0.59.7070 - Leashes, Status Effects and much more

First of all, horribly sorry for the delay with an update, but I was catastrophically disorganized last 2 months first of all due to some stupid legal paperwork (and I really tend to overthink there, to the point of feeling physically very bad :)). Apart from that a lot of work has been done, but due to its chaotic nature some of the features were not properly polished, so the build wasn’t stable and tested enough for quite a long time.

But we’re finally here! So, the major update includes:

• Leashes and collars - some monsters and traps now can prevent the character from running around free.
• Status effects system - similar to enchantments, but attached to the character and wear off after some time.
• 16 new monsters and 4 new traps with a lot of new behaviors, making use of 13 new restraints (+2 unused for now).
• 5 new items and 15 new enchantments/status effects. Significant improvements to randomly generated enchantments system and items identification.
• 16 haircuts (most are new)
• WIP ability to control the character from keyboard (for now movement and basic combat).

A bit more wordy description:

I guess the most fun new system is leashes. Now that pesky collar on the heroine’s neck has a ring not just as a cosmetic feature. Some traps and monsters can attach a leash there to make sure the character won’t wander off too far away. Leather and Chain Leashers will just try to collar the character and put on a leash, making sure she can’t run away. Leash and Chain Traps will do the same, attaching the collar to a stationary metal post, hard to break, but otherwise harmless. Leash Dasher is a monster that will dash to the heroine and try to leash her and attach the leash to a latch and run away. Finally Paddle Leasher and Barrel Mimic will try to attach a leash and play “ball-and-paddle” with the character, kicking her away if she is too close, and dragging her closer otherwise. Also some monsters while cannot attach a leash themselves, can under some circumstances pick up the leash if it’s hanging loose. Running or dashing against the leash drains stamina and damages the leash. There’s now a way to remove the collar, but unfortunately it’s not easy: the heroine needs to find and wear “Unstable Shards” item for quite some time, which will turn into a nasty restraint if the character is naked - more straightforward ways to get rid of collars will hopefully be available in the future.

Status effects system now allows temporary buffs and debuffs on the heroine. Some monsters like Slow Shooter, Bubble Shooter and Syringe use status effects as their primary means of harming the character. Some other monsters can also now occasionally apply those on successful attack, e.g. Twinkles and Dream Catchers no longer drain stamina during sleep attack, but instead make character unable to wake up for some time through a status effect.

Random (stochastic) enchantments system has been improved. Now the enchantments don’t have a random identification chance, but take longer time to identify and if it’s too hard for heroine’s level, the identification always fails. Also now 50% of items can contain only beneficial enchantments, making them much more useful. Many more (beneficial and malign) enchantments have been added to a pool of possible random enchantments an item could have.

This update also contains work-in-progress ability to control the character directly from keyboard (hopefully soon also with a gamepad). For now you can move (WASD/Arrow keys), dash (Spacebar) and attack (bump into enemies, to move through enemies without attacking, hold Shift). There’s still missing ability to execute a stealth attack, disarm traps or do other complex interactions, and the control scheme still feels inconvenient, but it’s already useful.

Last but not least - the game data has finally been properly reorganized into “packages”, in other words: a groundwork for modding. For now there is no UI to choose mods and one cannot yet import mods on Android, but under the hood it’s now close to how it should work in the final game :) One of the features: now you can easily save presets for your characters and keep them between the game installations or even share them with others.

And of course a ton of other smaller features and bugfixes, see the full changelog below.

WIPs:

• Allow keyboard input (WASD/arrow keys) to move; ability to attack using keyboard (bump into enemies), space to roll (while holding movement keys). Press “Shift” to move through enemies without attacking. UX is still not good.
• Better wall sliding, still not good :) First of all to work better with manual input
• Rework of pathfinding algorithm (Allow monsters larager than Player character; allow differet walking speed on different floors). Almost works, a few minor bugs still present.

