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We're currently working on struggling, and hopefully combat is getting a refresh soon. I've not seen the no response from keys after a failed escape issue, so I'll have to investigate that one.

Males, nearly done. they should be on our next release.

Thanks!

Not yet.

Most of the functionality is working, but he is still bound to female animations, so I'm in the process of creating those. We've got all the movement and general animations done, and I'm on to the technical bits like takedowns, recovery and so on.

The aim is to have it released with male PCs at the start of next month.

We have not discussed these yet.

It should be out sometime tomorrow unless you're a Patreon/ Subscribestar member, in which case you should have access.

The main problem is I went into this project as a gamedev beginner, and as time goes by I have learned that the things I learnt from the start were mostly incorrect and laggy as fuck. So a lot of work is going in to repairing this and making stuff work right.

For example, when I learned how to build the characters, if you want an NPC to talk to the player, it needs to know who the player is. All the learning tools say to Cast to Player Character and store that in the NPC, so they can always interact with you.

The issue is that doing a Cast stores the player in Memory, as well as everything the player Casts to as well giving you a huge chain of things in memory. Add in that only interactable NPCs need to know who you are, and this gets messy and laggy.

The real answer is using Interfaces. So when you interact, it checks if the thing being interacted with implements that specific interface then uses it to get only the information needed when it is needed. No huge memory stack. This mess wasn't made intentionally, it's just how the lessons I used say it should be done. Then I learned about interfaces and have been using it to pack everything into them to cut memory usage. Any place something casts to another thing, I'm doing my best to remove it where practical, or if its an external calculation or process, then it's getting internalised into the character.

Another one is cutting the number of characters. There was a Male NPC, Female NPC, Male Rnd Enemy, Female Rnd Enemy, Male PC, Female PC, Male Wolf and Female Wolf. By optimising how they work, we now have Player, NPC, Enemy, and it sorts out gender and variations internally.

Believe me, we've been working so hard for months to get this whole thing working better.

There's a new demo coming out on monday which has had tons of optimisation and fixes.
I don't think I've seen the crash from just going over the bridge yet.

We've been doing a lot of fixes for all the issues we've seen so far and think we've got most of them.

The Player Character has been rebuilt from the ground up, NPCs rebuilt, wolves and random Enemies rebuilt. Dialog system has had some work done to try and resolve that, but will probably rebuild that if it keeps causing issues. 4k textures have been removed. A big cause of RAM usage was characters holding other characters in memory. Most of that should now be fixed and only referencing characters when needed.

My hope is that the bulk of the issues have been fixed. The next update has been released on Patreon and as Early Access for almost a week now and there's been surprisingly few bug reports, and none so far for the recurring problems.

And rest assured, my GPU goes off like a jet engine as well, but I think that's because it's on its last legs anyway. I'm trying to find ways to optimise and stop mine doing it as well.

It's my local currency, so it made sense.

Not currently. We have not discussed those content types yet, but given the game occurs over a few days, it's unlikely pregnancy will be relevant.

We're not sure yet. Possibly.

It would make sense given it's a huge potential player base.

So, this question will likely be out of date in a weeks time. We're going to be discussing the next steps and finalising a roadmap. We did have a roadmap, but things needed changed around, sequenced, or just don't fit any more. Alternatively, there's been new ideas from the new members of the team that will get looked at and decided on, We should be doing that over the next few days, and it's the main reason why the Roadmap in the game is now blank beyond the current point.

We're aiming for monthly release milestones, hopefully around the 1st of each month. The content is entirely dependent on how much we can do in that time! As it stands, all of us work to a greater or lesser degree, so it's all in spare time right now. This means that there's going to be days where people can't work on the game, which is fine. I myself have taken a backseat the last few weeks because of onsite visits for a client, and the last thing I want is for anyone on the team burning themselves out. As long as the monthly release shows some progression, it's going in the right direction.

We do however know that there's a few important goals we need to achieve in the next few updates. We know that the sex animations are a bit boring, so we want to turn them into something more interactive, so people want to watch and play the sex scenes instead of wishing for a skip button. We know that now we're pushing a Full Version of the game, we need to start building out the content beyond the demo.

