[HTML5]LEWD (Alpha1 release up!)

[Sadako]

The Alpha 1 release is here! There are now two different servers and urls to access the game at.

playlewd.com/test-server has all the latest content and features as they’re worked on, but it may be unplayable at times and/or very buggy. Only Patrons can access this.
playlewd.com/main is the main “stable” server (at least it should be stable). Both Patrons and people who have redeemed an access key can play here. Later on, I’ll open up wider access until it’s eventually fully open, but that costs too much for me to accommodate right now.

The “Play” button now leads to the main server, and you can find a link to the test server under it when it’s hovered instead. You get a separate save for each so what you do on the test server and save wipes on it won’t affect the stable server.

I also decided to keep test server access under the $5 reward for a longer period of time. Previously I was limiting that to have test server access up until the main server is up, but meh, why not?

You can now find any keys you have available or redeem one on your account page.

For Patrons, your access key will get one use for each $1 you’ve successfully charged through Patreon. You can share your key however you see fit.

For those who aren’t Patrons, and want to play the game for free, you have to find a key from one of the supporters. There’s like almost 3000 keys out there once the end of November payments finished, so hopefully they’re not terribly scarce. I’ll distribute some as well, increasingly as I can support more players and the game is developed more.
Perhaps people that have supported the game that go here will share theirs here.

Here's also a key to get started for you guys with 25 uses on it: LEWD-BLUE-FOX0-0000

The other best way to get into the closed alpha is to just have an account registered. I’ll be giving out keys there next thing, in probably a month or two.

I need to take a break. Haven’t had time to play games, relax. I need to reformat my computer which means backing up a lot, and quite a bit of time to get my workstation and everything in order how I like.
I did make a list of what I want to work on in the next 2-3 months in addition to getting more content added, and I’m looking for writers again.
… relook into clothing stuff, better descs and the not reequipping from save issue.
… fix renderer crashing. Better errors for when renderer problems are someone’s browsers’ fault.

… Explorables coming up always on first server load but not when resaved? etc :<
… An issue with showing multiple binds on each tile in the editor that may be related to this.

… Refractor indices in editor, and fix an issue with newly created inputs in editor. (qol stuff to make tools work more fluidly, basically)
… fix some issues with real time updating of content making some comparisons fail. (this usually isn’t a problem experienced, but it’s still one)

… callback design: Function to receive data from a dialog option, and operate on it (input passwords, written responses, etc)
… shaders for portraits to procedurally modify them (different colors, multiple texture params that can be supplied and combined, etc)
… more of the client side variables set need to save between saves, or better yet should be saved on the server.
… make traits selectable outside of chargen. Restrict chargen to a first time thing and add something else in game for changing appearence later, or whatever.

… fix duplicate unmodified object sending wasting data.
… fix orbiting camera on system map slowly zooming out.
… make reconnects work seamlessly, without having to refresh, start over, etc; improved support for spotty connections.
… add a powerful refractorer to the tool.

… better mobile device support (some buttons/inputs are not working right? And could use UI adjustments for them)
… writing parser recode for more sanity, mutability, and efficiency.

[Sadako]

Main and Test Server Update, Alpha 1.2

• Progress through scenarios is now saved between sessions on the client. (This fixes it describing something as unfamiliar when it shouldn't, and so on)
• Updates to the renderer.
• The starting screen now will detect if WebGL isn't support and/or has crashed on your browser, and report an error to that effect.
• Starting screen errors are more clearly noted.

There is a known issue with the "More of the same?" options on the 'taur girl sticking in place when you select one. I'm looking into that and will have it fixed soon. Think I'm getting too tired to get it done today.

After fixing that and the issue where items aren't properly instanced (will take a bit, it's a deep rooted engine issue), I'll be working on the 2nd alpha release that'll have some of those new features I've mentioned earlier.

December was light on content, but that should pick up. Lots was slow due to holidays, and I'm still looking for at least one new writer since none have met that 10k words of content per month benchmark lately.