Larger features:

• Huge data organization refactor, use package/module structure (modding support). Ring of Disrobing, Jack’o’Lantern and Ghost Cloth are now mods, not part of base game. There is still no UI to manage in-game content though, it will come later.
• Status Effects system. UI notifying about active status effects, and a character screen page with all active/inactive effects (enchantments and status effects).
• Leash mechanics. Now the heroine can have a leash attached to a collar and a monster can hold the other end. Straiter, Medicus, Pincher, Ticklers and Whipper can now take advantage of a leash on heroine’s neck to make sure she won’t wander off (but can’t attach a leash by themselves). Removing collar in any way breaks the leash. Killing a monster that was holding the leash only releases the heroine, but leash remains in place to be reused when necessary, unless broken. When leashed, the pathfinding will be disabled. Running/dashing against the leash drains stamina and damages the leash. Leash length can be different and can be adjusted by monsters if they want to.
• Virtual equipment slots and render slots mechanic - they can be used by items to allow render more layers without cluttering the UI (e.g. cape now can render both behind the character and in front of), and to support more straightforward character body organization logic (e.g. support potential nagas without legs, or snakes without arms and legs).
• Character customization now can be saved into a “preset”. It’s a “ready” mod for the game, you can reuse it between game versions or send to other players :) You can save/apply a preset in character appearance edit screen. On Windows platform the saved presets are usually found in C:\Users(username)\AppData\Local\vinculike\presets, on Linux it’s inside ~/.config/vinculike/presets. Currently only Random preset is enabled on Android due to a bug. Loading mods on Android is also not yet supported.

Items and enchantments:

• New enchantment: XP multiplier
• 3 new amulets: +12% experience, +8%/+8% experience when dressed and +10%/+10% experience when nude
• New enchantment: Hurt or heal the wearer when the item is damaged
• New item: Unstable Shards - good weapon when properly dressed, but becomes a nasty constricting restraint when nude. Also can finally unequip the collar.
• New item: Fishnet Dress - doesn’t cover anything, but heals the wearer when the item takes damage
• New enchantment: Rest quality multiplier, now sleeping blindfold, sleeping bag and a lot of other items use it
• New enchantment: Stuns the wearer periodically
• New enchantment: Teleports the wearer around periodically
• New body features: 16 haircuts
• 3 new enchantments: Resist physical, mental and stamina damage.
• Automatically apply physical and mental resist short-term buff when receiving a significant damage.
• New enchantment requirement: Leash Held
• New enchantment: noise addition (before we’ve had only a multiplier)
• New restraint: Pet Collar. Can be equipped voluntarily and provides significant benefits when held on a leash :)
• 2 new enchantments: Ignore a specific object on the map (used by leashers, making them temporarily invulnerable if character has chosen to be obedient) and ignore a specific kind of objects on the map (not used yet)
• 2 new enchantments: Resist Stun and Resist Knockback.
• New enchantment: Knock Unconscious. Has a random chance to force character unconscious if stamina falls below some threshold.
• New enchantment: Send patrol to Player. Will occasionally spawn a monster patrol that will go to Player character’s location
• More enchantments now have a higher chance to be on items that take more inventory slots (for now a very simple formula). Slightly change balancing.
• Some enchantments are harder to identify than others (bondage in the first place)
• 2 new restraints: Tape underwear. Not even underwear. Covers only the no-no parts, and hurts when trying to unequip.

Monsters and restraints:

