Dev Log — March 2025

Hi everyone!

Sorry for missing the February dev log. It's not the first time, but it is only the second time I've had to skip a dev log! I hoped to write about some of the things I've been working on lately, but the system kept changing, so it was difficult to write about anything I was confident wouldn't get changed already by the next (this) dev log.

Anyway, many things have happened in the past month and I have many exciting news to share for players and erotic lovers of all kinds!

Turn-Based Actions

One of the major additions to PvP with the new update are turn-based actions, specifically for sexual activities.

Consider a ball that represents whose turn it is. When a player takes an action to exploit another player sexually (desires allowing), they pick up the ball and are given priority by the game for a short while. Actions that start an activity will give the initiating player a few options for how they want to do it, and priority gives them a moment to consider their options.

When the initiating player has made a choice, an event text will be posted to all online players in the location describing the scene, and then the ball will be passed on to the other player, who will then receive priority. Alternatively, if the priority timer runs out for the initiating player before they make a decision, the other player can choose to take the ball and become the initiating player. Sometimes, players may need more time to think or roleplay before making a decision, so they will keep the ball after they lose priority, that is, their turn runs out but it doesn't end, and the other player can then advance to their turn by taking the ball, but it doesn't happen automatically.

When the ball is passed from one player to another, the receiving player can either react to what the previous player did, advancing the scene, or they can initiate a new activity to start a new scene. With this sort of setup, both players have an equal right and control over the scene that plays out.

Most actions don't consider priority and don't interfere with or interrupt sexual activities. This allows players to cast spells and use actions to alter themselves or their opponent while a scene plays out. Why not grope someone's breasts while you cast a spell to make them grow? —Or cloud someone's mind with lust while you change their appearance to your liking!

• During sexual activities, players take turns acting and reacting, and the choosing player whose turn it is is given priority.

• While you have priority, other players must wait for you to decide what you want to do next.

• Not all actions require you to have or be able to take priority, and players can continue to attack and cast spells while another player has priority.

When it comes to sex and romance, many terms are often conflated, such as Dominant = Active = Giving = Penetrating, or Submissive = Passive = Receiving = Penetrated. With this new system, I attempt to give players the freedom to choose not just what they do, but also their intentions and feelings behind the things they do. For instance, an initiating player might decide to give another player a blowjob. This makes them the active and giving player, but it doesn't assume them to be either submissive or dominant, nor eager or shy, without them explicitly choosing to be so.

Extract from Natalie Wynn's video about Twilight where she dissects romance and erotica in media and advocates for sex-positivity and sexual expression and -freedom. I heartily recommend watching the video, which has been a huge inspiration for my current vision for Battle Mages and helped me put things into words that I've previously struggled to express to people who are not as involved in adult games and erotica. Source: https://youtu.be/bqloPw5wp48

This is why players are given options for how they react to or initiate a scene, so they can express their feelings and intentions behind what they do, and allow said feelings and motivations to evolve as the scene unfolds.

Commands 

In many sexual activities, there is an active and passive participant. When you fuck someone's vagina or mouth, ride someone's penis, or give someone a blowjob, you are considered the active player, and you can initiate these activities as the active player.

Any command with an active player has a command counterpart, which allows you to demand another player to take initiative and become the active player. Going by the example above, you can command someone to fuck your vagina or mouth, ride your penis, or give you a blowjob (desires allowing).

The desires required for these actions are also flipped. If you want to give someone a blowjob, their Cock Desire (that is their desire to have their penis pleasured) must be high enough for them to implicitly allow it, while if you command someone to give you a blowjob, their Mouth Desire (that is their desire to use their mouth sexually) must be high enough for them to implicitly allow it.

The big difference between initiating and commanding an activity is that commands pass the ball to the other player, who must choose an option before their turn ends, or a choice will be made for them. Then, the ball will be passed to the commanding player, who in turn, must choose a reaction or one will be decided for them, so the ball can be passed back to the commanded player. It's important that the first player who can change the scene isn't also the initiating player to, ensure both players have an equal right and control over the narrative.

• When given a command, you decide how your character reacts. Will you be eager, shy, or defiant?

