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.