Arachne reveal + Devlog #138 + Illustration poll #12 is on! (Patreon)

It's time for Arachne!Believe it or not, I was planning to release here this month even before before she won the illustration poll. It was a big surprise for me, but that works...!Her mods are Bra tailor, Multi-arms and Appropriate tiny pet.As you'd expect, Bra tailor was the toughest one to figure out. Having her change bras across ranks seemed obvious, but how exactly to do it wasn't... I'm very happy with what I came up with though, using her webs to upgrade her bra throughout ranks! It makes perfect use of her spider traits, gives good bra variety, and is easy to understand! I also knew from the get go that I wanted her upside down, it's just too cool of a thing not to do! Which also meant the bras had to work both upright and upside down. It's interesting how the process of figuring out something simple is harder than the solution, if that makes sense ^^Her multi arms actually came in handy in that process too, since more fingers meant more attachment points for the webs! Arachnes usually have 10 limbs, 8 legs and 2 arms. Since she got 4 arms though, I figured I should reduce the legs to 6 to not have limbs everywhere in the illustration. I guess it's a little bit less spider like, but it's still 10 limbs in total, and I don't feel like it actually takes away from her spiderness! So I'm happy with that choice ^^And finally, since she had two webs, I figured I should give her two tiny pets! One male Ball spider (might change that name), and one female. They were fun to design as well ^^One other point I hesitated about a lot was the human legs / mandibles ("Chelicerae" being the actual name for these apparently!). Having human legs used that way has become fairly common for Arachne designs. I usually do my own weird take on things, but in this case, this idea just marries the human and spider parts too well, so I went for it in the end. I did try my best to make them look as Chelicerae-like as possible though, it'd tough to walk on these ^^And of course, Chitei once again did an incredible job with her! She simply turned out amazing ^^

So yeah, I hope you'll like her, and her lil pets! ^^

Chitei and I have been working together a fair bit over the last few months by the way, expect most of the upcoming monstergirl reveals to be drawn by him! :B

Here are all the monstergirl ranks (BOOBS!!!):

Rank 1

Rank 2

Rank 3

Rank 4

Rank 5

You can follow/support Chitei here:

https://www.patreon.com/cw/u27507852 (18+)https://www.pixiv.net/en/users/1484994 (18+)https://x.com/rai32019 (18+)

A LOT of good coding work taken care of this time! Let's start with the TODO list:

- Secret feature: main gameplay loop

- Secret feature: polishing

- Improved Soul drop system

- Improved Shape fight drops

- Improved spell related system

- Improved eaten food check function

- Improved item description system

- Improved "?" menu button system

- Improved Almanach system (visually the same for you, easier to work with for me)

- New Almanach entries system

- New Almanach entries

- New sub quests

- Witch swap related improvements

- More SFX improvements and audio balancing

- Hold a button to keep moving in a direction

- Unique skills for all characters

- Better balancing

- Add some illustrations in game (including some of the ones that have been voted on!)

- Ability to rewatch and skip rank up animations

- More settings (including some accessibility settings)

- Funnee

- Ability to ignore fights if that enemy has been defeated enough times

- Another surprise (actually mostly done already)

- A little bit more story content

- Rework the deungeon ocean

- Small Biscotti tunnel modifications

- Various small exploration related improvements

- Texture prefetch/ flush improvements (optimization)

- OK Write new party events

- Add more party events

- Write some rank up events

- Add rank up events

- Draw the remaining demo chibis (Tiger, Hydra, Dragon, Axelle, Saen'Liz)

- Implement the new chibis

- Various smaller improvements

Oh man, so much stuff.First was of course the secret feature! I called it polishing, but it turns out there was actually a fair amount of work left. It must have taken at least 15 days to get everything in order, but it's in a damn good state now! I can still think of a couple things I could improve, and surely a bit of balancing as well, but until certain other improvements and changes are made outside of that feature itself it's better to leave it as is. And since it's really not that much anyway, I'm calling it done for now! Of course, this doesn't include the art and audio commissions, which I'll need to take care of sooner rather than later now. Very exciting stuff ^^But yeah, it was a relief to be done with this, I really needed a change of pace after that. For some reason I felt like doing something I usually consider to be a bit of a pain, which is displaying information in game...!

The first thing I did was improving the item description system. It currently shows up in that little box below the inventory, but space is extremely restricted there which was a pretty big hurdle when writing descriptions. I had to figure the most succinct ways of writing for some spells in particular, and still ended up with very squished text despite that! And that's in english, french often takes more space for example. It just wasn't viable for all sorts of reasons. Now, the description simply appears in a floating box next to the cursor when hovering over an item! Like in Stardew or Terraria. The old textbox space is now used to display the buy/sell toggle button in the Shop and Storage menus ^^It works great, I'm very happy with it! I applied it in a bunch of places too, not just the inventory/shop/storage menus. It's also used in the Almanach recipe tab, in the character select menu, in the Alchemy menu (which also let me decrease the recipe summary display, meaning no more awkward clerk slide when selecting a recipe), and even in that new secret feature! Very good stuff ^^

Then, I had to improve the Almanach. Currently, all the tuto pages are just a big sprite, even the text...! It doesn't really matter to the player, but this meant that localizing in other languages would have meant having to edit every single one of these tuto page sprites, which as you'd expect would be a massive pain, and there's other issues I won't get into... I couldn't have that, so I changed that whole system to instead be able to simply place and scale any amount of strings and sprites I want, at the depth I need. Modular and optimized, very cool!You might have noticed that I added a new "New Almanach entries system" task in the list on top of the previous "New Almanach entries". That's because adding actual entries and managing how new entry types are displayed on the screen are two different things ^^Some of these new entry types are related to the new feature, but one of the ones I talk about is something I'd been thinking of for a long time: Growth charts! Cup sizes and numbers, for every character, for every rank! Of course this is only the system part of things, I'll need to actual figure out the values for every character. But yeah, these are now in working order! ^^

Finally, I also found the time to improve the tips button, or "?" button.Currently, it simply shows a little dialogue box in the corner when clicked. My issue with that is that it's not a very good way of explaining something specific, and having a lot of stuff to explain on one screen means a lot of text that you have to sift through. It's just kind of ugly and annoying!What it does now however, is that clicking the button darkens the whole screen and causes various "?" to appear in any spot that needs explaining. In the inventory for example, one appears over the inventory itself, another over the tabs, and another over the Drop item area. Hovering over any of them will cause them to turn into text! It's much easier for the player to learn about a specific game mechanic that way, and way cleaner too. I'm very happy with it ^^I noticed the Map menu was missing a tips button too, so I added one there as well!

Also! The Sablee purple colums hints have also been improved thanks to GS! Thank ye! :B

There's gotta be more very minor changes and clean ups I did, but nothing too important. Some time was also spent on commission related work of course, and that's pretty much everything this time!Lots of great progress, I've had all of these on my mind for such a long time, it's so good to have them all taken care of ^^I'm actually not sure what I'll tackle next! There's options for sure... We shall see ^^

And now, the poll stuff!

The next illustration poll has begun! The theme this time is [Freeform (no horny)]!You can vote in the Discord server if you are a 2$+ patron! Here are the current theme and submissions: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Drz4UD09YftgaihcwWq6McqiFTa2l77XJ9oBJ0hfDco

And the lil bonus pic, Shark girl concept art! Other than an improved pose and bigger muscles, she largely stayed the same between the concept and the final result ^^

Thank you for reading once again! :BHOOHOOOOOO