SHF3 v.28 - Personality editor, new pones, clothes coloring. (Patreon)

Cozy Glow, Maud, and Queen Chrysalis with a big ol' bug dick. A Personality editor, a color picker for clothing, and princess regalia. Also balance updates and bug fixes! 

Heads up that the new UI stuff looks a bit scuffed. For some reason I didn't ask my UI helper for help designing it. I don't know why I didn't but it was a mistake.

Links to the game are here! 

Also um, holy crap, we're getting startlingly close to my highest Patreon goal. Amazingly, I actually DO have a plan for what'll happen when we hit it. You guys are amazing. <3

Personality Editor

When I added the personalities feature in the last update, the main thing I saw was everyone trying to figure out the personalities of each character by trial and error. Some dedicated people even delved into the code! So this update includes the feature that should've been released alongside Personalities- a Personality editor.

The button to open the Personality menu is under the Configurator tab on the right (hotkey P). You'll see a categorized list of preferences for the selected character. E.g. "Big Toys", "Anal". There's also a button to switch between "Receiving" and "Watching". A character might enjoy watching something but hate receiving it, or vice versa.

Each Preference is defined by two sliders- "Arousal" and "Interest". Note that extremely high or low values on anything can cause a character to solely focus on that thing, even if they're in extreme pleasure or pain.  

Arousal correlates to the normal arousal meter. The higher the value, the more arousing the object is when the character is looking at it. A negative Arousal score becomes Disgust, making the object a turn-off to the character. Disgust is the least-fleshed-out emotion currently, and so its main function right now is as a counter to Arousal.

Interest is mostly used for its negative form- Fear, which is self-explanatory. In its positive form, Interest makes a character optimistic about an object, and at high values can make them become transfixed by it. If you're trying to make them uninterested in an object, then set the value to zero.

The reasoning behind how this works is that I wanted a character to be able to have mixed feelings about individual toys, ponies, or sex acts. So I needed multiple sliders to describe their opinions on it. I think that Arousal/Disgust and Interest/Fear are a good start, since they allow a pretty good range of reactions.

I can see a need for more complexity in the future, though! Emotions that don't fall into those spectrum, like embarrassment, might need their own sliders when they become features. Also note that right now, I'm referring to a character's preferences as their "Personality", but that definition will expand as I add to the psychological features.

The more advanced this gets, the more need there'll be for the player to save their work. You can't right now, but I am looking at ways to do this.

Clothing and colors

All colorable clothing will now show a color picker, and more clothing is now colorable to make use of it, including the princesses' shoes, necklaces, and crowns. 

Okay, so making a color picker has been an irrational fear of mine for a long time. But I did it! This is a good start. It'll allow for more color options down the road, especially once I dive into character customization features.

Changelog

• added Queen Chrysalis
• added Cozy Glow
• added Maud
• added Personality config. You can view and edit all of a character's Preferences from the menu.
• each Preference is defined by two sliders: "Arousal/Disgust" and "Interest/Fear". 
• Personality config menu toggles between two modes- 'Receiving' and 'Watching'. Not all Preferences have both modes. Preferences are grayed out if they don't have the selected mode.
• added "Personality" button to Configurator tab on the right side panel (hotkey 'P')
• added hoof/necklace regalia for celestia and luna
• the princesses' crowns and regalia can be taken off
• can now color socks, ball gag, blindfold, and the princesses' crowns/regalia
• the collar no longer appears when using the spell Restrict Orgasm
• the collar is now under Accessories - Neck
• added color picker for clothes/apparel
• clicking on the colored square next to a clothing button opens the color picker for that piece of clothing
• color picker includes a default colors swatch for each piece of clothing
• color picker includes a button to match all of a character's current clothes to the selected color
• nerfed "ruined" orgasms- it now takes a longer period of zero stimulation to ruin an orgasm
• characters' attention is "stickier" now, to avoid their eyes flitting back and forth between two things. They will tend to pay attention to things they're already looking at, unless something a lot more interesting appears. This also adds some situational randomness to what they decide to look at.
• tweaked various character preferences
• improved Luna's mane/tail
• fixed Celestia's eye color >.<'
• Cadance's dick is now thinner
• fixed several animation jumps that would occur when starting/stopping struggling
• added more random seeding to start of struggling animations so that when multiple characters start struggling at the exact same time, the animations are less likely to sync up
• fixed a bug where orgasming or edging while unconscious would cause characters to appear awake (thanks for pointing this out!)
• (back-end) re-added the ability for multiple expression sets. Only Maud has a different expression set right now, but more will come.
• added special thanks to the credits screen

Known bugs:

The game doesn't handle big dicks very well yet

Wand might make some characters afraid because they think you're going to shove it inside them, and it's pretty big

some eyelashes might be a little off? Working on that

Changeling mouths aren't colored the same way as their vaginal walls. Not really a bug, but it looks kinda wrong. I'm looking at ways to fix this!

What's coming in the next couple updates?

The Preferences feature has a glaring flaw at the moment. Each character reacts to only a single object at a time: the object they're looking at. This flaw is really obvious when you blindfold the characters and they stop reacting to stuff. I'm working on making them aware of everything happening to their bodies. If testing goes well on that feature, then it'll be in the next update.

There's a few more things I want to add for changelings, and then I'll move on to the next species :3

Cozy Glow is a little too big right now, so I'm working on smaller rigs. 

More psychological features: consent, shame, and willpower. I'll talk more about these as they take shape.

More tickling toys/options.

Dicks need some serious work. The penetrable body parts are pretty complex in this game, but dicks are very simple and IMO not very satisfying to play with yet. It's time to improve them!

Public update when?

Uh, soon? Sorry guys, I'm not very good at schedules. I'll address the public update situation sometime between now and the next Patron update. 

Didn't you say you were going to try to do smaller updates with single features instead of big updates with a bunch of unrelated features?

I did say that. And I failed myself. And I'm sorry. Maybe this next update will be the one where I conquer my terrible project management habits.

Will you add X feature?

I don't know. I have a general roadmap figured out, but it changes a LOT as I run into challenges or make new discoveries while coding. I don't want to make promises I can't keep with this game, so I'm trying to stay vague about big future features until they're more solid.

Some stuff might not make it into SHF due to technical limitations, but might make it into a different game instead. For example, I'm looking at several side projects right now, and one of them is really well-suited to explore oviposition and pregnancy kinks. Now, pregnancy might make it into SHF if I can figure out the rigs and code for it. But it might be too complicated for SHF. 

The thing is, I don't know if it's going to be possible in SHF yet, and I don't know if that side project I mentioned is the one I'll choose to develop alongside SHF. So I would feel irresponsible for promising that feature when I'm so uncertain.

Here's what I can say- I like a lot of weird stuff, including oviposition, pregnancy, size difference, bdsm, inflation, and gender transformation. If SHF doesn't allow me to explore an aspect of these kinks that I want to explore, then I'll be looking for a way to express them in another project. Hopefully, I can scratch all those itches eventually. 

I just can't say when or how yet >.<

That's all for now! <3