V0.6.5 Progress Report

 
Update: Added two new features coming to V0.6.5 below.

Hey everyone,
The next patch is in the making, and it's called "Pretty in Ink". As you may already have realized, this is not another monster girl patch as it has been common in the v0.6.x patch cycle. No, we are done with monster girls for now. The Doomsday content is not done yet, though, but it's becoming less of a blockbuster content for it to be considered the main hook for the whole patch. So, instead, something else has been brewing for quite a while. I'm sure you've figured it out by now, but here's the list of new features in v0.6.5:

Tattoos

In the past, I have not spoiled the theme of a new end-of-week show, but this one is too extensive not to use it as the hook for the patch. I'm still not going to go into too much detail about all the possibilities, in part because I'm still figuring out some stuff that may not work as I want it to in the end. However, I'm happy with how it's going so far. Now... I've planned this new show for at least a year since we've had the piercing show to be quite open. There has been some negative feedback about the piercing show, and I hear you, which is why I've been hesitant about the tattoo show. However, after a lot of thinking, I have come to the conclusion that the idea of the show cannot only be to provide sexy fun but also to give the player something they may not want; otherwise, they'd miss their entire meaning. So, I've decided to go through with my original concept. However, I will introduce a new mechanic in the future that will let you sabotage the Wheel of Unfortune in the future. It'll be a few patches until that arrives though. Until then, I hope you'll enjoy the tattoos.

New Doomsday Floor

Access the in-house science department with two new rooms to roam and explore in the Doomsday ending. This continues the point-and-click gameplay in the Doomsday ending, so it'll only be accessible after starting the elevator back up, just like the CEO Office Floor last patch. This floor doesn't contain as many rooms as the last one, though, which gives me more hope for the art to be done in time.

Erica Expressions

You know how this works by now. I get a ton of work where I have to touch every dialog line in the script, and you get a cool, more dynamic-looking NPC character that expresses itself more emotionally. This time, it's for Erica - the last of the female contestants on the list. Honestly, it's such a boring, never-ending task that I can't wait to be done with her. But the end result is worth it. I hope you'll enjoy being given cruel tasks by the new and improved Erica.

NPC Sex Scenes

Another tradition in the v0.6.x patch cycle is to introduce a new concept into the "default gameplay"—the main gameplay loop. This time, it's something that was announced a long, long time ago: the introduction of NPC sex scenes. These are not only dialogs with graphics that play once but changed character positions in the world. So if two characters like each other a lot, they might have some regular fun in the locker room, and that'll change their position on the map, so they won't be where they usually are at that time. This is an introduction of a new system, and we will make more and more scenes over the v0.7.x patch cycle.

UPDATE
I had a bit of a brain wave these past two days, and once I start something, I get really motivated to finish it. So... I can add two more features to this list:

Memory Usage Improvements

A big issue with BMO TV has traditionally been memory usage. Over the years, I've improved upon this issue several times, but while the game grows, new problem areas arise. So, over the past few patches, the game got too big to run on 8GB of RAM machines again, and something had to be done. But to improve these, I need brain wave moments like I had a couple of days ago to try out something new. I tried something, and it seems to have worked. The memory profiler is showing an improvement of over 50% in runtime usage. The best part is that this is only after half of my ideas were implemented, so I expect an even further improvement. That said, I don't know yet how this will translate to real-world scenarios of the game running a long time or a lot of scenes happening right after one another and such. But I'm hoping to give you at least an improvement. Since I had to touch the code of all NPC graphics, there might be some bugs, though. But that's what Alpha is for.

Mind DNA Mutation

I have to be honest. I think I just forgot about this one. While going through all the NPC interactions in the game to improve their memory usage, I stumbled over the fact that the Mind options in the DNA Mutation scene were still not implemented. It wasn't the biggest deal to finally implement the ability to lock one's mind values, so I added it to this patch. I'm really sorry it took this long. There were just too many other things going on, I guess.

And that's it. Personally, I think (update: especially with the new additions) this is another huge patch, and I'm pretty busy with the implementation. I'm also still working on a bit of art for it. In fact, all the features from this list have art as a prerequisite. A lot of it is already there, which is what I'm working on. Anyway, it worked out last time, so I'm sure it will again this time.

Looking forward to the release soon. Let me know what you think.

Best,
Kim