The Proteus Effect 0.9 is Released!

Greetings!

Well, it's finally here. It's been a long, long time - and I'll talk more about the development in a future post - but now it's finally done. Expectations are probably high, so I want to take a moment to temper them: I really like this release for a number of different reasons, but if you're expecting it to be the greatest thing since sliced bread you may be disappointed. Having said that, I'm fairly confident that if you enjoyed the game up to this point you'll also enjoy 0.9. Before I get into talking about it, here are the links:

Windows 

Mac 

Linux 

I usually start off by giving an estimated playtime, but that's a little hard here. This release has a ton of dialogue. My final playthrough, where I tried to review all the dialogue in the release, took me almost 6 hours. (!) And I know exactly where everything is and exactly what I'm supposed to do. Now, most of that dialogue is optional, and you're unlikely to see it all unless you go around obsessively talking to everyone at various points in the different quests, but it's still there. If you do just the story quests and H-scenes, and aren't obsessive about talking to everyone, it'll probably take you somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 hours. The Ned Danger stuff will probably tack on another 1.5 or so, then there are a few skits and such.

It's worth talking about the Ned Danger quest, since such a large chunk of content is contained within it. The quest (The Weather-Beaten Hat) is initiated by finding a mysterious person's hat in a secret room right before the last boss in The Dark Pits (from 0.7, and you can still get it after beating the dungeon.) After finding the hat, you can then find 3 books, which will allow you to ask Ren about something after visiting the nightclub, which opens up the rest of the quest. 2 of these books are in Ogremarsh, but the final one is in Jovi's parents' house, which means you must have done Jovi's Quest (Counting Sheep) in order to get it. If you've already fought the dragon with the Bunnies' help and you *haven't* done Jovi's quest, you're locked out of it. Luckily that's at the very end of 0.8, so if you need to load an earlier save and do it it shouldn't take long.

0.9 has 2 H-scenes, and both of them are gated behind a quest you get from the nightclub. The second H-scene is by far the longest I've ever written, but I really like it - hopefully you will, too!

Changelog

Playable content:

• 2 new H-scenes
• 7-ish quests, depending on how you count
• 1 (small) dungeon
• 2 boss fights
• 1 minigame
• New district
• Several new skits

Art:

• 60 new images (31 H-scene images, 29 character view images)
• Many new portraits

Features and misc:

• New party member
• Added lighting effects
• Added game character view feature (press 'i' to toggle. Warning: this feature is a little wonky!)
• Added menu character view feature (on the Status menu)
• Xmog feature (he's on the 2nd floor of the Sorcerer's Society)
• Battle action sequences
• New animations
• New ability for Ana
• New equipment slots
• Default items for new slots (old saves should be fixed automatically)
• New boots for completing Celie's quest (chickens vs. frogs, awarded retroactively)
• Changed the way TP behaves for many characters
• Removed lots of exclamation points!!
• Got rid of level indicators
• Improved conveyance for cookie quest (there should be fewer 'WTF am I supposed to do?' moments.)
• Probably lots of stuff I missed

I'll talk more about the release later, I just wanted to give you the things you needed to know before starting it up. I don't *think* there are any game-breaking bugs, but it's entirely possible I missed some. It *may* be possible that the lighting plugin will cause problems for people using certain older computers - if so, I can issue a workaround fix. Please let me know if you find any bugs, game-breaking or no. 

I hope you enjoy 0.9 - And thank you for your support!