Stormside 0.22.04 PUBLIC RELEASE



Goddamn, well that took a while. 7 months. Hopefully when you play it you'll see why. I don't really have much to say about the update aside from what you can read in the changelog, so I'll keep it relatively brief and just explain some key points.

1) I've added a shitload of quality of life improvements, including the much requested in game walkthrough. However, the walkthrough is still a work in progress, so if you get any tips from it that are straight up not true, or you feel could be explained better, please let me know.

2) In my opinion, I've significantly improved the animation in many places for this one. In fact, I was making it so long that some of the later scenes are more advanced than the earlier ones. I dun sum learnin.

3) Old saves should still work, but given how long it's been I imagine many of you will be starting new ones anyway.

4) There's a new system at play. Routes. Each of the main girls has 3 routes, Romance, Submission and Slave. The way you get them is a bit different for each girl, but generally if you're nice it'll lean more towards the Romance route, and if you're not, more towards Slave. Mix the two and you get Submission. There's more than one way to get each girl onto each route usually, so don't worry about it too much. If this sounds confusing and you want to guarantee that you get the route you want, then the in game walkthrough is for you.

5) While it went through 4 versions released to the patrons, this last one hasn't been fully tested, so if you find bugs please do let me know. Depending on the severity I may patch them with a 0.22.05, but only if they're straight up terrible.


6) This update primarily features Riley, Hikari, Akemi and Cassie. If you don't like those characters, then errr... Well you're out of luck because that's over half of them lol. All the girls do show up in some capacity though. Taliya was gonna get some stuff finally, but I had to cut it for the sake of time. She'll get stuff in the next update probably.

7) One change has been made that might mean that saves from before the start of the 0.22 content will throw an error when you try to open the profile screen. To fix this, either make a new save, or just progress that one to the start of the 0.22 content, and it'll sort itself out. (Hell, if you have the console enabled you can type call v0_22 and that'll fix it too. It'll do some other weird stuff too though, so probably best to not do that.)

8) Due to efforts to reduce the filesize, many renders have been converted to sprites. If you load a save file and see something weird like a character's face floating off their body or something, this doesn't mean the save is broken. Roll back a whole bunch, then keep playing and it should fix itself. Or just keep playing and it'll fix itself eventually. This should not affect new saves.



That was less brief than planned. Oh well, here's the changelog, which I'm copying from Patreon, so it might repeat some of the above.
As usual, please feel free to report any bugs in the discord or comments or whatever.

New content.

  • 22 new sex scenes scattered across the various routes and choices.
  • 5400+ new renders
  • 430+ new animations
  • I have no idea how many hours of content, but probably between 2 and 3 to complete it once without going back to get all the content. Depends on your choices and how fast you read I guess. If any of you are the type to just make loads of saves so you can get all the content without just using a gallery unlocker, imma guess maybe 5 hours. Not sure. Lemme know.
  • A bunch of new sound effects, but I don't keep track of that stuff.
  • Same with lines of code or dialogue lines. Obviously I've added a whole bunch of them, but I have no idea how many.
  • I suppose this isn't really a metric, but 10 brand new characters who haven't shown up in the game before.
  • A VN version of the ghost hunt, so now people who don't wanna do sandbox stuff can still get spooked. (Assuming my shitty jumpscares work on them)
  • 1 new main menu animation. It doesn't matter really, but I did it.. It's an animated version of the 4th of July thing you may have seen. (Though with bikinis as not to give away the goods instantly to new players)
  • 2 new onions. (Not many this time. But 22 sex scenes cmooon)
  • 3 new phone images.

Quality of life stuff.