[decimad]

Would love to pay it again, but no redeem codes left. When pressing play it always directs me to the testserver which I dont have a code for sadly.

Gotta wait for new ones I guess.

[Sadako]

I really need feedback to see what sort of rewards people would like for their contribution, and any stretch-goal sort of ideas they may have.

I'd appreciate if you can respond in this thread: http://forum.playlewd.com/index.php?p=/discussion/146/need-input-for-stretch-goals-rewards
That way it's all organized for me, but responding here is fine too.

[Sadako]

Alpha 1.3 release candidate

I updated the test server with some fixes.

I'll be updating the main server in a few days - assuming these fixes don't create new problems (please report problems) - along with giving a key each emailed to a few thousand of the oldest registered accounts.

Engine:

• Fixed an engine issue that lead to it being unresponsive when selection any option in response to "More of the same?" from the female 'taur.
• Added the missing instance id to an object's properties
• Fixed an engine issue that wasted a lot of data and caused the bug where your clothing would seem to get unequipped, and you would see issues like "removes your bare breasts" in the writing.
• This would also cause problems with things not being equipped the same when you leave the game and come on again. That'll probably be an issue that still persists between server restarts until a further update, however.
• Fixed an issue where scenarios were being bound to a tile multiple times, and explorable only scenarios were getting bound to scenarios on initialization of the server that shouldn't be. Fixes roll chances too high, and explorable only scenarios coming up without hitting "Explore".

Tools:

• Fixed the tool showing multiples of a scenario when a tile was clicked if it was an explorable scenario.

Patron Bot:

• Fixed an issue with capitals in emails which was effecting 8 Patrons.

There is a known issue with player data not saving on scenarios between sessions, and even between instances of them. But there is very little content that this effects, and I'm going to be focusing on some other things before fixing that.

[Sadako]

Alpha 1.3 update, and new keys given out

I’ve given a key to all accounts that were registered before August 1st, 2015. 4449 in total. If you have a key, it can be found on your account page.
Each key is a 2 use one, so those that get one can also share it with someone else to grant them early access to the main server as well.

I’ll be sending an email out to all those that got one as well later today or tomorrow to confirm for those that got one. But you can just check your account now if you think you registered before then and it’ll be there if you had.

Also I fixed an issue where the main server would be missing resources the client needs to fetch whenever the test server is down, and did some various other things that just make deploying updates branched off from the test server easier and more painless for me.

[Sadako]

Oh, and I just took a look and we're nearly at 200,000 words of content which is actually further along than I thought we were.

I'm looking to spend most of February working on increasing most of the content now that nearly all the bugs are fixed (just three fairly small ones remain that I'm aware of). I'll be getting back to writing myself, and working with the other writers to get more written and polished up.

[Sadako]

I've been just mostly thinking, working on some new content, and getting the new writers situated. So this is just a few minor things I got added or fixed up. And like usual I don't put the added content in these notes since you can see that on the Dev Tracker for the most part.

• Added some extras to the writing parser to further make changes to content based on past choices easier.
• Fixed a bug with saving certain client data that messed up how things were displayed between sessions.
• Removed something about how scenario content is displayed so some odd edge cases wouldn't happen when it comes to different ways to deliver content. It now no longer removes repeated selections, and instead has the whole entire history for the duration of that scenario.
• Scenario content now starts from the bottom up, instead of at the top, so the new content is consistently at the bottom.
• When reloading from a save, you now start at the last area you were playing at.

[Sadako]

I want to reiterate that we're always looking for feedback on the game, and that you can post that on the forum. In developing a game, you sometimes see things a certain way and things seem to play fine, but you need that perspective of how it is for people that are fresh to it and how that might not be the best. We especially need feedback from those that are supporting the game monetarily and helping progress it that way, and what they expect, what could be better.
It's just an alpha, yeah, but you shouldn't just assume that things will magically get better and that we've thought all that you've thought, especially when there are things that you don't see written in the "game info" or otherwise haven't seen mentioned. So don't be shy on giving your feedback on issues you ran into, or things that you think that could improve the game which fall in line with the sort of game it is.

