Hello everyone! I've just put out a new version. I know I don't usually post every time I do a release, but this is a very exciting one. - with Version you can actually get married! The public version is up to this has a scene where you wreak a terrible revenge on your boyfriend's douchebag friend. It's a bit of an experimental one so I'm keen to get people's thoughts on it as well as the marriage content. Let me know if you find any bugs, and good luck on your wedding day!
Hi all! Hope you're having a good week. Next release isn't too far off - the makeout work is all done and I'm just figuring out what permutations I need for the wedding dress scene before that can be finished off. Thank you! Newlife is written in Java using the Eclipse IDE with a Swing UI and some open-source libraries to help with a few things (such as Kryo, and yamlBeans). I originally used the WIndowBuilder plugin to make the UI but I've later moved onto writing the layouts by hand which is time-consuming but gives better results. Swing is in general not a great choice of UI though and I'd recommend something else (javaFX perhaps?) for a new project. Hi, glad you're enjoying the game. I don't think output has changed much recently - I don't believe that either the size or the frequency of updates has significantly changed since last year. I have been working on the side on a system to allow user contributions which is still ongoing - I keep having to set it aside to get releases out of the door. Once that's complete I may look into taking user submissions or paid contributions which might increase the new content that gets added. However, I don't know yet if this will be a success. Writing for Newlife is quite complicated due to all the factors to take into acount and so it might not prove realistic for people less familiar with the game's internals to write for it. It's a Java app, I don't know what IDE he uses but Eclipse is one of the more popular ones. As for development it's a been a mix of minor and major ones, the friendship feature was a major one but most of that work is behind the scenes. Major updates need to be architectured or else the whole thing will become a giant mess of spaghetti code. You can compare coding to physics, every line of code adds mass to a program, at first the program is light and easy to move forward but as the mass increases it takes more and more effort to move forward. How you architect the program has impact as time goes on in two ways, one it lets you break the project down into smaller parts which individually are easier to move then the whole and two it can effect how much resistance it has to moving forward ie a pound ball would be hard to move forward but a pound cube would be even harder. This is why so many armature projects stall and fail. Most just start out banging out code and before you know it they have a pound cube shaped spaghetti monster on their hands that they ether need to completely redesign or give up on. Well put. Of course many parts of Newlife are quite poorly designed - I can't claim it's an especially well put-together piece of work. There are a lot of things I'd change if I were to start a new project along similar lines.
Seems like I should mention my game Newlife too. It doesn't cater to a lot of fetishes the way CoC does though- there's a plenty of vanilla MF sex and impregnation content, some gender-bender and a smidgeon of exhibitionism, voyeurism, BDSM and lesbian stuff. No rape, violence, mutilation, degradation etc, so if you're looking for darker content then it won't be one for you. It's entirely text-based, and there's a free public version on my blog. Newlife is a lifesim game where you play as a woman - either a man who gets transformed into a woman in the introductory scenes or as a woman from the start. It's set in an approximation of the modern-day UK, with some changes for gameplay reasons. The game's playable all the way through - I'm still adding content in the form of new random events and so on, but there's no point in the game where you reach a game-over because a scene hasn't been written yet. Otherwise it's hard to come up with recommendations. I'd usually suggest things like the weekend, but that does have "end of current content" points like most in-development text games. Possibly Cursed? I haven't played it for years but I think it avoids that sort of thing.
Hi all! I'm cracking on with the next version - this will be the proper start to the Relationship update. Not sure when it'll be released - as usual it's hard to estimate the completion date until I'm almost done. Thanks, glad you're enjoying it! There's some discussion on opening up the customisation options going on at the moment, but I won't be making an announcement about that for a few days time. Overall, I think that the week limit is important for the game. Both in terms of balance (although Newlife is not exactly a well-balanced game) and to encourage people to replay it. I try to write the scenes so playing different characters will give a different experience, and so I want to encourage players not just to take their first ever character and stick with them forvever. Still, there are ways of mitigating that, especially since I added persistent options a while back. There'll also be a post-ending gameplay option coming at some point in the x releases - that'll work a bit differently from the cheat option though in that it won't just delay the endgame but rather allow play to continue after it. I won't be adding that early on though - probably not until there's some post-marriage content. So far I've only ever increased the game length when testing things - I've never done it when I play Newlife for fun. If I find myself doing that then that'll be a strong sign that the ability to continue after the endgame sequence would be an important addition. That's because the game pretty much IS just text. Indeed so. backupfly: there are some screenshots on the 'Getting Started' page on the blog. They're from quite an old version but the UI hasn't changed significantly since then - I think that automatic outfit creation and some new traits are the only additions that affect the interface.
