Project Wild One v0.05: The Forest Lives

As of this moment, supporters can play the new version on Patreon and SubscribeStar! About two weeks from now, it’ll open up to more of them, and about a month from now this version will go public! Now that that’s clear, let’s talk about what’s new!

It’s been such a journey, it’ll be hard to catch everything, but let’s go down the big items first.

Locations

In past versions, the only “location” was basically where you are. NPCs would show up, and when they leave (or you “leave”) they would despawn until they’re needed again. With this update, the game now handles an unlimited number of different locations– and every NPC out there keeps doing their own thing, even when you’re not around. This means NPCs will be developing their own relationships, searching at the same time as you for companionship, and doing whatever kinky things to each other they please while you’re doing your own thing. And you can now walk in on them– you can find them sleeping, fighting, having sex, and so on, be it alone or in groups. The NPCs can now howl as well, and you (and any other NPC that hears) can follow.

This makes for a pretty fundamental change in how the game works and feels, as you may imagine. I’ve had to make a lot of changes behind the scenes, and this change has actually helped me find and root out a lot of bugs just because there’s so much more “going on” to test out the system anytime you’re playing. I’m not going to go into all the minutiae of how this works now, but I hope you’ll find the game a familiar, but vastly improved experience with much more immersion to it now.

Weight and Reserves

Previously, your weight could go up if you digest things, but that didn’t really mean anything. A normally tiny character could carry thousands of pounds without issue. On top of that, you never really had any way to make your weight go down, and you only really needed to rest if you were seriously wounded. This system has been waiting a long time, and finally, it’s installed.

With this version, you regenerate health and willpower from a limited resource called Reserves. This represents your stamina or backup energy. It refills much more slowly than HP or WP– and it, in turn, regenerates by consuming your body fat. If you run low on reserves, you’ll regenerate slower. If you run low on fat, your reserves will regen slower. Conversely, if you get an excess of reserves, you’ll start to gain weight, and if you gain a lot of weight, it will start to slow you down: some actions will take longer, some actions will cost WP, and you’ll take a general penalty to dexterity. These weight penalties will also apply if you’re carrying a lot of other weight by other means!

The main way to gain Reserves and body fat is to Rest– you forage as well as sleep during this time. This means it’s a good idea to rest up between intense encounters, and that if you have high reserves, you may be able to exhaust others semi-permanently simply by making them burn through all of their reserves before you in a marathon session.

Of course, you can also gain reserves and fat by digesting food you find for yourself. Milk isn’t quite implemented yet, but cum is now much more nutritiously rewarding– and requires a decent amount of Reserves to generate. And of course, vore players will find these changes very meaningful in their decisions during gameplay.

Gushing

Speaking of delicious fluids, the system for what happens when you have way too much of them has been dramatically overhauled. I had implemented gushing in a previous update, but going over it again later I found a lot of problems in how it was calculated. The system has been changed radically so that you will now gush when you’re holding a large amount of fluids you can’t comfortably contain, with the rate modified by how much it exceeds your capacity, how much can fit through the related orifice at a time, and how much “something else” might be blocking said passage.

On top of that, gushing was more or less “silent” in the past, but now has plenty of markups for when it happens. You’ll be notified when it starts, it will show as a status when it’s ongoing complete with a description of the current rate, and when it ends it will estimate how much total was gushed. Keep in mind, gushing is still a rather rare event, as most places that can hold fluids will stretch over time to accommodate their content, and it tends to take a pretty extreme amount of fluids to cause gushing. But I know some people love chasing situations like this, so I hope you’ll find this system much more rewarding to play with!

Giving In

Last version’s changes raised some problems with Relax– it regenerates so quickly, you can easily end up stuck in situations where you can’t do anything else, or don’t want to do anything. I hacked together a hotfix for that, but this addition offers a better solution for a range of situations where you just want to let things take their course.

In a variety of situations where inaction may be the best course, you can now Give In: for a very long time, you will not regenerate health or try to dodge attacks. This should help with passing time when you’ve been beaten down, give a helpful option for vore enthusiasts, and generally make it less frustrating when you’re in a difficult situation and you just want time to pass with fewer clicks. Others will still act around you, so you can watch them do things with you or each other, but hopefully this will take a lot of the frustration out of these corner situations.

secondary changes

All these changes have had a lot of consequences– some things need adjusting, some changes are now possible, some problems get exposed or more pressing, all sorts of things. Let’s talk in brief about changes happening because of or in relation to the big changes with this update, before we hit the list of more random stuff!