There's quite a lot of people that are pledging to the Patreon then canceling before a payment. I'm not sure if these are just people trying to abuse and cheat Patron's dumb system, if they had problems getting things to work, or if there is something they expected when pledging that they didn't actually get so changed their mind. For the last two, well feedback would be helpful that we haven't gotten a lot of yet.

Anyway, I think this fixes all the problems with Alpha 1. I'm going to start on Alpha 2 that should be out in March or April, which will add a number of neat new features. Alpha 2 will also fix one of the two last remaining engine issues that are in the way of a beta release and making the game freely available to non-supporters more widely, the saving and carrying persistence between player instanced game objects seamlessly, which is the cause of some "bugs" at the moment. (The other issue is caching to help lower bandwidth costs and further speed things up)
When Alpha 2 is released, I'll also be updating the main server with the test server content that's polished enough for that, which should be around a 30-50% increase in the amount of written content that's currently there. I'll also be giving out at least another 10,000 keys along side the Alpha 2 release, spread between the older registered users and large keys I'll post publicly again.

Site:

• Fixed an issue where things on the account page didn't update in a proper order, so it'd still say you don't have main-server access after redeeming a key.
• Added a "logout" button to log out from your account.

Game:

• Added more detail for female sex that was missing.

• Fixed some more PARSE_ERRORs, including one that wasn't finished for plural body parts (thighs, arms, etc). Still need to add some things for how it generates descriptions for asymmetrical pairs.
• Fixed some more content issues that had things displaying that shouldn't have been under certain conditions.
• Fixed some new crash issues that came up due to some previous updates.

There's been more content added to the test server as well, but you can see the dev tracker for that. Some point soon, I do want to start doing like "content" recaps to better go over them, but things can be pretty hectic with my programming side of things right now.

[Sadako]

Test server update
So far, still updates to get some enhancements to the engine all working smoothly, and to have the capabilities there for new upcoming features. Also got some more bugs fixed.

• Introduced a preliminary to restore player instances of game data. This should make some content work that wasn’t before, like the Macsen sex scenes that required tracking a “fondness” he had for each player. It also gets items restoring to their previous equip/unequipped state, and makes a lot of new content we’re working on possible. It’s just preliminary since it’s just a short persistence, and there are a lot of things I need to do over the next few weeks to get it fully capable and efficient.
• Fixed some more issues with parsing. “Eyes” would sometimes say they are bare.
• Fixed an issue where the camera would move inaccurately in some cases, particularly when teleporting a great distance.
• Made some small client changes to improve its efficiency slightly.
• Lowered the rate of libido gain (did this one a while ago and forgot to note it).
• Libido is now mostly working and updating correctly.
• Fixed an issue where some game objects would not get listened for changes on them. Only affects some new content being added, and nothing that was previously there.

I did notice some more issues with the parsing of what clothing is covering correctly. Some things seems to be showing bare and I’m not sure if it was doing that before this update or not.
I also think there’s some issues with parts of the player and/or their clothing being “cum covered”, “egg-filled”, and things like that, and how they’re handled by the content, especially with multiple things like that. I have a more robust ailments/conditions system which I might want to have implemented for the Alpha 2 release.
And there is some odd issue with underwear that makes them unequipable now that I need to look into. But besides that it seems like I’ve gotten most most of the new issues that have come up from this recoding resolved.

[Sadako]

Here's a preview of the new input feature that's been added in.


It's something I've wanted to add for a long time, but took a while to figure out the right implementation that'd be flexible in how it can be used as well as polished. Well, that and it took a while just to get the game ported 100% onto my new engine.

We'll be using this for quite a bit of content in different ways really soon.