  • New gallery system which now includes a filter so you can filter scenes by content type and involved characters. There are also now symbols on most of the scenes in the gallery to tell you whether a scene is exclusive to one or more character route.
  • The new system should also fix that problem where the gallery said you'd unlocked 25/17 images or whatever.
  • New route system which forms the basis of how the game works going forward. Each of the main girls now has a romance, submission and slave route.
  • Toggleable in game walkthrough applied to the entire game, which sort of functions as a directors commentary type thing. This is a work in progress, and may not be completely accurate at the moment. If you find anything that doesn't make sense, or that you feel can be improved in the walkthrough, please do let me know.
  • You can now set your phone background to any of the pictures the girls have sent you, or that you've taken with your phone. (Except the landscape ones.)
  • Replaced all of the outfit animations on the profile screen with new higher resolution ones that in my opinion look waaaaay better.
  • Added text animation in various places. Mostly the use of a small shake effect on the "Ahhh" and "Ehhhh" moans and stuff. Can be disabled in options if people want.
  • Added a scrollbar to the texts on the phone which makes it easier to scroll back to the start if you wanted to do that for some reason, but also it just kinda looks nice in my opinion.
  • Added a variable that tracks whether you've seen the dumb "You're on hold for 30 minutes" joke earlier in the game, and will let you skip it if you get to that point again on another save. (Untested however, so please let me know)
  • Changed how choices work during phonecalls and texts. Now, the options will appear to the side of the phone as not to obscure the texts, or just be hard to read.
  • Also changed how the phone looks during phonecalls, to make the bottom part slightly transparent. This just makes it easier to read the dialogue.
  • Changed the way the translation effect works so it should be a bit less laggy now on potato PC. Still lags quite a bit if you hold the skip button through it though, simply because of how it works.
  • Started using a new method of filesize reduction which is quite effective, but slow to implement. I haven't finished applying it to the whole game yet, but as it says above, I'm hoping to do that in the next 2 weeks. (If I forget to edit this line, hopefully I did it.)
  • The gallery unlocker now gives you the option to unlock onions and still images as well.
  • Changed the tutorial at the start a bit to explain the new route system, and also added some graphics to it.
  • That terrible pool dive animation with a bitrate of 10 has been remade and now looks quite a lot less shite.
  • Added a "jump to page" feature in the load screen that means you can go straight to page 200 if you for some reason have 200 pages of saves.
  • Added a screen that lets you rename stuff like the MC, the punishment system, or any other custom things you've been able to call the girls, or have them call you. (Don't do it unless you've been given the chance in game though, since choosing names can otherwise cause logical inconsistencies.
  • Added a system where hovering over a save game will show you what route you're on with each of the main girls in that save. (Only works for saves that have been saved in 0.22.03. This is a future-proofing feature that's unlikely to be useful until later updates)

Profile screen changes

  • The girls have new icons which I think look a lot better.
  • The majority of the text has been changed to be more readable.
  • There's now an indicator on the profile screen to tell you what route you're on with a girl, and generally what her relationship to you is.
  • There's now an indicator on the character icons to tell you whether a girl is collared or not.
  • New function allowing you to see what a girl has consented to, as well as any rules applied to her. (This might have been in 0.21, I actually can't remember. The rules thing is new though, and gets unlocked part way through the update.
  • New pages in the profile screen. There's now a page for side characters, as well as "Other" characters, the latter being mostly characters like Kellin or Logan. The page switch buttons are the white bars just below the word "Characters".
  • Outfit animations for all the side girls too. The new outfit animations aren't counted as part of that 430. If we're counting those, then there's over 500 animations total. (79 outfits)
  • I've scrapped the journal thing where the profile screen keeps a note of basically everything you do relating to a character, simply because it was a pain in the ass to update, and it was only gonna become more complicated to maintain as development went on. So now each character just has a general description of who they are, which may be updated in future. Not as frequently as previously though.
  • New scrollbars wooo. this doesn't matter, but I think it looks nice.

Options menu changes.

  • Removed the "skip transitions" option, because all it did was make the game automatically skip things like dissolve between renders, and if you turn that off the whole game pretty much goes to shit. Stoopid option.
  • Added the option to toggle text animation on or off. This affects the translation effect, as well as most other text animation in the game. The translation effect just swaps to the line being in English, with a note to say what language they're actually speaking. Lame, but good for those with potato PC.
  • Added the ability to toggle named saves on or off, so you can make it stop asking you if you want.
  • Added the ability to disable the animations in the scene gallery that play when you hover the mouse over a scene. The gallery is still slightly laggy, but I'm not gonna deal with that just yet.
  • Added an audio slider to allow you to control the volume of the girls' moans. This actually required a full rework of their audio in general, so all sex scenes have been rebalanced so that the default 50% should be perfect.

Bug fixes.

  • Various typos fixed, mostly things like saying Dad instead of dad, or having American characters say realise instead of realize and stuff.
  • I'm fairly sure I've finally fixed the issue with the nicknames, so you won't have characters just calling you "False" anymore. I thought I'd fixed that last time though, so I guess we'll see.
  • Fixed that issue with "sayer waitress not found".
  • A bunch of others I'm sure. Been working on it for 6 months, and I haven't written down every bug I fixed, so I have no idea.
  • Probably added a bunch of new ones, but hopefully not.

Misc changes.

