Enhanced Romancing and Related Perils

I couldn't help but notice that perhaps the majority of the people that found the game in itch.io did so through the romance tag, which might have been disappointing and justified some of the bouncing and negative ratings as it's remained a somewhat neglected and relatively secondary system compared to others, so in the next version of the game we'll have more complex romantic relationships to hopefully help generate more drama and interesting stories.

For starters, lovers will now occasionally come up to you when you are in their territories and try to initiate a relationship without you having to woo them first and a bunch of new flavour messages. This will be particularly interesting along with a new optional personal drawback making your character thirsty enough to automatically accept every relationship. Other things like the player character's status or contexts like those involving too few males or females within the colony will influence how likely your character is to be approached in this manner.

To different degrees, depending on each particular kind of lover, they will also start feeling neglected if you don't continue wooing them. They will start showing their discontent in different ways and eventually take action if they feel too ignored, with some leaving, some making a number and others being too spineless to do anything other than continue to whine meekly. Over time, as the relationship progresses their neediness will also decrease slightly, making most reasonable lovers fairly stable in the long run.

Since this will have you wooing lovers for a new reason other than Weariness reduction or baby-making, all generic lovers will have 12 rather than 8 flavour wooing events, with these new 4 being chosen at random from a pool of generic actions determined by their personalities and physical traits, making each one more unique and fun to explore. Renascents will instead have their 12 existing events doubled to 24 unique ones. Furthermore, renascents that fancy you will try to vie for your attention and make their disposition known to you when staying at home even if you are already in a romantic relationship with another. 

You will also get some new flavour text when existing lovers reject your wooing because you're being perceived as having the wrong kind of character. Furthermore, breaking up with a renascent will cause his or her opinion of you to decrease in accordance to how deep they considered the relationship to be, meaning that some will feel so betrayed as to never trust you again and most will require some work on your part and healing before they once again show themselves receptive to your wooing.

The possibility for a lover wanting to raise children will also be a little bit more specific to each one. Generally you will still be able to reproduce with most lovers, but some will tend to be more interested in the idea than others. Additionally, those lovers with which you chose raise children, as is often the case when you find yourself saddled with shrieking monkeys, will be a bit more patient towards romantic neglect.

Some people will just not be right for you though. Whereas up to now lovers had a random chance to do mean things outside your control, now you'll be able to counter some of those negative effects levelling up each lover's required stat. The lifestyles some would expect of you might require a certain level of Resistance or Mobility to prevent you from gaining Weariness or Local Tension, while others might outright take advantage of you or even become abusive if your Terror or Intelligence isn't high enough. You will be warned in advance about lovers that your character might suspect to try to do this and be informed of the stat you would need to increase to prevent this.

I'm making no guesses for a release date yet because of several new real life uncertainties and the fact that some of this kind of content is proving surprisingly tricky to come up with. I'm sure you can at least think of at least a couple of troublesome, not very romance-conductive renascents to write this sort of content for, but the challenge is where most of the fun is at anyway.

All in all, the release is going to take longer than the latest ones, but be closer to the older ones in terms of new content and mechanics.

Drawbacks, Turncoats and Fate

In the next version of Anamnesis we'll be able to give our character a number of personal drawbacks that can be turned into strengths, switch allegiance mid-game, and generate player characters entirely at random.

Player character drawbacks will be entirely optional and only available if you chose to play advanced mode. You'll be offered 3 at random and be able to re-roll them all or individually as many times as you want just like the starting contexts. They will work in a similar manner, but modifying your character rather than the world as a whole, generally giving your character a strongly negative handicap along with a positive advantage. In between cycles, you'll be able to turn any drawback into a strength, removing the negative trait while keeping the positive one or getting a new positive effect if it previously had none. This will cost 1 Insight tu turn around the first drawback, 2 for the next one and so on.

At the time of writing there are only 14 of these personal contexts, so more variety will be needed before the release. For example, the mysterious benefactor social context was turned into a personal one (and made harsher), allowing you to spend Insight to remove the Local Tension increase each 100 weeks while still getting the Arkhe reward at the end of said period. Others will have your character being a pacifist, granting you Merits but barring you from using unprovoked violence, add a time limit for each cycle by giving you a fading body, or making you an imperfect renascent so that any death in combat finishes the current cycle. Some others get us significantly closer to that long term goal of having a monster game mode for non-human player characters.

Others yet proved to work better as regular socio-environmental contexts, so the game also has 4 more of those for now.

Other than that, following a suggestion in the Discord server, I also decided to allow players to switch between The Court and The Influence between cycles, which I admittedly haven't even thought about until now. This can be done in a few ways. When you have 3 consecutive victories, a random enemy renascent will approach you to try to convince you to switch and join them with arguments of varying validity. When you befriend and bond a captured enemy renascent, you'll also be able to use this to earn the other side's trust and switch at any time. Some of those new personal contexts also allow this.

Lastly, every character generation option can now also be chosen for you at random and left to fate if you feel like it, in case that needed any further clarification.

Anamnesis 240429 Released

Previous savegames are not compatible.
 