• New monster: Living Vibrator - a powerful bottom vibrator that will try hard to attach itself to the heroine
• New restraint: Large Vibrator - does what it must.
• New monster: Living Straitjacket - a restraining straitjacket that will try to immobilize the heroine with itself
• New monster: Rune Thief - steals items and equips debuffing temporary runes in their place
• New trap: Rune Trap - unequips and drops items and forces debuffing runes on the character
• 4 new restraints: Rune of Weakness, Rune of Helpless, Rune of Feeble, Rune of Shame that prevent character from equipping clothes and add significant debuffs. Wear out quickly though. (actually they were implemented in the previous update, but they weren’t used and I’ve forgotten to add them to the changelog :))
• New monster: Slow Shooter - instead of affecting the target directly, applies debuffing temporary status effects (including some small health damage)
• New trap and monster: Repair Trap - steals items, repairs and packs them into a Container Ghost monster that will flee the player, and can be rather tough depending on amount of items stolen.
• 2 new traps: Leash Trap and Chain Trap that will try to attach a leather or chain leash to heroine’s collar and if succeeds will attach the other end to a stationary and extremely robust Metal Post. If heroine is already wearing a leash it will get reinforced.
• 2 new restraints: Leather collar: a simple collar that is good to attach a leash, plastic collar - a very durable but still not indestructible collar that can serve as an anchor for a leash.
• 2 new restraints: Leather leash: a not very durable leash that does it job well enough. Chain leash: you definitely don’t want the heroine to get it.
• 2 new monsters: Leather Leasher and Chain Leasher. Will try to equip leather or plastic collar on the heroine, and if she already has one - a leather or chain leash, and if she already has one - grab the leash, and if already grabbed - make sure the heroine doesn’t wander off. Also character can “submit” to these monsters, which in turn will provide a significant healing of current willpower value.
• New monster and map object: Leash Dasher. Will dash to the target, try to attach a leash and pin to a Plastic Latch, then regardless of the result - run away.
• New monster: Leasher Paddle. Will equip choking collar on the heroine, attach a leash and play “ball-and-paddle” game with her, whoever breaks first - the leash or the heroine.
• New restraint: Choking Collar. Drains stamina when leash is held.
• New restraint: Simple collar. The weakest and simplest of all collars, used by Dash Leasher if everything else fails.
• 2 new restraints: Tape collar and leash. Collar is sticky and hurts if one tries to unequip it. Leash is just a weak leash. (Not yet used - for a new monster)
• New monster: Living Blindfold. As other living clothes will wander around and try to attach itself to the character’s face, being one of the strongest blindfolds up to date (but not too strong :))
• New restraint: Blindfold and Gag. Gag is not yet functional :)
• 2 new monsters: Underbreaker and Overbreaker. Instead of hurting the heroine, damage one inventory item by 15% and 30% of its durability respectively. Mostly harmless against empty inventory.
• New monster: Barrel Mimic. Finally barrels aren’t safe too. Unlike other mimics will try to leash the target and play ball-and-paddle with it.
• New monster: Bubble Shooter. Shoots slow but large and homing (and ghosting) projectiles that apply temporary debuffs on the character.
• New monster: Vampiric Shooter. Converts damage dealt to the body into health buff for the nearest monster.
• New monster: Syringe. Injects 2-4 temporary status effects out of quite a big pool. Some are beneficial (healing, sleep bonus), some are extremely dangerous (e.g. chance to drop unconscious on low stamina).

Smaller features:

• UI button to switch between pathfinding/no-pathfinding mode

• 50% of items can have only positive enchantments (others may or may not have malicious enchantments)

• Some enchantments can be rarer than others

• Improvements to zero g trap/projectile logs

• Significantly reduce item identification noise

• Middle click - quick repair items on the ground

• Vinculopedia sorts articles alphabetically; unlocked articles go on top

• UI that displays normal and stealth damage with current equipment

• Damage Bonus and Damage Multiplier no longer affect Stealth Damage Bonus and Stealth Damage Multiplier

• XP bar to display current level and progress towards the next one

• Normal and stealth damage enchantments are now independent of each other; some rebalancing of old items

• Significantly reduce stamina / max stamina regeneration

• Some old items now can come in multiple colors

• Now when monsters get suspicious or engage the character they play a sound

• When monsters die they play a sound

• UI for active effects (status effects and inventory enchantments), show passive enchantments too (those for which the requirements aren’t met)

• Dream Catcher and Twinkle now use “Don’t wake up for N seconds” status effect instead of draining stamina.

• More context-aware buttons in Item Popup. Will not allow some actions on items explaining the reason.

• Show wardrobe malfunction chance in item popup

• XP gained for rescuing a character now depends on how much that character accumulated through her run

• Remove random from item identification. The harder the enchantment is the longer it will take to identify.

