5.4 - Gone Gold

Greetings everyone!

I'm posting an off-schedule devblog tonight because there were a few things I wanted to talk about regarding the impending 5.4 update.

First of all, it's done! These next few days leading up to release will be spent testing the new content and mechanics and fixing any major issues before Wednesday. Now I want to talk about the release itself.

Artwork Update Delay

First of all, I want to let everyone know that I've decided to delay the artwork preview I had intended to include in this update. As I began to work on it, it proved to be a little more complex than just flipping a switch as I'd hoped. One option would have been to delay the update itself until I got it working, but I'm not sure that would have been enough.

I'll have a playable artwork demo available soon enough, but it wont be coming in 5.4 unfortunately. You can still expect a stream of previews until then.

As much as I hate not delivering on features, I'd hate even more to delay an anticipated update because of artwork, so this is the decision I've made. Speaking of anticipation, this brings me to the second thing I want to talk about regarding 5.4.

Tempering Expectations

I almost feel like the Sophie Update has been, maybe, a little over-hyped. I'd like to remind everyone that Sophie's content is really only half the picture here, with the other half being Chapter 3. I'm preparing a large overview for Chapter 3 scheduled for September 12th, a week after the 5.4 public release.

There's a solid chunk of content coming in this update with new random events, dynamic events in Sophie's office, new serum events, and lots of under-the-hood improvements. That said, I want to emphasize that I only added as much content as made sense for the span of Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, and much of it lays the groundwork for what's to come in Chapter 3, which will be fairly Sophie-centric.

I'm really excited for everyone to see all the new content added in 5.4, and I hope everyone enjoys playing through the new content as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Suddenly, Patch Notes

As long as I'm posting, I figure now's as good a time as any to drop the release notes for 5.4. You'll find them just below!

The Company - Alpha 5.4

Content Updates

• New opportunities to dose Sophie are in the game
  • These scenes will appear throughout the story and cannot be missed
  • You'll be able to choose to take Sophie down either a Romantic, Submissive, or Dominant relationship route
    • "Allow you to refer to her casually" begins the Romantic route
    • "Have her go down on you" begins the Submissive route
    • "Have her show you her tits" begins her Dominant route
  • You'll find the most rewards by sticking to a single path
• New random events have been added involving Sophie
• New dynamic events in Sophie's office unlock at different points in each route
• Choosing her Romantic route unlocks phone, day trip, and date events
• Several new conversations have been added, at least one per character

System Updates

• All random events, random conversations, and dreams have a 4-day internal cooldown applied
  • This means that once an event, conversation, or dream has occurred, that same event should not occur again for at least 4 days
  • If a character has no conversation topics left in their pool as a result, they should not appear in random conversations
• Random conversations now actually appear randomly
• Older conversation topics will now sometimes be removed from the pool as new conversations with those characters appear
• The background will now change based on time of day
  • This can be disabled/enabled from the sidebar
• Dream system has been overhauled
  • Changes are mainly on the back end
  • Dreams now have internal cooldowns as described above
  • Dreams now function more like random events and can change based on how your character has changed