ALPHA 0.7.1: Soap Opera

I've gotten a couple of interesting comments offering perspectives on what's going on inside devoted slaves' heads. I've done my best to leave this ambiguous in game, and it will stay that way. Are devoted, loving slaves honestly in love with the player character, having accepted a place in a slaveowning society? Or are they cases of Stockholm Syndrome, their minds taking the easy way out by accepting the delusion of love? Or, more disturbingly still, is the player character fooling him or herself about their feelings, which are actually an act? I don't know.

If you can think of a single sentence slice of life for one of your slaves, submit it as a vignette. The prototype vignette system added with 0.7 can add flavor to the game, but only if it's populated with a lot of possibilities.

Download: Dropbox, Mega. Saves from previous versions are incompatible, but 0.7+ saves are eligible for New Game Plus. Latest hotfix (0.7.1.1) up at 2015 PST. Save compatible. Fixes Dairy error, locks out school promotions at very low reputation, and patches inferior prestige overwriting.

0.7.1 Changelog

Head Girl Suite changes

• Added permission toggles for surgical, growth hormone, and hormonal modification of the Head Girl suite slave by the Head Girl.
• Head Girls will receive a reduction to Devotion bonuses from having a suite girl for each modification method they are forbidden to use.
• Alternatively, the Head Girl and her slave can be declared equals: no modification will happen, and if both are Devoted, they will switch places weekly.

Slave School development

• Significantly increased the likelihood of a slave school the player patronizes offering its endowment event.
• Slave schools can offer to move a branch campus into the arcology after the player endows them. They will ask for reduced rent, causing a ¤1000 increase in weekly upkeep.
• The presence of a Slave School branch campus will improve the local economy, providing the same impact as the standard prosperity subsidy.
• Further subsidies can be provided, enhancing the branch campus. A perfected branch campus will provide a small but reliable and free reputation bonus.
• Alternatively, branch campuses can be covertly undermined, causing an event in which the branch campus closes and gives the player slaves as payment of back rent.
• Undermining a branch campus will convince an institution that placing another branch campus in the arcology would be a bad idea, locking out that option.
• Slave schools that the player has never patronized may offer the player a huge discount on a single slave during the next week as a promotion.
• Added player character titles for hosting and perfecting branch campuses.

Event updates

• Revised the personal assistant's development events, and made the smart piercing improvement automatic for unshackled assistants.
• The slave school developments are cemented during events, with a total of 18 new events available to advance them. Customized personal assistants make rude comments in many of them.
• Added a special event for Futanari Sisters forced into slavery through manipulation by the PC, including one of the game's more pointlessly cruel event options.
• Generic event for devoted slaves assigned to share a bed with the PC.

Industrial Dairy changes

• Added an event in which the personal assistant will suggest that an industrialized Dairy permanently integrate optimized cows.
• Integrated cows will be redesignated as equipment and permanently removed from the slave list.
• The integration option can be toggled from the Dairy menu once announced.
• The Milkmaid position is now incompatible with an industrialized Dairy, since the machines do almost everything a Milkmaid is described as doing.

Other updates

• Slaves who find large dicks appealing can experience hole loosening if given access to interslave sex with well endowed slaves.
• Nymphomania will now override some obedience checks on sexual assignments.
• Exempting a slave from the Rules Assistant will now exempt her from the Autosurgery as well.
• Transformation Fetishist societies now consider disporportionately large asses attractive.
• Bugfixes.

Vignette Submissions

Update 0.7 added a prototype vignette system to the whoring assignment. I would like to extend this system to cover the other assignments, but for it to stay fresh and interesting, each assignment needs hundreds of possible vignettes. So, I need your help coming up with slices of life for the following assignments:

• Whoring: being a street prostitute.
• Public service: having sex with citizens for free.
• Working a glory hole: being restrained for public use.
• Getting milked: giving milk (or semen) on a free-range basis, only using the machines when full.
• Taking classes: learning the basics of slave life, mostly by video.
• Resting: looking after her own physical and mental health.
• Pleasing you: serving as the PC's fucktoy.
• Serving as a subordinate sex slave: getting other slaves off.
• Serving as a subordinate servant: cleaning up around the arcology.
• Staying confined: being locked up in a cell.
• Being your Bodyguard
• Being the Head Girl

In order to add a vignette to the game, here's what I need: which assignment it's for, what qualities a slave needs to experience it, what happens, and what its effects are. Also, the idea needs to fit within the game's existing content. If I have to add major body mods to make the vignette work, it can't go in. As an example:

This week, she got repeat business from a customer who loves well-preserved asian ladies, making you an extra ¤20.