• If you don't react before the time is up, a decision will be made for you.

• Afterward, the player who made the command will be forced to react to your choice before priority is given back to you.

• While you have priority, other players must wait for you to decide whether you want to continue or take things in a different direction.

Leaving

Leaving an encounter now requires you to have priority or be able to take priority. This is to ensure players cannot abort a scene during someone else's turn.

Anything that interferes with or interrupts a sexual activity is beholden to who has priority and requires you to be able to take possession of the ball.

This is another important reason why the ball must end with the commanded player, so they are always given an opportunity to leave after an opponent has initiated an activity.

Climax

Desires, lust, and sexual activities work together to create a scene that builds similar to an erotic scene in a porn or a graphic novel. Desires normally start low and must be raised during sexual activities that start with foreplay and end with a climax. This also further underscores the gravity of future effects that will increase your desires at the beginning of an encounter!

Activities that have a natural conclusion when one of the participants orgasms will trigger a unique reaction for that player when it becomes imminent, so they can decide how they want to finish. Then, before they climax, the other player will get a final moment to react to how the other player decided to finish before the end of the scene plays out.

Similar to commands, when an orgasm is imminent, both players must act before their turn ends, or a decision will be made for them. Additionally, the player whose orgasm isn't considered the natural climax of the scene can come at any time and might come multiple times or not at all. For instance, when using your penis to fuck someone's vagina, your partner might come multiple times or not at all before you reach climax.

Masturbating 

Masturbation is another core component of sexual activities, which can raise your lust and desires, and trigger your own orgasm. Numerous sexual activities can be quite one-sided unless your character has gained unnatural erogenous zones, including oral sex, and masturbation can be used to grant yourself pleasure while you pleasure someone else, assuming your attire doesn't prevent you from touching yourself. This further underscores the gravity of bondage and future effects that can increase the sensitivity of numerous body parts or responses to certain kinks.

With Battle Mages, I've always attempted to emulate reality as closely as possible in cases where it can enhance a fantasy, including why you must train your various holes to accommodate larger insertions and the pride or indignity that might surface from the thought of your body becoming accustomed to huge objects.

Similarly, I have decided to emulate the female orgasm as not normally being achievable through penetrative sex alone, as this is the reality for the vast majority of women. Penetrative sex can raise a player character's lust, but for them to achieve orgasm, their clitoris must be stimulated.

This makes masturbation during sex all the more important. For this reason, masturbation is a togglable status, similar to kneeling, which will continue until stopped or replaced. While active, masturbation will be retriggered every time you react to a sexual activity on your turn.

The added benefit of this is that it allows players to more easily orgasm together during vaginal sex, since the player being penetrated won't orgasm until they stimulate their clitoris, which they can do as a reaction to their partner finishing (assuming they are able).

This direction also means future effects that can cause hair-trigger orgasms have a profound effect on players with male and female orgasms and a similar level. Since being able to orgasm from penetrative sex as a woman is a natural thing as well, and much more common in fantasies and media than in real life, effects that allow for this particular increase in sensitivity are planned to be much more accessible to players.

Sex Toys 

Sex Toys are also being worked into the new priority system together with future items like ray guns and vibrators.

Instead of showing a long list of options in a dropdown, using these items will now show a list of abilities similar to options for sexual activities, which allow players to choose how they want to use an item and on whom.

Actions of a sexual nature will be hooked directly into the priority pipeline and allow players to initiate scenes involving a given sex toy, or to use a sex toy to masturbate themselves with.

I'm also working on item actions that will allow you to forcefully equip the item on an opponent, which will also give them ownership of the item. This will be gated behind desires and/or the player being defeated, and I'm also looking into allowing players to remove equipped bondage from a downed opponent, so they can gain access to their holes, and allowing items to be displaced during sex, which counts as the item still being worn to calculate stats, but removed for anything else.

Inanimate Player Actions

Inanimate players will likewise receive specific scene descriptions when used and I'm even working on also giving inanimate players similar reaction options to when they are used by their owner, which will be shown to their owner and maybe other players in the same location! Worn inanimate players will be allowed to act at will, while items in the inventory will only be able to react when they are being interacted with by their owner.