Hope thats a good enough answer!

They are in the Open Forest levels.

Often they're quite hard to see in the grass, but you should be able to spot them on the minimap.

Apologies for the late reply.

For drivers, just run a windows update and the latest driver for your GPU. Because the game uses one of the latest versions of Unreal Engine, a lot of crashes are just down to old GPU drivers not liking new UE features.

It could well be computer speed. There's been some speed improvements between versions, so it should now run better. So thats the most likely culprit. I'm planning on a full optimisation sweep of the game to get it as fast as possible for all players and hopefully that'll resolve your issues. It won't go through the normal Patreon exclusive week first because it's solely optimisation and any bugs that pop up.

So, I'm using one of the latest Unreal versions for the game for the procedural generation stuff. A common UE issue is the newer versions have incompatibility with older GPU drivers, which has a habit of causing "Unhandled Exception: EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION". I believe it's trying to find something in registry which has moved between UE versions.

It may not be whats causing this bug though, but as it's a common issue, it's usually best to rule that out first.

So they're totally different level types. The dungeon is relatively lightweight for loading, while the open forests are big and have to load a lot.

First things to try would be update windows then update GPU drivers. I tend to find more often than not that issues resolve when everything is up to date. If it's not getting to the black loadscreen then it can't open the level at all. Does it do it for every forest level, or just that one in particular? Could be an unseen error in one of the levels.

I apologise, I've only just seen your post. Does it still do it with newer versions?

Could you go into: C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\RotW\Saved\Crashes and if it exists, zip up the crashfile and email it to: methodiar@gmail.com

I'll look into it. I don't know what causes it. Some people never get it, others occasionally and a few get it all the time. I suspect it might be  a hardware configuration, but the crashlog should help.

I would recommend updating Windows and your GPU drivers first though and seeing if it still crashes.

What stage does it get to?

Does it go to the screen with the picture, or does it get as far as the final black loading screen with the text updates, and if it gets to that, which one does it get stuck on?

My working theory is possibly something is failing to load properly, so it keeps trying to place an object and fails the whole section of code stopping progression. The other one is that code keeps going but gets into an infinite loop trying to spawn it.

The bits of text that pop up like "Trimming bushes" are markers for what is currently being spawned/generated, so if it's stuck on one of those, it gives a good idea what's failed.

The other alternative is to quit and try again. Most things should spawn in the same place, but it might just have been a glitch. Still bad and I'd still like to track it down.

It's not actually that bad. Once the first one gets you, everyone sits down to watch and you have time to escape.

Here's a link to it on Drive: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1t0ey9pHkIAiGijzNodbNmF8CGU1SVCIi/view?usp=shari...

It may take a little while after I post this for it to become available to download, and I'll probably remove it when the next build comes out, for anyone trying to download in the near future.

Also, it's nice to get a complaint that isn't my fault!

It's on the list already!

The 3 different game modes you select from Chobb when registering all currently default to Casual which is supposed to be no violence or weapons. But because this is still an early version of the game, it's just a case of throwing everything at the wall and organising it into rulesets later. However, the next big push I want to do is a mix of polish and getting the game to a properly sellable and stable early access state, which means bringing in content options and starting to arrange the event types. 

If I recall (which may be wrong, it's been a few months since I typed up those game rules...), Casual should be no combat or weapons, though there will be distraction weapons, which does mean there would need to be some kind of reaction to enemies getting hit with distractors, though the stagger you suggested would work. the middle one is as it is at the moment (even the HP deaths aren't lethal, it's just easier to refer to them as deaths, it's more fainted and out of the game. The final was meant to be lethality and no or very little sex and be more survival, so players can choose what overall content they want in their playthrough.

Beyond that, there's going to be content and gameplay options. I do want to be able to turn off all sexual content, and then allow players to set M/M, F/F, M/F, vore (plant game overs for example), feral and humanoid/anthro genitals as well as  a few other things. In the end I want the content to be changeable so people can see and do the things they want.