[Sadako]

Test server update

• Added an open ended system for prompting text inputs from the player.
• Added an additional “submit” input key into bindings. Default is “enter”. This is used for text inputs since the default “space” for confirming other things obviously doesn’t work well when it comes to typing things that could have spaces.
• Added in the key for switching between different interaction focuses in the game (ie between chat, the map, and scenario) to the settings, which previously wasn’t rebindable. Default is “tab”.
• When you don’t meet the requirements to select a dialog option, it now gives some hint to what you’re lacking.
• Made some error messages more clear.
• Fixed another engine issue where not everything that should be listened to was actually listened to.
• Fixed an engine issue where Scenarios weren’t restoring instances correctly.
• Made improvements to how the instancing is done to further reduce memory and data.
• Fixed an issue with player saves being loaded, which lead to instance restoring being messed up.
• Fixed an issue where saves weren’t working for supporters on the main server (well, once I get the Alpha2 release done and up on the main server, that’ll be fixed)

I think things are mostly pretty smooth and mostly bug free now?
Though the restoring of different states is still a sort of “short” memory thing. Things seem to work fine from a new playthrough. When restoring from a save, sometimes there are issues. I’ll get that fully working as intended soon.
Probably going to take a break from that engine stuff and see if I can get some new content added myself, though. Also need to see about implementing a better system with dealing with parts of the body or clothing made to be “cum covered” and so on.

[Sadako]

Programming wise, things seem to be in a good place unless there is some new crash bug or something that's come up that I haven't seen yet.
The new engine is a lot more efficient, and I just have maybe 3-4 days total of programming to do to completely have it ready.

It's April 10th now, so that's plenty of time left for that, but it's a question of having the content I want it to have, both enough of it and polished up in time. That's much more questionable.
So I'm not sure if I'm going to hit that April goal for the release. I'd like to, but I ultimately want it to be a good release.
I want to write a lot myself to help in that regard, but first I really need to add some more to the site such as polls, a way for supporters to redeem extra rewards for their contributions, and some other things.

Whether it's out in April or it's delayed until the next month, I'm still going to be giving out a few thousand free keys so a lot more non-Patrons can play the Alpha2 release, so be on the lookout for that.

Additionally, I spent some time rewriting a lot of the Patreon scraping bot that gives people game access, which fixes some minor issues issues with it. I also got it to use about 1/7th the memory it was using when I hastily wrote it in the past, which was getting in the way of how much was available for that game itself.

[Sadako]

Alpha 2 Release-Candidate 1

Wew.. I kept running into one issue after another that made this take a lot longer. Ended up having to recode a significant amount to get the game-state to properly restore for different players. Then I kept finding a bunch of other bugs, when I want the features and content here to be nicely bug free and polished.

I have updated the main server as well as the test server with this release candidate. The main server, at the time of writing this, still has the same old content from Alpha 1(except for what's added due to bug fixes that aren't on the content), but tomorrow I’m going to be looking over what is in good enough of shape to be put up on the main server as well.
By the time the proper Alpha 2 release comes around (should be in the middle of May, depends on if new issues are found and how long it takes to get the content for it finalized), the main server should be brought up to parity again. There’s just some content on the test server that needs to be polished up and finalized enough first. That should be about 3-4x the content the prototype had, and 50-75% more than Alpha1.

Game

• Tons of recoding of stuff under the hood… Bleh
• Updated NPC cards so that changes to them are updated as they happen. (ie changing their stats, portrait, etc)
  A complicated part of the backend is working correctly when it comes to instancing and saving/restoring different game states. This fixes a ton of issues, including the not having clothing/items equiped or unequipped properly how they were last time you played, among tons of other things that were limited with content moving forward especially
• Cum/Squirt is now in the list of descriptions that you can change.
• Stats levels on chargen can now be selected via dropdown in addition to the slider and are now faded out if you can’t afford them
• Added a new %____Short descriptor to parsing for all body parts that always outputs a concise description
• Logical NOT (aka !) in the writing parser now properly works with function conditionals
• Made more changes to how the scenario scenes are delivered, so the entire scroll back is there. No more fancy removing duplicate scenes since they often aren’t duplicates and mess up the flow. Now it just works more straight forward.
• Removed the spin of the space station map. Will replace it with something else later on.
• More minor client efficiency improvements
• Saves have been wiped