To contribute this vignette, I'd submit:

Whoring 

Asian ethnicity, older, pretty face 

"she got repeat business business from a customer who loves well-preserved Asian ladies," 

+ Cash

The "This week," or similar, at the start of the sentence and the description of the vignette's effects at the end are created by the code; don't worry about them. The text of the vignettes needs to follow "This week," or a similar phrase, and end in a comma. You can include as many necessary qualities as you like, or none at all: the system needs a mix of generic vignettes that could happen to anyone, and specific vignettes that fit special slaves.

It's important to keep in mind that the vignette system is supposed to show little slices of our slaves' lives, not present major events that demand the player's attention. If your idea includes any of these factors, it's probably too significant for a vignette, and should be an event instead:

• Involves more than one slave.
• Improves a slave's skills.
• Has a permanent physical effect.
• Has multiple major effects.

Vignettes can only have a single significant effect, which can be positive or negative. These are the supported effects as of 0.7.5, though this may be expanded in future versions:

• PC's money
• PC's reputation
• Health
• Devotion
• Trust

You can submit vignettes by email or by commenting here.

ALPHA 0.7: On Camera

Since 0.6.8, I've planned to use major version numbers (0.7, 0.8, etc.) to denote breaks in save game eligibility for the New Game Plus option. Many 0.6.8+ slaves now suffer from a bug involving their age variable, so this update cuts off NGP eligibility for previous versions and is numbered 0.7.

This update gives slaves hip and shoulder stats, which I've been intending to add for a while. Added stats have become less frequent as the game moves towards a 1.0 release, partly due to well-founded complaints that the game already presents an extreme number of things to track and manage. (Slaves are now modeled by more than 150 distinct stats.) I think this is a good addition despite those concerns, since it changes very little for players who are not interested in it, it provides more depth for those who are, it increases slave distinctiveness, and it improves the realism of the game. The new stats model bone structure rather than soft tissue. The way preexisting stats worked together had bothered me for a long time, since neither growth hormones nor implants can change the underlying frame. In reality, there are pretty hard limits on the asset sizes different body types can handle without appearing disproportionate and strange. Furthermore, having only height and facial beauty stats available to help model underlying bone structure has made slaves too interchangeable, since enough drug treatment can wipe out almost all physical individuality.

This update invokes a couple of FC lore concepts that I haven't touched on for a while. First, Beauty: it's a mostly-hidden stat, but it appears frequently in changelogs. It's a measure of how many citizens of the arcology are willing to pay to fuck the slave over the course of a week. It does not act as any kind judgment from the game as to what the player should think of a slave's appearance. It's a market measure of a slave's beauty from the perspective of the population as a whole, and nothing more. Second, pornography. Sex is so ubiquitous in the Free Cities world that porn just doesn't pay. Players have often suggested a porn star assignment and a porn studio as an upgrade, but the money just isn't there in a world where sex is so cheap. This update takes another approach by using porn for publicity, not profit.

Finally, there have been many, many requests since the current assignment system took shape to provide more flavor to slaves' weekly lives with minor random events or something similar. This update adds a prototype vignette system to the Whoring assignment. It produces single-sentence glimpses of a slave whore's life, which may have a trivial effect on money or reputation, or even no effect at all. Balancing the lack of direct interactivity for these vignettes is going to be hard, since I don't intend to add a direct punishment system. If slaves screw up once a day, a PC with ten slaves will be doling out 70 potential punishments every turn, so FC is assuming that an immense amount of correction goes on offscreen. Once I've gotten some feedback on this, I intend to open the system up for user content submission. This is uniquely suited for crowd-sourced content, since once it's extended to other assignments as well as Whoring, thousands of vignettes will be required.

Download: Dropbox, Mega. Previous saves may work, but are not eligible for NGP. Please do not report bugs if you have not started a fresh game with 0.7. Latest hotfix is 0.7.0.3, uploaded at 2000 PST May 17. Fixes include:

• Ball drug relief with FemPC error
• Starting slave customization hip descriptions
• Ball drugs not growing balls
• Ghost clit effects
• Futanari Sister pair selection
• Pregnancy refresh bug
• Brothel error
• Debugging flags
• Hips defaulting to very wide
• Bad vignette names
• Other minor issues.