One note though, the hammer isn't a weapon, and it increases your Defence for 20 seconds. It's a stupid joke, because originally it was called the Numbener and the idea was you hit yourself with the hammer so you lose feeling for a few seconds, but that was a really shitty idea. It then became Skunk Dribblings, so nobody wants near you for a while, but the item mesh never got updated.

It's a bug, it needs fixed. If it's what I think it is, then it's something I never found in testing cos I didn't get the circumstances right.

Anyway, might as well list the other updates done today: 

• Added check to stop crouched player walking off ledges
• Improved currency
• changed health/stamina stalls to cost money
• Fix for market stalls, so you can only see their price labels when close to them, not from miles away
• Fixed a small gap in the ground at the top of the main ramp in Pineridge
• Added Buy and Sell functions with feedback if it is too expensive, to make shops easier
• Added new stat to player to track where they are sleeping at night
• Improvements to end of day into morning sequence, moving player from the bar to their purchased bed
• Worked the purchasing stuff into the Inn, so buying rooms now has feedback if you can't afford the selected room
• New dialog for Clive the Innkeeper for the morning, to stop player from repeatedly starting a new day
• Secret dialog for Clive which currently cannot be accessed for if you spend the night with Clive

In theory, it shouldn't be possible for an enemy to capture while the lizard is attaching.

If the enemy approaches and the player is set "Is Busy", they can only stand and wait for you to stop being busy. You go Busy at the start of the lizard capture, then unBusy at the end. I have noticed that depending on GPU, sometimes things happen out of sequence. When the levels are generating and it says what it is doing, each message should play as that thing is done, but on faster GPUs it completes a later item in the chain before a previous one. I think this might be whats happening here, and it's going to unBusy before the camera can finish. Just in case I've also added a second delay at the end before switching off Busy.

I've moved the busy flags to the very first and very last thing in the lizard chain, so that might fix it, but I've been unable to get it to happen for me, so I can't test it.

I'll get a bugfix update out within a week. I can't do it straight away because there's some unfinished work that needs done first.

Gonna try and field as many of these as I can...

• The intro quest isn't *quite* the same from this point on. For the updates going forward, there should be more quests and things to do in the town before the actual event. Pineridge has been neglected while trying to flesh out the rest of the game, but now I'm moving back into that area and there should be more to make it work better and actually be interesting.
• Skipping animations should be less of an issue once I can get interactive sex scenes in, so every time should be as long or short as you want.
• I agree about the worldmap. It worked until I updated the foliage system, and now it blocks it. I'm probably going to move the text and available directions the the user interface or try something a little different.
• There is a plan that has already started to be able to earn money in Pineridge, or even to avoid paying for accommodation
• The lower town is blocked for now. I was going to open it all up at once, but it needs a load of buildings and I didn't have time to spare on them,  so it's just concentrating on the upper town for now. I'm undecided if I'll add the lower town as explorable from the start, or set it as a barred off area until the player completes one of the worlds.
• Capture states means ways and circumstances to be caught. So for example, at the moment there's 3 states: standing and facing away from the capturer / crouching and facing the captor / stepping on plant. So basic ones would be to add standing and facing captor, crouching while facing away, even if it just means an additional animation to turn them around to start the the other directional state. I'd like to add things like capturing from a lower level than the player, capturing while near a low wall, capture near a high wall and so on. Ways the player can be caught and adapt the animation used to how and where they are. So a capture done in a field would lead to sex on the ground, while near a wall would give something to lay on and get height. But then it would also add in specific ones for specific enemies.
• I'd like more info on breaking the camera. This is a bug I haven't seen yet. If its the ingame camera, it suggests something tried to take control of the camera or release the camera and failed, so knowing what you were doing will help figure out what is failing. That'll be why save & quit works, it's just restarting the level. Usually it'll be around a capture and struggle, which is one of a few times camera control is disabled to let you do the mouse wiggle without flailing the camera around.

This is the third report I've had on a similar issue, but still not figured out what causes it as it doesn't give out any crash error.