• UI to display how properly dressed the character is.

• Properly colorize enchantments (by positive/negative) in item popup and active effects screen

• Gag inventory slot (not yet functional)

• Monsters patrols go much more often to unexplored areas.

• Character now constantly increases chance to escape Holder’s grasp, simplify (and therefore make more robust) Holder action

• Enchantment now can have a condition “if blindfolded”

• A set of cheat items, accessible through Debug UI.

• Log how much item durability has been wasted during repair.

• Mark “Eye Shooter” monster as rare (cannot be the only kind of monsters on the map)

• Collar now has proper sounds

• Improvements to random “Unequip items” enchantments (now they’ll be significantly less likely to unequip own item)

• Minor optimization: do not reallocate memory when repainting paperdolls

• Improve some vinculopedia articles

• More diverse sprites for footwear

• Slightly rebalance items stats to accommodate for “Damage / Stealth Damage” bonus separation

• Items now can protect top and bottom independently of their equipment slots, e.g. amulet of protection, poncho, bathwear now protect whole body, not only upper part

• Slightly change protection level of some items (and significantly increase that of corsette)

• 4x higher durability for sleeping bag

• No longer show error message when monster dies as a result of own action (e.g. living suit equipped itself on the player character), handle the situation safely

• Use Alt+Enter to toggle full screen mode; Screenshot moved from F5 -> F12 (like in Steam) and also to Print Screen button (apparently it doesn’t work on all systems)

• During pause UI shows pause icon

• Cross-references between vinculopedia pages, “see also”.

• Amulet of bells now also regenerates max willpower a bit.

• Better handling of guards and vacuum cleaner monsters - now by-tag.

• Centralized handling of game configuration (small optimization, more future-proof, more easily extensible)

• Lower random “regenerate (max) durability” enchantment values

• Reduce leaf underwear durability regeneration

• Slightly reduce XP for Small Tickler

• Properly describe if “Deep Sleep” enchantment prevents character from waking up completely

• Lower (clothed) vision bonus for web shooter

• Map sprite for heart dress

• Remove some error messages (they have been properly workarounded)

• Save stealth UI state in configuration

• Better scaling of character customization screen

• Improve Straiter sleep attack logs

• Make random RequiresHealthBelow more meaningful (min 20%, going for higher values)

• A few more useful functions in Debug UI (mostly debug features)

• Chests & mimics also obey start spawning / end spawning depth

• Allow loading images with no metadata (will log a warning and assume defaults).

• Add vibrapawn sleep attack sound.

• Pause UI state (party and menu) is now saved in configuration and doesn’t need to be adjusted on every game launch.

• Reduce Ghost Pantythief stamina damage 20 -> 14

• Slightly more random XP for initial characters trapped in the dungeon

• After affected by knockback or stun character will gain 50% resistance to same effect for 1 second.

• Don’t log level and experience - now most of it is in the UI

• Improve compilation instructions

• Reduce zero g action noise (20 -> 10) and reduce zero g trap duration 5 -> 3 seconds

• Ring of disrobing 2% protection and 10x less durability

• Log specific slots unequipped by UnequipInventory enchantment

• Sound for Straiter sleep attack

• More consistent (and even less punishing) willpower damage due to forced stripping. The “Current value” of willpower receives the same high amount of damage, but max stat degrades a much smaller amount than usually. Also prevent from potential “killing blow” due to disrobing, if multipliers were involved.

• Sandpaper trap no longer hurts nude target, just does a minor stamina damage.