0.7 Changelog

Pornographic publicity

• A Media Hub upgrade is now available for the arcology, which allows the player to make video feeds of individual slaves publicly available.
• Funds can be spent to publicize individual slaves' feeds, and the Rules Assistant can be instructed to do this automatically for excellent slaves.
• Making slaves' video feeds public will increase their individual impacts on future society development, and subsidizing slaves' publicity will strengthen this effect.
• Paid publicity can eventually increase prestige if enough funding is provided over enough time.

Enhancement drugs

• Added testicle enhancement drugs.
• Moved some effects from penis enhancement drugs to testicle enhancement drugs. Each will only grow the other organ if it is at its absolute minimal value.
• In addition to their growth effects, testicle enhancement drugs enhance cum production.
• Slaves who are allowed to masturbate may develop cum fetishes while on testicle enhancement drugs.
• Slaves who are not allowed to masturbate may receive bonus Trust while on testicle enhancement drugs.

Pit eligibility

• Rather than selecting slaves for two slots in the Pit, the player can now add slaves to a list of eligible fighters.
• Added an option to the Pit to toggle between selecting two random eligible slaves to fight and pitting the Bodyguard against a random eligible slave.
• The personal assistant will do her best to schedule a fight during weeks when other events do not intervene, and eligible fighters are available.

Hips stat

• Slaves' hips are now statted: as a bone structure stat like Height, changing it is difficult and limited.
• Height and natural hormonal makeup contribute to randomly generated Hips.
• Broad Hips increase Beauty, and narrow hips reduce it, though Gender Radicalism and Slimness Enthusiasm will remove the latter effect.
• Butts that diverge too far from the size of the slave's Hips will apply a penalty to Beauty, but Butts that are proportional to the slave's Hips slightly increase Beauty.
• Very broad or very narrow Hips will widen the criteria for attractive weight one step in the direction of more weight or less weight, respectively.
• Hips can be broadened or narrowed one step with surgery like Height, with the one step restriction removed by upgrading the surgery.
• Hormone treatments can affect Hip development for slaves under age 25.
• Hips added to starting slave customization.

Shoulders stat

• Slaves' shoulders are now statted: as a bone structure stat like Height, changing it is difficult and limited.
• Height and natural hormonal makeup contribute to randomly generated Shoulders.
• Slaves with Shoulders broader than their Hips suffer reduced Beauty. Gender Radicalism will remove this effect and Gender Fundamentalism will increase it.
• Extremely large Boobs can distract from broad shoulders, preventing the Beauty penalty.
• Shoulders can be broadened or narrowed one step with surgery like Height, with the one step restriction removed by upgrading the surgery.
• Hormone treatments can affect Shoulder development for slaves under age 25.
• Shoulders added to starting slave customization.

Event updates

• Random event for trusting slaves when the weather permits tanning.
• New slave market fluctuation events.
• Revisions to preexisting events to account for recent changes.

New slave school

• Added The Futanari Sisters, an enigmatic group dedicated to transforming themselves into futanari, who fund their operations by selling their own members. They function like a slave school.
• In addition to being a source of slaves with an unusual combination of features, they have a unique behavior: Sisters will only form relationships with other Sisters, and any two unattached Sisters will instantly pair off as lovers if the rules allow it.
• Added an unusual endowment event for the Sisters that involves a schism over the definition of futanari.

Other changes

• Added a prototype random vignette system to the Whoring assignment for feedback, which has more than 100 potential outcomes. It needs many more, so it will seem repetitive; it can be disabled under Options.
• Slaves' Attractiveness Score (previously referred to as Beauty) and Sexual Score can be displayed on their individual menus.
• Added a Kiss option to the generic sex scenes.
• Revised the Default Rules logic to respect variances in weight attractiveness created by Hips.
• Revised the Rules Assistant and Autosurgery logic to avoid automatically giving slaves disproportionate butts.
• Slightly reduced the base effectiveness of growth hormones to balance them against implants.
• Reduced the incidence of several common fetish sources to increase effective fetish variety.
• Concubinage is now a potential source of the Emotionally Bonded relationship status.
• Boosted the sexual history requirements for slaves to become Emotional Sluts.
• Maximized Reputation will no longer negatively impact prosperity growth.
• Rebalanced distribution of weather severity.
• Slaves without ovaries or balls will now slowly lose sex drive, though nymphomania will prevent this effect.
• Descriptive expansions.
• Code consolidation.
• Bugfixes.

