Author: SaltyJustice

The UI Update Is Underway

I’ve made layouts for most of the UI upgrades and completed the Equip and Status screens.

The Status UI is pretty simple, but now a bit more open to show off the portrait of the character. Everything is now also correctly aligned and has some nice detail flourishes.

The Equipment UI is likewise more open to show off the portrait art. You can also use left/right to select gem slots directly, making equipping them and comparing things easier.

You can push F2 to see details of the item. I put some automation in to generate the properties on the bottom. Important for combat items since their properties usually can’t be described with just statistics alone.

See the comparison on the right and directly equipping gems. The replacement UI is also now in-stride with the other equipment instead of being its own window.

Curious Cat

Links? In my pile? It’s more linkly than you link.

Argue about this post on the forums!    Discussion thread for String Tyrant!

Maiden Sealed in Stone, a game Salty translated!

Buy our dumb gaiden game on itch.io! It’s on Steam too!

Ask us questions anonymously on Curious Cat!

Buy our merch on Redbubble and Teepublic!

Give us money on Patreon so we can make more monstergirl stuff!

Join our Discord and curse at me in person! Get mad at the testers for feigning confusion when confronted!

Coding Stuff

As of now I have “done” the cutscenes I needed to do up until the party forms proper in chapter 2. I want to get the first village done and obviously have the combat outlined before I do a release.

However, the public voted for some exciting UI update action, so that’s my current priority.

Artistry

Remember those goofball artists? The house in Slitted Eye is now done, all we have to do is make the various enemies path around and try to murder you. Which is actually a lot of work so hey, back to the grind.

Curious Cat

The Link Pile

Argue about this post on the forums!    Discussion thread for String Tyrant!

Maiden Sealed in Stone, a game Salty translated!

Buy our dumb gaiden game on itch.io! It’s on Steam too!

Ask us questions anonymously on Curious Cat!

Buy our merch on Redbubble and Teepublic!

Give us money on Patreon so we can make more monstergirl stuff!

Join our Discord and curse at me in person! Hunt our testers down like dogs. Dogs!

Coding and Whatnot

Artist Chickenwhite got herself a new computer that no longer lags when doing 3D animation. So that’s a nice thing now isn’t it.

As far as coding goes, the third puzzle mechanic is now in, all I need to do is go through every map I’ve made and add clue spawners. So at this point it’s largely cutscenes, dialogue, and combat between me and the release. Speaking of.

Poll Results

Last week I asked the patron pals what we should do concerning Slitted Eye suggestions and the UI Update. Well here’s your damn results.

This means that I’ll be yelling at our UI artist to get me the last UI pieces and implementing it ASAP. I have to finish a couple things in chapter 2 first, and then I’ll switch over to implementing the UI.

Look at how generous our 5$ patrons are.

Starting today, there will be a patron post that I will link to in each update post where you can submit ideas. If you’d like your name on the resulting piece (should Koops choose to accept it) please be sure to put that in the answer.

Obviously.

Curious Cat

Way too many links! An unmanageable amount of links!

Argue about this post on the forums!    Discussion thread for String Tyrant!

Maiden Sealed in Stone, a game Salty translated!

Buy our dumb gaiden game on itch.io! It’s on Steam too!

Ask us questions anonymously on Curious Cat!

Buy our merch on Redbubble and Teepublic!

Give us money on Patreon so we can make more monstergirl stuff!

Join our Discord and curse at me in person! Hunt our testers down like dogs. Dogs!

God damn it

It’s like deliberately tying votes is some kind of running gag with you people. Which means I get to decide and you get to see Statue Sanya this week if you’re a patron. You jerks.

Other Development

The artists are still hard at work on Slitted Eye. It’s coming along very nicely, but likely will not be done in October. There is a bunch of soundwork I’d like to do on it even if the animations are ready, and I want to spend a bit more time polishing this one than String Tyrant got.

I’ve “finished” the second of the big new puzzle mechanics that is going into chapter 2’s introduction. I put finished in quotes because it can always use more polish and bugtesting, but it works and is playable. It’s even kinda fun and the puzzle generator stumps me, the guy who wrote it, every now and then!

This means there’s one more major new mechanic, a few cutscenes, and all of the initial combat (there are three playable party members in the intro!) and then we’re ready to go on chapter 2’s introduction.

Curious Cat

Way too many links! An unmanageable amount of links!

Argue about this post on the forums!    Discussion thread for String Tyrant!