Four new traits have been added! These traits are all related to the changes above and should help you play the way you want to if these changes are giving you a tough time. One has been added to the traits available for a new character, and all four can be earned as upgrades. They do not currently show up on NPCs.

The game now has a “loading” period after you start a new playthrough! This period is literally spending in-game time spawning in other NPCs and letting them get things started before you show up, to add a little immersion and feel less like everyone “just spawned.” Think of it like building a new world in minecraft.

With these changes, Rest and Search take on new significance– they’re both actions NPCs can now take! When you Rest, you are less likely to be found by others, and when you Search, you can find groups of NPCs. Currently, if you Howl, then Search, NPCs following your howl can still find you until you actually find someone else, but that may change in future expansions of the location system.

Howl has been totally overhauled! As mentioned, NPCs can now howl, and when any character howls, a random selection of other characters hear it and get the option to try and follow the noise for a limited time after. If you hear someone howl, it will interrupt your Search, and it might wake you from Resting, though that reduces dramatically the more howls you’ve heard recently. You can now follow howls yourself, and this will behave very similar to Searching.

The time passing system has been tweaked to cover for the game’s processing time. All these NPCs doing their thing at the same time as you in the background has made the game much more resource-intensive! When you have a lot of NPCs running around, some devices may start facing slowdowns. This was especially problematic taking long actions like a Rest: the game would freeze while processing everything else happening over a very long period of time, then finally play through the animation of the time actually passing. I’ve overhauled the system behind the scenes so that the game should do much more of that work in parallel with in-game time passing, so on a long turn you can watch the time pass in the turn queue as almost a loading bar, if you’re playing a heavy enough game for the effect to be noticeable.

For vore enthusiasts, prey will now transfer what they’re carrying to the storage they’re inside of! Anytime a prey gushes, leaks, or ejaculates, all of that will now transfer to the storage they’re in rather than just disappearing. And when prey dies in a storage, anything they had inside them will also transfer to that storage.

With the changes to how NPCs work, I was getting a lot of big crowds during testing. I have adjusted how NPCs work to much more aggressively avoid large crowds, both making them more likely to leave and less likely to find large crowds when searching. These effects still scale with your settings for crowding during game setup.

It is now possible as a rare event that when you run away from an encounter, you will stumble directly into another encounter! These woods are full of life, and I want it to feel that way.

Other changes

Now, there’s still a bunch more changes on my old checklists, so let’s just have a quick roundup of the rest!

• Orgasm and post-orgasm WP loss has been reduced.
• NPCs are now less interested in having sex with characters that have low WP, and especially helpless characters.
• Text for changing stance on sex/vore now have alts for if you’re already sexing/voring.
• Text for offering sex/vore will now acknowledge if you’re already doing that thing, or something similar.
• Text for changing stance on sex/vore grapples now have alts for when the grapple is close to ending.
• Added text to make it clear when trying to end a grapple is blocked by another character.
• When blocked from any further progress by sex that can be ended in one action, the actions to focus on vore/diving will now attempt to end the conflicting sex.
• Initiating vore actions can now attempt to end conflicting vore that can be ended in one action.
• Initiating urethral sex can now attempt to end conflicting urethral sex the other way around if that sex can be ended in one action.
• Fixed Veteran and Attractive being available when related content is disabled.
• Fixed traits disabled by content settings being available as startup traits.
• Fixed a bug with returning to the main menu and resuming during game setup.
• Fixed exploit allowing for multiple simultaneous vores in the same orifice.
• Fixed default stance in new grapples always being positive if you’ve ever offered in the past.
• Fixed anomalies with NPC anatomy generation.
• Fixed various typos.

What’s Next?

I’ve skipped over a ton of notes on smaller changes and additions that I feel either aren’t that important or are kinda just “part of implementing the big stuff,” so I think that just about covers what’s new with v0.05! Now the question is, where are we going from here?

