v0.22 is Live!

Click Play the Game above to check it out!

With this release, the Stone Door is finally complete! It's been a hell of a journey, and I've gotten some really promising feedback so far from people that were really emotionally impacted by the game in one way or another as they took the next step after figuring out the nature of their relationship with Lith. Looking back, I do wish I'd eased back a little more on the length with some of the later portions, but my instincts kept wanting to go epic with the big finale for this miniature adventure novel, even though there were about twelve different finales to write. So it was a pretty huge challenge! But it's finally done with, and I feel both fantastic and fantastically weary to close off this chapter of your adventure with Lith.

I'll get into what this means for the game and its future in a moment, but first, just to be clear: v0.22 adds the last path needed for the Black Collar Stone Door. You should now be able to safely choose any path you wish with any collar and play through to an ending or to your chance to return to the Void and stay there. Also, I've added two new pieces of art, as usual: one to give you a better look at a couple of the creatures you encounter in the Stone Door, and one to illustrate Lith's thought processes if you're especially persistent in discussing a certain topic. Now that I've got a few nice porn shots in the game, I've been opening up to getting art that's a little less directly pornographic, just to enhance the reader experience in a variety of ways. There's still plenty more sex stuff coming down the pipe, of course, but these pieces are rather less lewd than previous additions.

Lastly, I've added one new feature that I saw a couple requests for and rather liked. There are now ten pieces of art in the game, not counting the loading animation, the various chibis for character creation, Lith's face in the upper left, or over a hundred bits and pieces that are assembled to make the aforementioned pieces of art in the correct configurations. Finding all of them can be a bit tricky, and a little hard to remember if you just want to see the art again. So I've added a gallery feature!

The gallery doesn't let you see everything for free, of course. When you first open the game, it'll check your old files, and any events it's sure you've already opened will have their associated art unlocked. For everything else, you'll have to find those scenes in-game to unlock them in the gallery. This will also help serve as sort of a checklist, so you can know if there's more art to be found somewhere else in the game. Plus, the art will always configure it to your current save file, so if you play the game one way, then start a new file, you can see how that art would look with that version of, say, your and Lith's anatomy, quickly and easily. Of course, some pieces of art assume certain things, so they might show things not quite how they are in your file.

That covers the new material in this release! Now, a lot of you may be wondering what's next, if we're finishing up this huge chunk of the game. The answer is, lots! I've got tons of things I've been waiting to do until I had the Stone Door finished, so it's more a question of, what do I do first? The Big Thing on the horizon is the next Door. Supporters can get a sneak peek at what this will involve in the cheat-enabled version of the game, but for now, suffice to say that it'll be Very Different. One problem with it, though, is that it will be, even more so than the Stone Door, something that's hard to release in smaller parts. So at this point, I'm thinking that I'll actually be working on it over the next few versions (letting supporters see the partway content in the meantime) while releasing lots of smaller things I've been wanting to do on the side, until it's finally ready to go out all at once.

And there's lots of little things I've had waiting for me to come back and work on them! I don't want to make any promises, as I intend to mostly work on whatever feels most interesting at the time, but I've been wanting to expand the wooden door sexy/fun content, as well as add more content to the first half of the game and generally work on refining the experience. A lot of my old writing is looking sort of shoddy compared to my newer work, some of the gameplay is still confusing and unbalanced, a lot of gender-related content still needs to be filled out, and it wouldn't hurt to add a little more variety in available actions here and there, I think. I probably won't be able to hit all of this, but I've got lots to take a shot at for smaller updates and additions while I'm working on the content for the new Door!

Now, this update did come out later than I'd like. I'm really unhappy with how my progress has gone here, because while I'm technically still inside the schedule (release sometime in May), I'd much rather be releasing at the beginning of the month than at the end. So for v0.23, I'm going to try and focus in on the project and pack in new content quickly, to try and get a new version ready as soon as possible! I don't know if I'll be able to make the first week of July, but it's what I'm tentatively aiming for as an ideal. I just hope I can pack in enough little things for it to feel like a worthwhile release! Also, the art @_@ Art has been a huge headache for me lately. We'll see!

And on a final note, once again, if you haven't seen the other project I'm working on, I'd encourage you guys to check it out! The Cathouse Tale is a fully 3D-rendered furry porn game, so other people are actually doing the bulk of the work, but I'm handling the writing as well as acting as sort of a coordinator and public relations guy for the team. It's been really challenging the last month or two since we're finally getting things going again, but I'm hoping that I'll have more time to come back to my own work this month now that we're hopefully all set up to start plugging away at it!

Thanks for reading, guys! I hope you enjoy the new content, and that you'll like all the new stuff coming up in both projects!