If you squint your eyes hard enough, this almost passes as a medium-sized release by good old day standards. Not a whole lot of new written content, but it adds a few new mechanics to make cycles more varied and mechanically different.

Change Log:

• Each of the 32 renascents now has a new phase/mood for a total of 8.
• Each cycle can now have up to 5 simultaneous Socio-Environmental Contexts (previously less correctly named Social Contexts) rather than 4.
• Added a new Monster Strength value, displayed in the "Colony" information screen, determining how much stronger or weaker Monster units will be in the present cycle. Low technology diffusion, societal development and certain feyfolk and contexts will make them more powerful and viceversa, making the strongest ones nearly unbeatable during ages of magic, ignorance and superstition, but more manageable in enlightened cycles.
• Investments are more profitable, especially in novel ideas. These will get exhausted as the cycle progresses with other competing investors also seeking them out now, simultaneously weeding out over time the worst ideas for prudent investors.
  
• The Experience (EX) value of the player character and other renascents now decreases very slightly with each cycle while monster and mundane units will continue to see theirs reset.
• Generated aristocrats from any given territory can now sometimes be of different types to increase variety within the same cycle. As a whole, they are also slightly less likely to try to sabotage and spy on you.
  
• Inviting aristocrats to your homebase is now free and gaining control over an opportunist that had control over you in turn will allow you to break relationships with them for free.
  
• Fighting cautiously and resting at home very slightly decreases Local Tension now.
  
• New fey content, including a new fey power, 2 new passive fey effects and smaller assorted variations.
• 13 new socio-environmental contexts.
  
• The usual balancing and bugfixing, most notably removing the ability the consume any captured unit freely, which was supposed to be an uncommon fey power.

Socio-Environmental Contexts and Competing Investors

I had a small breakthrough last week in which a couple of new social contexts (now more aptly named "Socio-Enviromental Contexts" within the game) led to a bunch of more broad changes with interesting uses beyond their initial reach

For starters, there is now an overall Monster Strength value in each cycle, shown in the "Colony" screen, that will make all monster units stronger or weaker as a whole depending not only on a number of new contexts but other factors like technological spread, societal development and good old feyfolk involvement. The larger the value the more incentives influenced players will have to use them, while the wise stalwart player will have more reasons to bind feyfolk that weaken them or fight the superstitions surrounding and strengthening such creatures rather than risk direct confrontation.

Investments, which I assume most players have been ignoring in favour of trading and banking until now, also received some long overdue attention as well. They will be slightly more profitable as a whole, especially when they involve novel ideas, but on the other hand, other investors will seek these opportunities and gradually steal them from the player over time. This is a double-edged sword that will allow you to passively gather more information about what kind of investments work and which ones do not, but will take away the best opportunities. All this information will be automatically logged in the correspondent investment menu under "Correspondence" for your evaluation and convenience.

Along with these changes, we'll get 1 new fey power, 2 new passive fey effects, and 11 new contexts, most of them revolving around these new mechanics and a few other smaller things.  And since this increases the total amount of existing contexts to 77, I went ahead an allowed the game to have up to 5 simultaneous contexts instead of 4 per cycle, because I really like the way in which they make us adapt our play styles with the passing of the ages.

Meanwhile, 6 more renascents had their new phase/mood developed, which puts us at 13 out of 32. I'm going to try to focus on this now and will probably call it a release once the remaining ones are done either the following month or the one after that.

Stuff Being Slowly Worked On

Here's the result of tinkering and toying with ultimately discarded ideas during the last month.

Renascent characters, including the player, will be subject to a very slight loss of experience level after each cycle to represent the world changing around them. They will still have it better in the long run than mundane units and monsters, which see their level reset after each cycle, but a character that has not been around for literally ages should now notice a significant decrease in skill unless they were never around and had 0 experience to begin with.

Player character peculiarities can now also store some more information including non-zero starting values. This will enable more varied types in the future, but so far it only impacts the one for biting your own fingernails, allowing these characters to actually start with nails to bite.

Other than that I've fleshed out the new phase/mood for 7 of the 32 renascent and added 2 new social contexts.

The next couple of weeks at least are going to remain busy with paperwork and regular work, but there is a good chance I'll have some more free time to invest in the game afterwards and be able to give you more exciting news than these.

I might even resume updating the "Working on" list afterwards so you can once again enjoy the thrills of watching arbitrary numbers go up.

Anamnesis 240109 Released

 

Previous savegames are not compatible.
 

2023 has been an awful year for Anamnesis and me, so I decided to start the new year turning page and making a release out of the meagre progress I was able to get done during the last few months.

Change Log:

• Non-bonded renascents will slightly change their behaviours and available actions with each cycle.
• Hanging around with renascents now has a change to give the player the opportunity to make certain actions of theirs more or less available in exchange for a slight, non-permanent cost in the renascent's opinion on them.
• Each of the 32 renascents has a new action when staying at home.
  
• Players can now terminate any romance without a reason in the "Other actions" menu when they are in the lover's territory, or homebase in the case of renascents.
• 2 new units.
• Some balancing and bug fixing, mostly involving oddities about wars in the mainland and their effects on the colony.