My biggest, most pressing goal currently is still to do the AI overhaul. NPCs still act very erratic because they’re mostly just weighing the situation and doing whatever action is most appealing from moment to moment, with very little “awareness” or “thought” beyond weighing direct benefits. The code is getting crowded with messy additions and tweaks to make it work “for now,” but it’s getting ugly. I want to introduce some real logic and emotion to how NPCs act. I want them to have goals, and form relationships more nuanced than just liking and/or wanting to sex up someone.

And… that is an absolutely monumental goal to work toward. The Location system at the heart of this update was a big move to get ready for AI, and the biggest remaining thing that needed to be done first. (As a side note, the rest of the changes in this update were pretty much long-standing “should do’s” that got squeezed in when I saw the opportunity.) I’ve been trying to chunk out the work of making the AI overhaul happen so that I can get the big change done in one update without it taking absolutely forever, and there are two parts to that: strip it down to a very basic version I can expand later, and get all the supporting pieces it needs in order to function done ahead of time.

So the question is: was the Location system the last supporting piece, or is there something else I should get done first? I’ve been developing my plans for the new AI system in the back of my head for quite some time now, and it’s still tough to say. The NPC generation system is overdue for at least a minor revamp, and depending on how much NPCs’ personalities are defined ahead of time by certain traits, I might want to do that first so I can lay out new personality traits for all of them without muddling through the old system changing them all.

I’ve also been wanting to add some options for more nuance with actions so that you can do things like “attack softly” or “stretch them out carefully,” which would add a lot more nuance to the options for you and the AI, but that might be better pushed off to after the change just so I don’t have to code the extra options for the current AI. Integrating new actions into the AI tends to be one of the most cumbersome parts of making changes as things are now.

There’s been a lot of demand for adding a basic save function or at least something for exporting a character and continuing with that PC in the next playthrough. I’d like to get to that soon, but that would change a lot about the gameplay priorities, so I’ve got that slated to happen in parallel with some changes to how upgrades work. Still, this would be a good quality-of-life change to make as soon as possible, but given that your own character does a lot of the things an NPC does silently, having the new AI system in place first would be probably be preferable, and is still the higher priority overall.

The more I think about it, there are tons of changes I’m wanting to make that want the new AI system to be in place first. Right now, the only thing that really stands out as something to do before that would be changing how the NPC generation system works behind the scenes, and maybe not even in that dramatic a way.

I’m taking the lull between versions as a chance to look at a lot of things that usually get pushed aside as “less important than getting the new version ready,” partly so that if any big bug reports come in I can address them before I’ve changed too much in the code. I’ll keep thinking about this in the meantime, so we’ll see if something else comes up… but as it stands, there’s not a lot of reason not to try and tackle at least the most basic, core version of an AI overhaul in the next update. It’s almost hard to believe it might finally be time.

That’s pretty exciting to think about, but also brings me a certain dread. Big new systems can drag out in development, and it can be easy to fall into a motivation death spiral with things like that. I’m going to try and keep up my steady pace from recent development, and aim for as simple a starting model as I possibly can, if I do go for it this update.

We’ll see how it goes. Hopefully I’ll be making at least a short dev journal for supporters before too long, so those of you putting food on my table might know before long which way we’re going for v0.06.

Right now, though, I’m just happy to finally have v0.05 done and out the door. It’s been a huge journey, with a lot of different strange challenges along the way, but I think it’s a pretty huge improvement. I hope you guys enjoy all the changes and can see just a little more of this game’s potential starting to shine through!

If you want to know more about what’s going on, there’s lots of options! You can get twice as many dev journals, plus monthly free-writes about the world and lore developing behind my projects (plus various other rewards!) if you support me on Patreon or SubscribeStar! If you’re looking for friendly people to discuss my work with or just hang out and share philosophy and porn with, I run a pretty cozy Discord server! If you want to occasionally see some silly nonsense from me and also notifications for new posts and such, you can follow me on Twitter! Also I used to announce it on there when I stream on Twitch, but that felt like it was getting obnoxious so I just announce it on the Discord now.

I think that covers all the important stuff, and all the plugs and links. Thanks for reading this one, it’s been a pretty big one, I guess to match the update! And thanks for playing my games!