Futomo alt costume reveal + Devlog #104 (Patreon)

Wha-!
New Futomo alt costume?!
I wasn't planning on this at all, but I got the urge to draw something while I was resting. I wanted to draw Futomo in particular, but then I liked the pose, and then I figured I might as well make it an alt costume, and so I ended up working anyway. It was still a great change of pace though, and I took my time with it.
I think she turned out great! I got her to smile for the camera this time :)
In case you weren't sure what alt costumes are about, this is it! A different pose and a different outfit. In this case it's pretty much a goth themed swimsuit, but it could have been anything really.
Since she was the only poll monstergirl to not get max booba size because that goal wasn't reached yet at the times, I took this opportunity to change that :B I also just wanted to draw booba. I did experiment a bit as well and greatly improved the fluffiness among other things!
I hope you like her! ^^

Here are all the monstergirl ranks:

Rank 1

Rank 2

Rank 3

Rank 4

Rank 5

Before posting about development stuff, I would like to thank everyone who's joined the Patreon. It's been pretty crazy, even despite me not advertising all that much. Thank you so much for your support!
Thanks to this, I'll be able to hire artists to help me with new characters! I'll start actively looking and contacting people during the month, so I'll report back on this in the next devlog ^^

If you're in the Discord server, you might already know what I've worked on for the next build. I'm going to lazily copy paste that:

********************************************************************

With the illustration I was working on finished, I set up some GameMaker stuff yesterday. I only really started bug fixing today, but some important ones have been taken care of already:

After Vuu's kinghting ceremony, Some invisible doors close in the ocean. These can be reopened by saving and reloading if the ocean hasn't been entered in this play session.
Reviving Klehss causes cutscene 34 to play again
Fight crash
Wrong sprite for some of the fire spells
Wrong oyon colors / special blocks in Myasine fight and Night Dome 2F
Tile select screen can't be exited with left click, only with right click
Night Dome keys can still be used on locks even after they've been opened
Myasine hand not appearing after giving up the Myasine fight

These have all been fixed!

Some extra notes for those interested:

About Myasine hand not appearing after giving up the Myasine fight:
Myasine's cutscene is triggered by smashing her mushroom hand. That particular object is a multistate, and was set as active at the same time as starting the cutscene. There was no problem with that initially but after I added the give up option, giving up and going back would load the room with the mushroom hand as active, which is only supposed to happen after the fight has been won.
The black screen was a side effect of a safety measure. The cutscene can also trigger by leaving the room to the south if the story progression value tells the game to do so, a black fade in is also triggered that way, and that specific cutscene doesn't do a fade out, hence the black screen during the whole cutscene.
Anyway, the hand is now set as active after the fight instead!

About Night Dome keys can still be used on locks even after they've been opened:
An easy fix thankfully! And an excellent catch, thank you!

About fight crash:
This one is at worst only a partial fix.
If a selected oyon becomes cursed and is then deleted through Overcurse (Kitsune) or Teleport (Nightmare), trying to switch it anyway will cause a crash. This has been fixed, the current selection will now be automatically unselected.
In some rare and cases I haven't been able to replicate, mushroom blocks might cause a similar crash. Mushroom blocks aren't supposed to spread to an oyon if it's selected, but I suspect it could still happen under very specific conditions. The fix should apply to this anyway, but for now unless I can figure out how mushrooms can crash the game, I'll just have to wait and see. Still, great progress!
I might not post updates here everyday, but I'll try to every now and then!

Here are some more bugs:

2nd trinket crash
Rare Nightmare chibi pose when Nightmare is in the party
Fight crash part 2
Yoyo Heartweapon crash
Insect Heartweapon crash
Note open when moving to a different floor crash
Typos
Nina doesn't sell Badylugs and Flufflowers

These have all been fixed as well!

About the Rare Nightmare chibi pose crash:
Rarely, characters in the party can take a different pose than the normal idle pose. In Nightmare's case, a simple typo in her list of possible pose's IDs caused a crash whenever she did...

