I’ve implemented a first pass of a version of the game that doesn’t use the LOVE game engine. I’ve had two people now encounter a bug in LOVE that keeps it from properly rendering text on their Windows machines. Windows version. I haven’t released a console version for the Mac and Linux yet, mostly because it was built explicitly for people encountering a bug in Windows. The Linux and Mac versions will be released with the new content once that’s ready. The Love-less version uses the console, so it has some pros and cons vs. the Love version:

————Pros:—————–

Way more efficient – The game boots up significantly faster, and the UI is also much snappier.

Miniscule download size – The console version is not even 2MB, whereas the Love version > 10.

Better character creation – Rather than slogging through a list one at a time, the whole list of outfits for each slot is displayed. You can even filter by typing in a search string!

Can copy the text directly (so you don’t need to post screenshots to show me bugged content)

Can resize the cmd window better than you can resize my game.

Can handle “weird” resolutions, where “weird” is defined as resolutions neither of my two test machines use

Autoscrolling!

————-Cons:—————

You have to press enter after each input. This UI doesn’t respond to keypresses immediately (though this also enables things like the search strings).

The game doesn’t overwrite the screen every time you input a command. Instead, it appends the new screen to the bottom of the player session (and the command prompt then autoscrolls). If you don’t scroll up much, it’ll look like the screen’s being updated in place, but as soon as you start scrolling up, it gets weird. On the other hand, this does give you a nice log of your play session that you could copy and send me if you were helping me debug.

The autoscrolling is overzealous, and you’ll have to scroll up if the content is greater than your screen. The solution to this I think for me to work harder to keep each event short enough to fill no more than a screen. So this could end up being a blessing in disguise.

No pictures or sound effects. This isn’t a big deal though, because except for the titlescreen, my game doesn’t have any pictures or sound effects, nor do I plan on adding any.

I personally prefer the console UI, but my command line fetish is almost as big as my “big female bottom in a thong getting soundly spanked” fetish, so you know. I’m biased.

So the console version is recommended if either the Love version isn’t printing text for you (but is otherwise running fine), your machine is old and cranky and can’t handle the Love version, or you’re a command-line junkie like me.

I’m also reworking the character creation screen in the Love version. Once that’s done, rather than having to manually scroll through your options one at a time, whenever you select something (like gender or underwear), you’ll be taken to a different screen. That screen displays a list of all the options that you can select either by providing their number, or by typing in a search string. This should make customizing your character much less of a pain. I’ve found it much more performant so far too.

Finally, I’m cranking away at the content for the second half of episode 4. No ETA yet though.

A fan, Dloohi, has been kind enough to enhance the Master of the Manor content that I posted a while back. Now, not only do you have access to a plain text and ebook version, but there’s also an HTML version. This version lets you track your character’s state right there next to you, rather than in a separate program/piece of paper. You can “save” your state by right-clicking on the page and selecting “Save Page As.” This will save the HTML locally, and you can then open that file with your web browser. It doesn’t save your page location though, so you’ll need to come up with a system for that (either including the page number in the file name, or putting it somewhere else or something). Thanks a lot Dloohi!

If windows users want to go ahead and try out the console version linked earlier, I would be quite grateful. Especially if you’ve had problems with the game not displaying text, so you’ve been reading the HTML version.

AKA