Maiden Sealed in Stone, a game Salty translated!

Buy our dumb gaiden game on itch.io! It’s on Steam too!

Ask us questions anonymously on Curious Cat!

Buy our merch on Redbubble and Teepublic!

Give us money on Patreon so we can make more monstergirl stuff!

Join our Discord and curse at me in person! Hunt our testers down like dogs. Dogs!

Odyssey of Gianna’s release date is September 22nd

Hey remember that game? That one that Salty shilled for? It’s coming out this week.

Here’s Vhiel’s patreon post with some more details.

Having played the game myself, I (Salty) being a tester for it, I can say it has my seal of approval. It has monstergirls, it has transformation, and most of all it has game design and a story. It’s actually fun to play. Hard to believe I know.

I did a cross-promotion to this almost two years ago in October of 2019. Since then a pandemic got in the way but now it’s coming out and you should go play it and enjoy it. If you liked Pandemonium you’ll probably enjoy this. Maybe. I’m not the boss of you.

Other Development News

Koops has now finished all of the concepts for the introduction of chapter 2. I’ve moved her onto making stuff for Slitted Eye. Expect to see Space Lesbians With Ray Guns, The Movie soon.

I’m almost done the second puzzle mechanic set of chapter 2. This one is a bit more involved and will probably have lots of lovely bugs for me to fix, but I think it’s pretty fun and inventive.

Chicken has finished her part of the upcoming commission release. That means she is now back to making 3D models. She is hoping to fix up Urimas’ cat model attempts.

All of the artists are now working on Slitted Eye. We hope to have a playable demo by the end of the month.

Curious Cat

The Big Link That Makes All of the Rules

Argue about this post on the forums!    Discussion thread for String Tyrant!

Maiden Sealed in Stone, a game Salty translated!

Buy our dumb gaiden game on itch.io! It’s on Steam too!

Ask us questions anonymously on Curious Cat!

Buy our merch on Redbubble and Teepublic!

Give us money on Patreon so we can make more monstergirl stuff!

Join our Discord and curse at me in person! Hunt our testers down like dogs. Dogs!

Fresh New Kicks

Tired of all those block-pushing puzzles that other games have? So are we? As such, Sanya kicks the blocks to move them.

This is basically what game design is.

I’m still working my way through the intro to chapter 2. Block puzzles are completed, the first of three new mechanics in chapter 2’s intro. There’s even more new mechanics later in the chapter, making it a doozy to code. Chapter 5’s big thing was just lighting, which is was less complex than kicking blocks.

Curious Cat

The Link Pile

Argue about this post on the forums!    Discussion thread for String Tyrant!

Maiden Sealed in Stone, a game Salty translated!

Buy our dumb gaiden game on itch.io! It’s on Steam too!

Ask us questions anonymously on Curious Cat!

Buy our merch on Redbubble and Teepublic!

Give us money on Patreon so we can make more monstergirl stuff!

Join our Discord and curse at me in person! Hunt our testers down like dogs. Dogs!

Development Roadmap

Someone asked for a roadmap, so here it is!

Slitted Eye Promotional Image!

All of the artists have been redirected to Slitted Eye work in order to get the game out ASAP. Our goal is to have it up in time for the Spooky Season. I’m still working on cutscenes and scripts for chapter 2 because most of my coding job is done until I have animation renders done.

Curious Cat

The Link Pile

Argue about this post on the forums!    Discussion thread for String Tyrant!

Maiden Sealed in Stone, a game Salty translated!

Buy our dumb gaiden game on itch.io! It’s on Steam too!

Ask us questions anonymously on Curious Cat!

Buy our merch on Redbubble and Teepublic!

Give us money on Patreon so we can make more monstergirl stuff!

Join our Discord and curse at me in person! Hunt our testers down like dogs. Dogs!

HOLY SHIT FAN ART

Source.

If you want to make Salty very happy, fan art is how you do it. Also the artwork is just superb, somehow managing to be colorful and joyful despite rilmani being literally none of those things.

I’m (Almost) Done the Maps

That’s right, the intro section to chapter 2 is almost mapped. I need some more tiles from Urimas and then it’ll be time for all the glue, scripting, characters. You know, everything that is not placing tiles.

I’m feeling pretty good about how the maps look and feel so far. Very adventure-y.

Slitted Eye Progress

I made a simple internal prototype using sample animations. The engine is “Done” because this kind of game doesn’t actually do a lot under the hood. We’ve also finished about half of the rooms and Urimas’ next assignment is to make the animations for the first level.