• Fixed a new crash bug
• Fixed an exploit that allowed faster than intended movement (still needs improvements, though)
• Fixed the herm trait not having default penis and breast sizes
• Fixed an issue where body parts with a synonym appeared twice in the descriptions part of chargen
• Fixed some default description issues
• Fixed a new issue with clearing saves that came up in the last update
• Fixed an issue where the string parsing wouldn’t show falsey values like “0”
• Fixed an issue where the word counting didn’t count the words in dialog, and thus made it appear as though less was added
• Fixed the remaining issue with the camera sometimes not focusing on quite the right spot when first entering a map
• Fixed another parsing issue that would show “PARSER_ERROR”. Should be the last unintended one
• Fixed an issue with underwear not working right on a newly created character with the default sex not changed
• Fixed the text on the bottom right in the game being that super outdated message. Woops.
• Fixed an issue with the site not giving an error when trying to add a duplicate name to your account. Instead, you can now pick any name you want for additional characters and only your account name is unique, so you can now have a non-unique character name that someone else also has. This also includes a special id to differentiate duplicate numbers when they appear. (Sorry, everyone that was trying to make a character name “Slut” before!)

Other

• (Hopefully) Better clarified things about when Patrons receive keys, which is when payment is confirmed.

Tools

• Fixed a new issue in newer versions of Firefox, and sped a part of it up.

[Sadako]

Alpha 2 Release-Candidate 1 Hotfix 1

I made a few quick fixes of some problems that were identified.

• Some minor content updates. There’ll be a lot more to come before the milestone release is finalized.
  
• Added default penis and breast sizes to the herm trait.
  
• Fixed a general issue that sometimes made some sex scenes not appear at all.
  
• Fixed 3 causes of crashes, which is likely all of them now.
  
• Fixed the “Meet Macsen” quest pointing to a non-travesible tile, and other various content fixes.
  
• Fixed an issue where the tutorial had a black backdrop where it shouldn’t in Chrome.
  
• Some other stuff I forgot. D:

I’m aware of another issue with the whole egg-filled adjectives being permanent if content doesn’t remove it, as clearing save does not clear descriptions.
I’m thinking of implementing a new better system to handle things like conditions/ailments like that for the Alpha 2 release.

[Sadako]

Alpha 2 Release Candidate 2

• Completely recoded movement and pathfinding.
  
  • A lot of people were requesting diagonally movement, and that’s now in.
  • When using movement keys, the movement keys now don’t trigger until a second key is pressed (ie d held then w pressed), or until after the single key is lifted, instead of key down, to accomodate diagonal movement.
  • Less data is used for the new movement. The interpolation is much smoother and should be problem-free. A bunch of silly issues where fixed that often came up when, say, clicking to move while already moving.
  • todo: smart interpretation and queuing when using hotkey movement. It’s not very smooth right now compared to click-to-move.
• Made experimental changes to the connection model. Hopefully less disconnects. Please report any connectivity quirks and provide any data that you can.
• Added additional logging to try to find some errors. It seems like some client threads on the server may be halting for some reason, which could be responsible for the problem of some people being unable to access any content in The Matriarchy. I haven’t been able to replicate this on my end, please report any way you can find to reproduce the problem.
• The intro is now roughly 30% faster.
• Lots more content fixes.
• Disabled most debug logging on the main server, which’ll also speed things up.
• Some more efficiency improvements to the server. There’s still more to be found, for sure. (Seems like all the chargen things are really snappy, but sometimes selecting dialog options is a bit slow? Caching and pre-caching later down the line should also help ensure that’s made to be instantly responsive)
• Really fixed an issue that was causing scenes to sometimes not show. -_-
• Fixed an issue with the parser when it was trying to display non-string values.
• Fixed an issue where login errors would sometimes not show.
• Fixed it not properly labeling supporters as supporters on the main server on the client.