The first thing that seems to be a popular crash is outdated graphics drivers, they might need updated, but this is the first I've heard that locks the computer, which sounds like more of an issue. If drivers don't work, then try this:

1. Go into your C: drive and navigate to - Users\<username>\AppData\Local\RotW\Saved\Crashes
2. You might not see AppData, so in the browser window, at the top, do View > and tick "Hidden Items"
3. Zip the logs you see in there and email them to: methodiar@gmail.com

The main thing is being able to get eyes on what's causing it.

Thanks, and sorry for the crashes.

That's doable. I can do that.

I have been learning replication and multiplayer in a different project. It's a potential...

This is one of the biggest issues I have with Mac, and have done for years. It's either impossible or incredibly difficult to produce things for Mac without owning one because of the way Apple have locked down on software and code. They want you to use a Mac, use their software to create and so on.

What it means is that it's only really an option for certain things, like game development, when you've got enough disposable income to be able to produce a version for it, which rules out a lot of small developers.

Unfortunately, it is unlikely.

The game would need to be compiled and packaged on a Mac to work, and I don't have a Mac to do so.

Potentially. The plan is for multiple species, and I have considered it, but nothing final is in place.

Only thing I can think of is possibly a graphic driver issue, though who knows why it would crash it during dialog.

I'll try my best to field these points again!

• The customisation is a good idea, and is something I'd like to implement. It's something I am going to look into, but unfortunately I'm just one person making this, and though I'd love to work with other people, nobody seems interested in helping, so I've got to balance features with time and ability. Hopefully this is one of those things that is actually pretty easy, it *should* just be tweaking and saving stats, but it could be a massive pain. Though looking at the Items DataTable which has the stat modifiers for items, there doesn't actually seem to be anything in there, so not sure whats going on there. I'll explore it!
• So, mouse-wiggle is a bit of a deceptive description. The way it works is just through cursor movement, so each game tick it tracks where the cursor is now, and where it was last to generate a distance moved and apply that as an increment on the struggle counter. In theory, it should work with any system that moves the cursor. Maybe I should add a game setting so players can choose wiggle, arrows or hammer E. The idea was to have it so if the cursor moved to the left of the screen, the character would wriggle left, and vice versa to make it more interactive.
• With the Wolves, the way I saw it was that there are 20 in the game each time you play. They are faster, more intelligent and stronger than the other enemies you encounter, so each one is basically a mini-boss. At the moment, they are pretty much the same as the other species, though they do have boosted stats. They are the main enemy, just not the most common ones. Your point still stands though, the items are doable, and are on my list.
• The stuff about karma and consequences is sort of something I was planning, though I was on a much more basic level. Things like wolves doing different things based on basic stats like aggression, horniness etc, so the aggressive ones are more likely to fight you than capture you. Those stats could then be modified through the game, so if you harm one of them, he'll remember it and is more likely to either be aggressive next time, or potentially hold a grudge and target you over other legitimate victims. Likewise, when the interactive sex starts to work, if you get him off a bit too well, he's more likely to want to try that again. That system would then work for the competitors as well. Again, the viability of all this is down to coding ability on my part.
• Transmogrification of items is potentially a difficult one. I'd need to look in to mesh morphs maybe. It's not feasible to model all potential combinations, so I'd need to do something where it can generate itself. It's a thing to think about.

To be honest, at the moment my main aim is to get something a bit more fun to play, and hopefully with a few more sex positions and functional main features. Unfortunately, this game is having to take a backseat to other life stuff, as I need to earn enough to live on before turning back to the game. I'm working on ways to make this more sustainable, and in future I would love to work with other people on both this and other potential games, but for now it's just a case of getting what I can done on my own! The suggestions and feedback are genuinely good, even with a lack of resources, I still want to make this as good as I can, and just because I don't know how I'd achieve some things ow, doesn't mean I can't learn them.

The game you see now is about a years worth of work so far, with the first main chunk being pretty much fulltime for 6 months, which shows how long of a process this stuff is!

