down, on account of navigating back from classes without it being, quite frankly, an utter pain. It's basically a case of me saying "I'll work that out later" and never working it out later.
DeleteAs for highlight button, I forget that's a bug that happens but you're right. I need to look at the code and work out why it happens. All of weekend interact buttons are borked a bit for some reason. It's now on the list of things to do in the airport tomorrow.
For future bug hunting (from players comments) might be something to clean up sooner than later. As it will cut down not quite real bugs comments (like the stuck in weekend thing), from the real ones. Kinda hard to tell if something is bugged and you're stuck, or are you just missing something.
ReplyDeleteLike with the Melanie date, not sure if bugged or not. I won the fight to keep her, and the mention of getting thanks tonight. But noticed when I went to class the highlighted button was missing again. Clicked anyway and thought it might have worked... but then when going to the front of the school definately no return home button (not lit, and clicking doesn't work). So no idea if those attend classes were just button bug, didn't work, or something else.
That might be been from any save issues (not sure those are 100% trouble free) as I loaded off a save post fight.
Usually clean up gets delayed when I hit the release date and I've only just hit the intended content for the release. That's why I'm making every third update a spring cleaning one. So I can bug fix/make internal changes to improve the game going forward with little to no pressure.
DeleteThat Melanie bug is interesting. I *think* I know the cause, but it's something I'll have to investigate carefully. I might actually just re-arrange the way the events work to avoid the fuckery entirely. In fact, I probably will do that.
Sadly I can't do any meaningful testing on it until I finish the latest internal change, which has completely destroyed the game until it's finished, and will likely leave a few bugs to be found next week as I have to remember some important elements. Mostly in the Karen event, since that one's the messiest. Everything else runs clean.
But yes, will look at getting everything I can possibly find cleaned up for this release.
Some UI suggestions:
ReplyDeleteI think it would be a good idea to move the up/down buttons so that up is above down as that simply makes more intuitive sense.
Having the current location displayed above or near the movement pad would also be useful for getting around quicker and easier.
I don't know if this is true for all resolutions but on my screen (1280x1024) Jessica's portrait looks kind of shitty, like it's stretched and pixelated.
The button texts would look better if they were sans-serif or bold (or both), I think. Centering the button text vertically (on all but pick new feats is especially egregious) and horizontally (definitely the ones like U/D that are free standing, though the main buttons to the right of the portrait might look better left aligned) would also look better. You should definitely give the button text a little margin on the left, currently it's touching the edge of the button and that doesn't look good.
Pleasant UI can make a big difference to how pleasant it is to play the game. This is probably what I miss the most from the RAGS days.
Rereading this, I sounded pretty harshly critical. I actually really like this game and think it has really great potential!
DeleteI was mainly thinking that in order to attract new players, the experience of the first few minutes is the most critical.
Thanks for the suggestions! The up/down one is...depressingly obvious and I'm disappointed I didn't think of it sooner. I'll put that in...probably tomorrow once I'm done with the internal re-structuring of events.
DeleteCurrent location is also on the to-do list, I've just not gotten around to it yet. Mostly because I started off very conservative with my interface and I'm slowly getting more adventurous and interested in making it look very pretty.
Portrait is a placeholder for the time being, it looks stupid because it's a much larger image scaled down. I'm intending to get a new one commissioned for the 0.686, at which time I will look at making sure it looks nice.
Regarding buttons, I'll look into my options, but I doubt I'll bold them. So many buttons have had to be re-labelled to fit into the limited space, if I lose even one more character it's going to increase the pain there. As for centring, that's quite doable, I'm just lazy about working out exactly how to do it. It's one of those things that requires tweaking the numbers over and over and over until it comes out right, which isn't hard, but I hate doing it anyway.
Thanks again for the input though, interface is absolutely something I want to clean up, I just usually have something more pressing to work out in most updates, and the one where I didn't I largely squandered my time, which is something I'm trying to avoid doing again.