  • Made a change to Cassie's hookup event. Now, after you hook up at your house, you actually get to choose whether or not to enter the friends with benefits arrangement with her. The lack of that specific choice kinda clashes with the new route system, but don't worry if you did end up in the fwb arrangement but don't really want to. I'll be putting some sort of system to deal with this for existing saves when Cassie's stuff becomes more important.
  • Removed the ability to just stay silent and let Olivia walk off after she takes a phonecall in class. This is for two reasons. Firstly, it's fairly important that you speak to her father there, and secondly I don't think I'm gonna be doing an Olivia femdom route as it turns out, so the choice was actually completely pointless.
  • Added some new icons to the main menu because apparently I love clutter. (Twitter logo still there though because X look dumb)

Get Stormside

Download NowName your own price

Comments

Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.

Great job on the story and animations. The characters feel to me that they each have their own personalities and agendas. The animations are not the same thing rehashed over and over.

I for one, am enjoying this. Keep up the great work! :)

Glad you liked it :D The animations and sex scenes in general are a major focus, and there something I'm putting effort into to diferentiate this from other games. That won't be changing, so more to come ;)

(1 edit)

I'm kind of annoyed I didn't see this post in my Itch Feed (Itch's fault, not yours. Some authors updates don't seem to get pushed onto the Feed even though I've been following them for months). I only happened to check this because after looking through my games folder I realized it has been quite a while since I last played. The timing is kind of perfect though cause holy changelog! Now I'm even more interested in picking this back up!

I imagine many of you will be starting new ones anyway.

Guilty as fuck, lol. Doesn't really bother me any because I like this game anyways and though I remember what happened pretty well it can't hurt to refresh myself anyways.

Also the options menu is 10/10, I wish more games had more than just the default options to pick from. The built in Walkthrough Mod makes it even better, another thing I wish more games had.

If any of you are the type to just make loads of saves so you can get all the content without just using a gallery unlocker

Feelin a little personally attacked here lol. Called out twice.

I don't think I'm gonna be doing an Olivia femdom route as it turns out

Works for me, especially since I don't care too much for femdom. Personally, I'm still all aboard the full-time Magistrate, part-time brat-tamer train anyways, girl needs some correction.


Seriously, awesome work! Can't wait for the next update, hope things go by smoothly for you!

(+1)

Hah, glad you like the options menu and all the quality of life stuff I've done. Took ages, but given how complicated the game may appear at times, I felt the in game walkthrough was totally necessary. It's a lot of work though, which I expect is why most devs don't do it.

I'm currently working on a patch that fixes a couple of bugs in the release, and adds a slider in the options menu to allow players control over their image cache size. No reason to touch this slider unless the game gets laggy, and I've only had that reported on lower end machines like laptops or whatever. I expect the reason they may be having issues is because I changed the size of the image cache to be much bigger by default in this update, which does seem to help with some of the later animations on higher end machines, but I failed to account for the effect this may have on lower end machines. So I figure just letting the player set it themselves is a decent idea. (Provided there's a tooltip in the menu to actually tell them what the setting does.

Patch should just be a patch, no requirement to redownload the whole thing if someone wants to upgrade.

Thanks for the kind words though! No idea why itch didn't push it, but itch isn't the best when it comes to telling devs how their site works anyway.

The depth of the walkthrough was muuuuch more than I was expecting and now I feel a little bad for comparing it to another game I played with one.

I can't imagine how much time it took. I think the biggest and best example is that first punishment with Hikari. There's so much more to it than I was expecting there to be, it wasn't as simple as a "Did you spank her? Yes/no. If yes you didn't take it easy like you promised" sorta scenario like I thought it was before seeing what was said in the walkthrough.


Couple typos I noticed:
When the Director is no longer in the call with their superior/sponsor he notes how his computer was turned "of" and not "off"

With the Walkthrough when it comes to entering a relationship with Riley in the Reject hint/description it says "Closes submission route open"

Ahaaa, It's a shame I didn't read this 13 minutes ago when you posted it, because I just set 0.22.05 building, and coulda fixed those typos. Not gonna restart the build just for that though, but I'll fix them for next time, thanks.

Yeah there was no real way around it for some of the choices other than to just write an essay. Sadly I can't easily have the tooltips change based on what you've done, so I gotta just list a bunch of stuff. There's a lot that goes into the Akemi and Hikari stuff so they in particular have some fairly long tooltips in places. I may look at rewording them over time, but for now I kinda just had to write down what everything does or is planned to do to the best of my ability and then post it. The tips may change as well since the game is still in development. Some things may just become untrue and need to be changed.