And we even got Mario to write some copy for the answering machine messages!

Curious Cat

I snuck a secret cat into the curious cat images. Did you see him? He saw you.

The Link Pile

Argue about this post on the forums!    Discussion thread for String Tyrant!

Maiden Sealed in Stone, a game Salty translated!

Buy our dumb gaiden game on itch.io! It’s on Steam too!

Ask us questions anonymously on Curious Cat!

Buy our merch on Redbubble and Teepublic!

Give us money on Patreon so we can make more monstergirl stuff!

Join our Discord and curse at me in person! Hunt our testers down like dogs. Dogs!

You can download it here (Mega.nz / Mediafire) (Win/Lin/Mac Bundle)

Changelog

Major
*Used string pooling to cut savefile size in half or less.
*Fixed a serious bug that was massively inflating the filesize of saves. Combined with string pooling, saves are down to ~100kb!

Minor
*Fixed typos.
*The Region Notifier will scroll offscreen during cutscenes.
*Fixed 55’s job change icons being switched for Support and Subvert.
*Enemies forced to join your side by whatever means now give half their XP/JP/Platina.

Combat Balance
*Magnesium Grenades blind reduced to 30 (was 35).
*Paragons now get +100 INI instead of *100 INI. Which was pretty bonkers.
*JX-101’s Scavenge now correctly says it targets one enemy.
*Buffed JX-101’s accuracy by 30 so she’s not as bad during her section (she’s supposed to be thematically outmatched, but not useless).
*JX-101’s Flak Round is now 100% accurate.
*SX-399’s Flak Round is now 100% accurate. Just like mom used to make!
*JX-101’s Thunderbolt Slug now has +25 to its hit rate.
*Christine’s Lancer Inspire now correctly says it targets one enemy.
*Fixed several abilities showing the wrong damage factor. I changed some backend code, so please let me know if any more cases pop up.
*Christine’s Lancer Inspire now doesn’t glance.
*Critical Strike predictions should take into account Critical Strike Damage Bonus tags.
*Christine’s Live Wire Chain Zap now does 70 stun (up from 50).
*Adjusted some of chapter 5’s enemy stun thresholds to 70 so Chain Zap is useful in specific circumstances.
*Added cooldown notifications to Christine’s abilities that were missing them.
*Prediction box will now notify you if an effect has a zero percent chance to apply.
*Fixed 55’s Spearhead Full Auto being able to miss. Because it wasn’t supposed to.

Bugs
*Fixed a bug where the Mines boss was applying DoTs for zero damage.
*Bee Sniffers are now listed as being in Starfield Swamp instead of Evermoon Forest.
*Fixed several abilities not showing their hit rate.
*Adamantite found in the mines should now actually be added to the inventory.
*Abilities not in the active class will still tick their cooldowns when you switch classes in battle. They should also now reset correctly after battles.
*Fixed abilities with extremely low application rates clamping at zero, failing to take into account bonuses against the negative.
*Embolden now correctly lists itself as a Negative charge ability.
*Fixed mind-controlled or rubbered enemies (enemies forced to join your team) not giving their paragon KO count.
*Updated predictions handler to give Always Hits to stunned enemies.
*Fixed Christine’s Bounceback to work when covering an ally.

Probably a Release Tomorrow

I’ve cleaned up a lot of combat bugs this week in addition to making maps. The maps for chapter 2’s intro are almost done, but then the bug reports rolled in. Those will be handled in tomorrow’s release.

I’ll be making a Roadmap page a bit later so people can see what the overall plans for the game are.

Mario Did a Poll

It’s mermaid bondage nonsense. Humour him by filling it out.

Slitted Eye

We’re working on it, and Urimas has just prototyped some of the in-game animations. I’m hoping to have an internal prototype out this week. It’s a fairly simple game to play, there’s just a lot going on under the hood. It’s our most media-intensive game to date.

Curious Cat

The Link Pile

Argue about this post on the forums!    Discussion thread for String Tyrant!

Maiden Sealed in Stone, a game Salty translated!

Buy our dumb gaiden game on itch.io! It’s on Steam too!

Ask us questions anonymously on Curious Cat!

Buy our merch on Redbubble and Teepublic!

Give us money on Patreon so we can make more monstergirl stuff!

Join our Discord and curse at me in person! Hunt our testers down like dogs. Dogs!