I think this is it and ready to be released except for content needing to be polished up and selected to be on the main server. Well, unless that issue in The Matriarchy is widespread. I need to figure that out.

I'm not going to rush to get the Alpha 2 update out. I want it to have more content, but lots still needs polishing up. I don't want to have to like.. cut it to only be a third the content that's on the test server. :/
I'm also pretty exhausted, so I'm not sure when we can get this finalized.

[Sadako]

I made a survey to gather some feedback on the UI. If you've played recently enough to give good feedback on it, let me know what you think!

http://goo.gl/forms/GmEf4h3XNAKcLBkD3

[Sadako]

Sooo Patreon banned my bot.

See, normally services like Patreon have what’s called an application programing interface(API). It’s protocols for interacting with the outer layer of some other software. A service like Patreon would usually have an API that gives you some secret keys, similar to a password, that lets you communicate with its servers to get information you should be privy to and to perform functions you could do as a user, but via your own software communicating through those protocols.

Yeah well, Patreon doesn’t have that. 6 months ago, after I first made my bot, they did introduce a basic one, but it doesn’t do nearly as much as my bot does(…did), so it isn’t usable for me and LEWD.
I can’t, for example:
1. See past confirmed payments, only the current pledges. This means if someone paid me money, but aren’t currently pledging, then later link their account, well I just can’t see them in Patreons API at all and see that they have a confirmed payment. Woops?
2. There’s no payment total, only what their current pledge is (whether it went through or not). This means I can’t credit people for all they’ve contributed with the Patreon API like my bot has been doing with the credit total on people’s account.There’s some other things, but those are the show-stopping issues that make it unusable as far as doing what my bot did to give people access to the game and to credit them appropriately.
Because my bot couldn’t get any information on my patrons, she just set the pledges to 0… I went ahead and set these all to “5” for now so all that had a $5 pledge or more go through previously can still play on the test server, at least.I’m not sure how long this went on. I was just notified of pledge amounts not showing up right on patron’s accounts a day and a half ago. So it does seem that the ones that paid last month might not be affected, but obviously this sucks for the new ones.

I’m not sure on an ETA on when/how this will be resolved. I messaged Patreon’s support, and the easy and quick resolution would be for them to whitelist my bot.
If they don’t and I have to wait for them to improve their API… I have no clue how long that’ll take since it took 2 years for them to introduce the very basic API they have now. But who knows.If neither of those happen… I might end up having to finish up getting my own payment services finished sooner rather than later. This is a pain because I wanted to, you know, focus on actually making the game right now. I also probably wanted to stick with Patreon even after I added other ways to contribute because I think it’s convenient for a lot of people to use and they might not want to pay directly to my site, you know?

[Sadako]

Bot back up; you can link accounts and get credit again

Well, for now at least.
I'm not sure what changed. Maybe it's because I had her turned off for a day.
In the past she was relogging into Patreon and updating information every 6 hours since I was getting a lot of messages of people asking where their key was that couldn't wait a day.

So I don't know.. maybe if I cut her back to scraping every 24 hours, I won't have the problem.
Or maybe Patreon whitelisted her but hasn't notified me of that yet. That is what I requested of her, and the customer service person notified me that they'd have to ask around and try to get back to me on it.

Either way, my bot is working at this moment so people can link their LEWD and Patreon account again and get their contributions credited properly once more.

[impound258]

Now with Sadako's bot up, I'm relinked and got 4 keys to give out. (Will be refreshed 5 every month until I stop paying).

So with that said, I don't want random non-LOK users grabbing the keys. So if you're interested in playing and don't have a key, inbox me and I'll send you one.