Hoo boy, this is going to be a long response...

• More equipment - Absolutely. There's a reason why there's so little of it at the moment: it wasn't really important. They were more or less aesthetic. There's a little bit of armour variation, but it's minimal. The plan was to have some clothing tougher than others, give speed or whatever bonuses. Mainly the reason it's not got much further is just concentrating on core mechanics, but I'm loving the camo and heavy ideas.
• Clothing physics. That is something I plan to look into. I know it's doable in UE, it's just working out how. The flags in Pineridge use a clothsim, but they are static placed. I've added it to my list though.
• Clothing customisation - That is something I've been wanting to add from early on. The problem I hit was getting colours to change at runtime. I actually solved that a few weeks back, and now every NPC has randomised clothing colours, which is honestly horrific because it all comes out shades of neon. I plan to use that to lock down colour ranges, and provide a degree of customisation at the start of the game, as well as some body parts, fur, etc for more character customisation. Now I know how to do it, I can start adding it in future phases. 
• Firecrackers - another good idea. The old version of the enemies had a very direct damage system. The new updated version takes in damage inputs, so grenade style weapons are possible now
• Sticks - Thematic, but I'd have to think of how that would implement. The main concern there is eventually there should be various species out there chasing you, and the stick only works for canines. Then again, maybe there could be similar items that work only for specific species?
• Struggle - This has seen a lot of changes since the currently available version went online. The old Hit E to struggle has gone, it now uses a mouse movement system, so wiggling the mouse increases your escape bar. The plan is to link this in to character animation for better feedback and more procedural movement. Once that is figured out, I'm looking at implementing a new sex system, so the animation varies based on the stats or mood of the enemy, and can be influenced by the player as well. Using a procedural system as well would mean the sex portions would play out as a sort of minigame, with mouse movements controlling your character, pleasure & orgasm bars and so on. It's still in the design stages! It wouldn't cut down on the animations happening, but should make it a lot more interactive and different every time.
• Participants - That's sort of in the plans. The starting structure has space for 20 wolves and 20 participants. When it's working, the world maps will show where each wolf and each participant is. It's a bit of a multi-step process to get it to work though. First up I need to get the whole thing working for the wolves, so they generate at the start and pop up through the levels unless they get taken out.
• The easter eggs would probably be random events. Those are pencilled in for Phase 4.

Honestly, I'm liking a lot of these ideas, and I've added quite a few of them to my build list. The main deciding factor is my ability to implement them!

Is that the dialogue where you pick a room?

What options did you choose there, and when it crashes, does it have an error box pop up?

The intention is for there to eventually be more town to explore under the bridge, other quests, people to meet and so on, as well as other places to stay all over town.

The Tavern on the Bridge. Speak to the guy standing on the decking.

Not yet.

Upper clothing is for combat, lower for sex. Shirt and bra damage should start in phase 2.

Quick question: Are you playing it on a laptop?

That error relates to something inherent in UnrealEngine, and one cause is if it's running on a laptop without the power cable plugged in, which is weirdly specific.

If it is laptop, it could be Nvidias Battery Boost causing it. "NVIDIA GEFORCE EXPERIENCE → GAMES → BATTERY BOOST → DISABLE IT"

If it's on desktop, the recommendation is updating GPU drivers and see if that fixes it.

Hi,  the crash logs don't come to me, so it would be good to get them so I can see what went wrong: methodiar@gmail.com

Yeah, there's a bit more clarification in the next version on the different worlds, but for replayability you get the option to either reset the level seeds for the Forest Map or replay with the current seeds. The different modes, are later phase additions, so they all currently feed into just the standard mode. That's clarified a bit better in the new version, though elements of combat are in Phase 2 which is next up. The additional modes will be in the free version as well, it'll just be worlds. Main reason is itch.io filesize limits. I struggled to get Forest into the file limit, so 3 more worlds will be impossible.

The plan for the additional worlds will be possibly a Steam release, rather than tying it to Patreon, though Patreon members will get a steam key as well, but it's not required for the full game!