ALPHA 0.6.12: Board Certified

I received an unusually large number of good, straightforward suggestions for this update. I read and consider every suggestion I get, of course, but the simpler an idea is from a code standpoint, the more likely I am to implement it immediately. Don't hesitate to make sweeping requests, of course, but don't be surprised when I implement ideas like providing assignment preferences for Emotionally Bonded slaves more readily. This project is my first experience with getting public feedback in anything like this volume, and it's been an almost universally positive experience. Nothing is better than dreaming up ideas myself and seeing them come to life in the game, but to my surprise, it's also good fun to browse through suggestions and plug the best right in.

This update rebalances reputation decay again, this time by adding a hidden reputation floor for decay purposes. Only rep above the floor is considered for decay: therefore decay will not occur at all if the player's rep falls below it. The floor will rise naturally with good reputation, making no reputation gain worthless. Where early reputation bonuses, for example from events, were previously wiped out almost immediately by decay, they now serve to help raise the floor and thus reduce future decay. The floor starts at the player's initial reputation, taking the rep-boosting PC customization options from pathetic to very powerful. This comes from a suggestion by Boney M, which I am unhappy I didn't think of first.

On the subject of good community contributions, Ryllnyth was very helpful this week by submitting a number of bugfixes and balance suggestions in code form. The time I have to work on FC is fixed by real life commitments and other pursuits, so assistance of this kind directly increases the amount of new content I can add by cutting the time I spend on maintenance. Ryllnyth (and other crack contributors who have provided code) deserve general acclamation. I do have a couple of comments for those looking at the code. First, I work on FC using Twine (for now), meaning that line references and the like from the raw HTML are not useful. Second, the odd orphan numbers that sometimes appear in-game are artifacts of my debugging process that I've forgotten to remove: the game is displaying a value I was suspicious of and needed to verify while playtesting. Third, there is a small amount of code present that is intentionally inaccessible through normal gameplay, in most cases because it's not ready for public release yet. Finally, Twine isn't really meant for a management sim, and I'm self-taught, so there are some bizarre workarounds present; email me if you need an explanation.

Download: Dropbox, Mega. Previous saves will not work for standard gameplay, but saves from 0.6.8+ can be used for the New Game Plus function. Hotfix 0.6.12.2 posted at 1400 PST May 10. Hotfixed issues include the long form main menu error, a medical career error, pregnancy issues, Hates Men and Hates Women appearing as sexual flaws, and starting slave bonus bugs. Save compatible.

0.6.12 Changelog

Universal impregnation

• Added a universal rule set for insemination of fertile slaves, with options for PC or HG insemination if either is possible. Impregnations under this rule will appear in the end week report.
• This rule is not designed to prevent conception from other sources, but will usually beat other impregnation sources to the punch.
• Fertile slaves targeted by this rule, and Head Girls used as inseminatrices under this rule, will react variably based on their fetishes and other mental attributes.

New accessories

• Renamed existing Huge Dildo and Huge Buttplug accessories to Large Dildo and Large Buttplug, respectively.
• Added new Huge Dildo and Huge Buttplug options, which stretch slaves to the maximum hole sizes added with the Industrial Dairy.
• Huge Dildo and Huge Buttplug options cannot be implemented unless the appropriate orifice is already loose.
• Added these accessories as Rules Assistant settings, which will apply the Large option until the hole is appropriately loosened, and then switch over to the Huge accessory.

Relationship statuses

• Added more elements to the Emotional Slut versus Emotionally Bonded fork, including sexual history: having had many sexual encounters increases the likelihood of a slave becoming an Emotional Slut.
• Changed the Devotion bonus for Emotional Sluts on public sexual duty to a small Devotion penalty if not performing public sexual duties.
• Emotionally Bonded slaves now enjoy servant assignments and do better at them.
• Emotional Sluts and Emotionally Bonded slaves now have strong preferences when choosing their own jobs.
• Slaves imported using New Game Plus will retain Emotional Slut and Emotionally Bonded statuses.

Reputation rebalancing

• Rebalanced reputational decay by allowing the previously fixed floor at which decay appears to slowly rise when reputation exceeds it.
• All reputational gains will contribute indirectly to raising this floor, even if decay wipes them out in the short term.
• The initial reputational decay floor is now set by starting reputation, which makes rep-boosting PC customization choices more powerful by defining a higher resting point for reputation.