Removed the Turn-Timer

The turn-timer has been removed from the game!! I've wanted to do this for a while and I'm happy to finally have disconnected all features from the deprecated turn-timer so time in the game can progress more naturally instead of daytime changing constantly.

All locations you can travel to will now have a set background and daytime, while during scenarios like the prologue, the daytime can still change. I also want players to be able to change the daytime of a location in the future. I decided to have one daytime for each location so as to not split players into even more queues when traveling between locations.

Players will also be able to attend classes at any time, and will no longer have to wait for a specific day and time to attend a class.

There is no longer an in-game calendar, which also means holiday events won't happen daily. For now, I have made it easier to access spells and content that previously required holiday specific items, and in the future, I will make a better way to allow players to enable the chance of certain holiday-specific events to happen outside the holiday.

The solution is still a bit hacked, and exploration continues to use a similar timer, where players are only allowed to explore once a minute, resetting at the top of each minute on the server. This is a placeholder solution until the PvE overhaul is ready to be rolled out.

But without the turn-timer, it will be much easier to transition from the current exploration pipeline to the new improved one in the future. 

Soul Imprint & Restore Self

Removing the turn-timer is one of several big changes made to improve the flow of the game for new and existing players. Other include the changes to scenes that are triggered by sex toys, which are no longer PvE scenes, but make use of the interactive priority pipeline that allows scenes to play out mid-combat.

Another such case are the spells Soul Imprint and Restore Self, which played a PvE scene when used alone, which was an old solution to allow players to cancel the spell if they clicked it by mistake. I've now implemented support for spells with options that are displayed similarly to sexual options and options for using sex toys. Right now it's only used for these two spells, which will now require a second click to confirm the spell to be cast. These option versions of a spell can also be dragged onto the standard action bars or referenced in macros to use them directly, which can be used to skip the confirmation step for Soul Imprint and Restore Self.

Eventually, I plan to allow masters of different schools of magic and players with rare items to unlock divergent versions of known spells, which will also make use of the same system to show different options for how you want to cast a given spell. Cases include channeled spells that gradually change a person over time with a single cast and spells that consume multiple spell actions for one powerful hit that can change the target multiple steps at once.

Dynamic Avatars

With the help of Deko, we have also resumed work on the dynamic avatar! The direction for the dynamic avatar has changed slightly to make a version that is easier to transition to from the current avatars. The sheer scope and magnitude of the dynamic avatars I had planned made it difficult to find a good time to release them without the avatars feeling incomplete and potentially like a step down for some players.

I want the release of the dynamic avatar to be strictly better than what we have today, and I realize now that adding too much detail, such as specific skin colors, face styles, and eyes, among other things, would actually make it harder for players to emulate the look they want than when these things are left more abstract. It's also my experience, that the more details and options you give players have an adverse effect on how happy players are with their choices: the more choices you have, the more accurate you expect the result to be, and the less happy you will be with it if it doesn't live up to those rising expectations.

Therefore, we've decided to base the dynamic avatar on the current abstract avatars, with support for gradually changing physiques, breast sizes, hairstyles, and eventually animal traits, other appearance qualities, and clothes with coloring support. Eventually, we might still decide to make a more detailed dynamic avatar when it becomes feasible, but even then, anyone who prefers a more abstract representation can continue to use the abstract variant.

I'm looking forward to showing you more progress on the new direction of the dynamic avatars in the near future!

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That's it for this month's dev log! I'm sorry I haven't been more active in keeping you up to date or being able to push out a new update sooner, but I hope this dev log will at least give you a good idea of the amazing things that are being worked on and how massive and expansive the upcoming changes to sex, PvP, and items are!

—and thank you again for all your support! I couldn't do this without all the immense support you're giving me. These days I feel particularly vulnerable due to the world situation and how threats encroach on LGBTQ+ people and their rights, adult content makers, and a lot of other people and their livelihoods in general, and I imagine many of you feel the same. I love you all, and I feel blessed that I'm able to work on a game that is close to my heart and brings joy to a lot of people, because of the support and trust you put in me ❤️

XOXO,

Tinon