GP2 v55 "Working Grrl" (Patreon)

I've found myself with quite a lot of time to work on GP2 lately along with the inspiration to develop some new features as well, and so I was able to bang out a release in record time.  And it's a big one too.

Currently uploading to the Silver Tier folder.  All other versions have been pushed up to their respective branches, so v54 is on Bronze and v53 is now free.

The focus of this update is, as you might guess from the title, work.  More specifically, jobs and things you can do to earn money, and potentially quite a lot of it too.  This might be one of the biggest feature updates the game has received in a while.  The faction system has had a significant amount of work done on it to the point where its very nearly feature complete, at least in a basic sense.  

Additionally, prostitution is now in the game in a basic way.  There is currently only one spot to do this at, so that I can fully test it before adding it to other areas.  Find it in Empire Lane.  Along with Prostitution comes a dirtyness system and STI's.  Dirtyness is a factor that limits how effective your solicitation is, and builds up from sex and other activities, but can be cleaned up pretty easily.  STD's were eliminated in the Grrl Power universe by genetic medicine but STI's still exist, these are basically normal illnesses that last for a few days or can be cured relatively easily with a hospital visit.

There is a new area added to Venture Hills: Ruby Road.  This is the city's Red Light District.  Here you can find a casino (which isn't functional yet), and Raunchy Ralph's strip club, where you can work.  After talking to Ralph, you can do various kinds of shows and earn tips.  There is a small minigame here where you have to balance audience patience with stripping.  Finishing a show gracefully is relatively easy but the challenge comes in getting the most money out of the crowd when doing the show.  It's a bit of timing, a bit of luck, and a bit stat-based.

Also, there is now Long Term Employment.  This is basically your standard dayjob.  It's pretty straightforward for now.  You get the job, go to it when it's time, and get paid.  Later on, there will be events that occur at the job but for now it's simplified.

The faction system has always been a major goal of mine, and has had small updates as time goes by, but this is probably the biggest update to the system.  All fundamental parts of the faction system are now implemented and functional (though probably buggy like with everything else that's new).  Faction events can happen but are pretty rare right now since  there aren't many of them.  I haven't had much time to test any of this yet since I wanted to get this update out ASAP due to its size and the fact that doing these releases acts as my online backup system.  Even with a very small faction (one agent),  you can now capture randomly generated mission bases and sell them for income, though it may be best to hold at least one to offset the agent's wage and make them useful when they're not out doing things for you.

The new economic holdings system allows you to eventually build an economic empire by acquiring holdings, staffing them, and earning income over time.  Asset Liquidation services have been added to the bank, allowing you to trade specific valuable assets at a 1:1 ratio, to handle excessive amounts of money that may break the game's internal variable limits, and in the future I am planning on having a soft limit to the amount of money you can have in the bank (though it'll be a very high amount, probably around 8 figures), so as to avoid that limitation.  Asset Liquidation will be the way you can have wealth in excess of what the game could normally handle.  It also provides a way to sell gold bars and diamonds for more than you could at the pawn shop.

The faction system still needs a great deal of testing.  Parts that haven't been implemented yet include the second mission slot, auxiliary branches, and most of the faction events.  And more features will be added to all of these systems in future updates.

As usual, most of the new features are probably buggy, but it's still a big update and there's lots of new things to check out.  Testing will be a major focus of future updates (hopefully).