About Fight crash part 2:
Very happy figuring this one out! It turns out that an oyon being turned into a mushroom and falling in the same frame is another part of the Fight crash! And possibly the last one.
When an oyon fall, its ID is sent to the Fight Controller so that after all of the oyons supposed to fall in that frame have sent their ID, the controller can manage the order in which to make them fall, from the one in the lowest possible position to the one in the highest position, usually. However, when an oyon turns into a mushroom, it really is replaced by a mushroom instead. The oyon stops existing, the mushroom has a different ID, and the controller tries to make an oyon that doesn't exist anymore fall, causing the crash.
This is now fixed, and I added some other mushroom related safety measures as well.

About Note open when moving to a different floor crash:
Basically, there was some conflict between values updated by the note and by the room change in the same frame, before the map is drawn, which caused a crash (or weird stuff at best) when moving to a different floor while having a new note open.

More bugs have been fixed:

Infinite save animation (rare)
Mushroom puzzle pellet can be grabbed when it shouldn't (should fix other mushroom puzzle related bugs)
No gravity in Alchemy mode (hopefully the fix will work! I wasn't able to replicate this bug reliably so I'm crossing my fingers with that one)

Other improvements:

Smash cursor now hits a small area instead of a precise coordinate
Made the 3rd mushroom puzzle easier
Slingshot improved
Slingshot boss checkpoint added
Sneak system added
Balance changes
Info signs have been added to explain the Star shooters (cannons) in the Night Dome and to introduce the Sneak button in Sablee ocean

Sneak system:

The transparency button has been renamed to Sneak button. It still makes characters transparent, but also reduces the monster encounter rate by 2 to 3 times.
Characters can't become sad while sneaking. Also affects random encounter NPCs.

Balance updates:

Angel health has been decreased slightly
Some heartpowers values have been adjusted
auto fire star heartpower now shoots faster
Mines explode automatically after about 10 seconds
Yoyo laser now hits all Shapes it touches
Shell charged shot has been improved
Revived charaters' level is now equal to Vuu's level * 0.85 when revived
All characters now have default spells, though they should probably be changed ASAP anyway.
100% of the experience after a fight now goes to the character who finished the fight. Every other character gets 50%.

Of course, there will be more bug fixing / new features / balance changes in the future, but that will be all for this next build!

********************************************************************

The worst bugs have been fixed and I did my best to improve what most people reported as frustrating ^^
Here is a link to the latest build, uploaded just a moment ago: https://www.patreon.com/posts/92082128 

You should be able to transfer your save from the previous version, but you'll have to do it manually:

- Start the new version, calibrate the mouse, then close it.
- Go to AppData\Local
- Open BE_Witches___2023_10_07 (the previous version) and copy your save file
- Open BE_Witches___2023_11_01 (the new version) and paste your save file

I can't 100% guarantee that it will work, but I see no reason why it wouldn't.

Of course there is still work left to do, which will keep me busy this month. I also need to contact artists as I said before, and I want to take some time to improve the Discord server and the Patreon page. In particular, now that the stretch goal feature has been removed from Patreon (which I think is a little silly), I'll need to make my own instead.

Also about the OST, not every track has been released yet but the ones that have been can be found here: https://soundcloud.com/commodorekulor/sets/be-witches-demo-ost 

If you can, please follow the composers on twitter!
kulor: https://twitter.com/CommodoreKulor
RRThiel: https://twitter.com/RRThiel
AM4N: https://twitter.com/SHLUBS1 

Also, the Monstergirl polls are finally coming back! Here is the usual info about the polls:

The next monstergirl poll has begun! You can now vote for the monstergirl you want to be included in BE Witches in the Discord if you are a 2$+ patron!

The poll will be active until the 12th of this month. After this, you will be able to change your submitted modifier until the 15th. Finally, the two rounds of the modifier poll will take one week each afterwards.

Monstergirl poll rules

Poll submissions

Also, now is a good time to submit a monstergirl and/or modifiers if you haven't already as a patron! If you can't think of anything to submit, here is a list of ideas you can choose from. You'll need to join the server to submit anything!

Finally, I'll post something tomorrow to explain the debug functions, as well as a walkthrough of the new demo. The walkthrough was once again written by Draconian! Thank you so much! ^^
That's all for now. Bye! :B