• Slower vampires attack (roughly by 10%)

• Display time acceleration rate in the UI

• New inventory tutorial chapter related to popup and enchantments

Bugfixes:

• Bugfix: properly treat situation if mark/projectile requested itself to be finished (hopefully fixes a large number of random crashes)
• Bugfix: on Android “?” button in item popup now goes to a correct vinculopedia page too
• Bugfix: When pressing “?” button in item popup incorrect vinculopedia tab was highlighted
• Bugfix: enchantments now are checking if they make sense (e.g. won’t get “walk nude” enchantment on a dress)
• Bugfix: workaround potential negative damage due to enchantments
• Bugfix: enchanted items have 15% chance to spawn (at lvl.20) in all cases (both items in chests, and lying around)
• Bugfix: enchantment “deep sleep” was additive and could result in unexpected values
• Bugfix: another rare crash in vinculopedia/inventory buttons workaround
• Bugfix (Castle Game Engine): if the game is in a path that contains “#” symbol now it will not crash.
• Bugfix: character will no longer “recall the area” while sleeping
• Bugfix: if the character is wearing a disorienting item, it will prevent from recalling the area even if disorientation amount is small
• Bugfix: “barefoot” requirement now is applied and works correctly
• Bugfix: “barefoot” requirement was not displayed in enchantment requirements, and “requires unarmed” was also displaying “requires barefoot” instead
• Bugfix: enchantment “Regenerate max durability” was displaying negative numbers in case of “degradation”
• Bugfix: stochastic “x-ray” enchantment wasn’t working properly
• Bugfix: vinculopedia buttons still could crash sometimes, now should be more robust
• Bugfix: enchantment that randomy unequips items now properly plays “unequip” sound
• Bugfix: “nude mode” also hides additional render slots of equipment
• Bugfix: clothes now also hide “render slots” of bodyparts
• Bugfix: Repair Thief no longer hurts willpower if steals items in sleep
• Bugfix: killing bug shooter before projectile hits something could crash
• Bugfix: some Web Shooters projectiles can now be independent of their parent monster
• Bugfix: there was one ring off on Metal Armlet
• Bugfix: Old Cape was messing with rendering order on paperdolls
• Bugfix: Properly treat “requires unarmed” and “requires barefoot” enchantment requirements
• Bugfix: Don’t show WARNING particles when player is sleeping
• Bugfix: Weapons enchanted with bondage degrade at speed of normal weapon, not inherently bondage weapon
• Bugfix: Better wording instead of “Seems like hopeless” phrase when failing to identify an item
• Bugfix: Disabled buttons in Item Popup didn’t look disabled.
• Bugfix: Stun duration was displayed incorrect in ghost pantythief attack
• Bugfix: Add some missing particles when player was stunned
• Bugfix: Fix a few issues with blindfolds behavior, allows some enchantments (vision bonus, disorientation) to work better and allows to make them random.
• Bugfix: sometimes character couldn’t walk to chest or monster to interact
• Bugfix: fix collar render order with some haircuts.
• Bugfix: sleeping characters will no longer vocalize when something happens.
• Bugfix: hearing range is now treated properly (and enchantments now can be negative)
• Bugfix: monsters noise level was not affected by their action
• Bugfix: Manacler wasn’t playing “unequip” sound for stolen items
• Bugfix: keep “censored” flag when randomizing body
• Bugfix: potential navigation crashes when character is dragged around by monsters (leashers, ticklers, straiters, grabbers)
• Bugfix: potential crash when equipping item, but no longer able to equip item due to gotten restrained
• Bugfix: crash when got restrained while trying to identify item; More robust behavior while trying to identify item
• Bugfix: item could have become non-interactable after failing to equip
• Bugfix: items were displaying durability/durability in inventory instead of durability/maxdurability
• Bugfix: Panty Thief wakes up before stunning character (no harm was done except error message)
• Bugfix: Rework Credits in accordance with Creative Commons recommendations (those look absurd, but we aren’t inventing the rules - I hope I’ve finally came up with a compromise on how to both satisfy spirit and letter of the law)
• Bugfix: AddItemToExistingChestOrCreateThreeNew will not put items into mimics (fixes a bug when shadow thief would put the stolen item into a plastic latch)
• Bugfix: Only aggressive monsters can be targets of TMarkAbstract.GetNearestMonster (fixes a bug when e.g. eye shooter could put the stolen items into traps or vampire shooter heal chests)

And some other minor fixes and optimizations