Starting options

• Medicine is now available as a career option: it reduces both surgery costs and health impacts.
• Each career option now offers a different minor bonus that can be applied to starting slaves.
• Eye color added to starting slave customization.

Ryllynyth's revisions

• When consent between slaves is not required, slaves on Restrictive release rules will no longer molest unwilling peers.
• Shaved hair will now stay shaved without incessant hairstyling.
• Mindbroken slaves will now lose their quirks and flaws, if any.
• Very low sex drive will prevent the development of attraction.
• Bugfixes.

Other changes

• Voices can now be restored using the organ farm.
• Nickname eligibility delayed until slaves have been with the PC for several weeks.
• Relative recruiting eligibility is now reset with New Game Plus for slaves who are imported without a relative.
• Descriptive expansions for some combinations of extreme attributes.
• Code consolidation.
• Bugfixes.

ALPHA 0.6.11: People Skills

One of my main goals for FC is to avoid situations in which the player is forced to choose between what's sexy and what's mechanically rewarding. This is why slave outfits fit into broad categories rather than offering unique bonuses: to avoid a situation in which the player dresses all slaves assigned to whore in one specific outfit because it's the best choice from a profit perspective. That's less fun, and hinders replayability because mechanically superior choices become the default choices. (The rules assistant is very useful to me as a check against this; if I find myself setting it up the same way every game, I examine the reasons why.) From this perspective, slave relationships have been problematic since they were introduced. Permitting them for devoted slaves offers many benefits and has no real downside, making the choice of whether or not to permit broken slaves to get together no choice at all.

This update adds an alternative to the existing relationship track. Slaves who reach both high Devotion and high Trust and still consider themselves single (within the very different conception of relationships that Free Cities slave culture maintains) will fall into one of two possible statuses, both of which offer benefits comparable to but different than having a lover or being in a slave marriage. Slaves with extremely high sex drives will become Emotional Sluts, a status in which they try to address their human need for social and romantic support through nothing but sex. Conversely, slaves with lower sex drives who do not have close emotional connections with a peer will instead focus these social needs on the player character, becoming Emotionally Bonded to their Master or Mistress.

Download: Dropbox, Mega. Previous saves will not work for standard gameplay, but saves from 0.6.8+ can be used for the New Game Plus function. Hotfix 0.6.11.1 posted at 1700 PST, May 3. Hotfixed issues include the missing paren in New Game Plus, descriptive contradictions, the Schoolroom choice bug, Emotional Slut devotion while on public assignment, and HG orientation investigations.

0.6.11 Changelog

Relationship updates

• Added an Emotional Slut relationship status, in which slaves avoid relationships entirely, relying on sex for their emotional needs.
• Emotional Sluts receive a bonus to performance on public sexual assignments like Whoring, superior to the bonus from working with a wife or lover.
• Additionally, Emotional Sluts greatly enjoy public sexual assignments.
• Added a Emotionally Bonded relationship status, in which slaves rely completely on the PC for their emotional needs.
• Emotionally Bonded slaves do better at private sexual assignments like Fucktoy duty.
• Additionally, Emotionally Bonded slaves enjoy private sexual assignments, and gain a small weekly bonus to both Devotion and Trust regardless of assignment.
• Slaves who reach high Devotion and Trust without forming relationships with other slaves will become either Emotionally Bonded or Emotional Sluts, depending on their sex drive.
• Slaves who reach very high Devotion and Trust without advancing a relationship to a sexual stage will likewise become either Emotionally Bonded or Emotional Sluts.
• Losing Devotion or sex drive will remove Emotionally Bonded and Emotional Slut status, respectively.
• Reduced the advancement rate of relationships in general.
• Attraction and sex drive now play a much more significant role in the advancement of sexual relationships.
• Romantic slaves now enjoy an increased chance of relationship advancement.
• Sinful and Perverted slaves now enjoy an increased chance of advancing an incestuous relationship.
• Devoted slaves in slave marriages now receive weekly Trust bonuses in addition to the existing Devotion bonuses so long as the marriage is allowed to continue.

Other changes

• Increased reputation produced by slaves with perfect Devotion and Trust: one such slave will now organically produce reputation worth several hundred ¤ weekly.
• Rebalanced reputation decay.
• Code revision and consolidation.
• Bugfixes.