Hi all, The public version of that I uploaded earlier was a buggy one with several issues that were patched out in the final version of I've now replaced the download links with the correct zip file. If you're using that was downloaded earlier today then I recommend replacing it with a fresh download. I agree entirely: the cost of providing monthly support for the entire development of Newlife or pretty much any substantial single-developer game is going to end up way higher than you'd pay for an equivalent commercial game on Steam. Especially as even though Newlife is my baby and I'm proud of it despite its design issues, not even I can claim that it comes close to a big commercial title in terms of quality or content. This is both one of the weaknesses and one of the strengths of the Patreon model with free public releases and patron releases with perks - mainly early-access in terms of Newlife, although I know some adult developers have different advantages for patrons. It's a weakness because it's obviously unfair. Massively so. Sure, some patrons just support for one or two months as a short-term donation and then cancel it, but a lot of them keep their pledges month after month. These patrons are paying a very large amount of the game, far more than could be considered a reasonable price for what they're getting. It's a strength for the same reason. A lot of players won't have much money and won't be able to pay for a niche game like Newlife. These players get to play the public version, which is not just a demo but the full game. Other players will be quite well-off and will have no trouble supporting it even for more than AAA prices. These players can get perks with the patreon version and (I hope) the good feeling of having helped keep development going. Essentially this means that the wealthier players are paying over the odds but subsidising the game for the poorer ones. I make enough money to work on it full-time, and even players who never pay a penny still get to play the results of that work. I guess it makes sense for a site called Patreon, as it's not too dissimilar from the old system of artists having wealthy patrons. By contrast, if every player paid a fixed one-off price to get access for the game for good but no-one had it for free then the price could be very low indeed. I haven't set up google analytics on my blog so I don't know exactly how many people have played Newlife, but I'd expect it to have gone over , by now - the blog has nearly 3 million pageviews and there are direct download links on tfgamessite too. That means that if every player had paid just $1 once to get access to Newlife forever then I'd have made more money than I have through Patreon. Of course that wouldn't have actually worked. The poorer players wouldn't pay even $1 and rightly so because they need to be careful with their money and sex games are a pure luxury. Chances are that I wouldn't have made enough to go full-time, would have had to slink back to my old desk-job and Newlife would have ended up either cancelled or as an occasional weekend project with super-infrequent updates. So, from that point-of-view Patreon has been a big success for me, but you're right - it isn't a fair way of paying for games compared to fully-commerical ones where everyone pays the same and the price is lower as a result. While I'm talking about patronage, I'd like to highlight that no-one should feel guilty if they can't or don't want to support the game. Obviously like every other person I prefer making more money to making less, so I do encourage people to become patrons if they enjoy the game and can easily afford it. However, even if you love the game you shouldn't be spending money on it if you don't have the income to spare - Newlife should never come ahead of your rent, bills, food or whatever and if you're in a precarious job situation then you might need the money in your savings instead just in case. Just, you know, maybe remember me when you come into your fortune!
Hello everyone! The version of Newlife has been released and can be downloaded from patreon by early-access patrons. The previous version has been made public and can be downloaded from the blog. The blog post with the changelog is here. Have fun with the new version, and let me know if you find any bugs
Hi all! I've released a new version: which is the PMW release with anal sex. As usual this is available on Patreon for now, and it'll be made public when comes out. The release of means that is now public. As an Xmas/New-Year treat the patreon version of is being made public, thanks to the patrons who voted overwhelmingly in favour of this. can be downloaded from the blog ( www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar ). Happy New Year to all of you, and best wishes for !
Last I checked Steam had rules against erotic content - trust me, all of us adult game developers would absolutely love to get our games on Steam to be played by millions of people, but we can't. There are some games that sort of skirt around the rules by trying to be titillating without being outright pornographic, or by making a Steam version with adult content removed but available in a developer-created mod on another site. In general though it isn't a great source of erotic content. As others have said, looking into non-adult games with strong modding communities might be better. If you want something that was designed to be an adult game then you'll find that most places that sell mainstream games won't have them. For that sort of thing you're probably best off just reading posts in forums like this one (or hongfire, tfgamessite, legend of krystal, fenoxo's forum etc).
Hi all, I hope you're having a great day. As expected, I keep getting called away from the computer for xmas stuff so it's kind of tricky to get much done. Still, I'm planning to finish the player's anal orgasm options before xmas lunch - there's some crossover with the non-anal doggy scene for them, but also some new descriptions that I think will work quite well. First of, welcome to forums. When I said that I liked your game I, mean it. I think that you can tell from my first post on this thread. In fact I think that I was first person introducing your game here (in different thread). You do not need to invite me to your patron because I was there, before they started to charge at singup - and I didn't do that cheap trick with unsubing before month ends, I'm sure you can check that. But I was out quick because rate of updates suddenly drooped ( i think even before custom npc introduction) About that "30 lines of code" I took it from my ass, now I think that I exaggerated, but some times It looked that way (havent played neflife for some time I only droped on your blog to check what changed). So that was my conclusion, as I know some coding myself (html, php, python, some c, but not java). So I haven't read to any of that hate speech, it is all on me. About saying that your game could be scam, well I was disappointed with updates after you reached "full time job" milestone they tend to decrease in quick manner. Adding to that unhealthy atmosphere in patron now (breadingseson and few others). So thats that. I would like to add something else but I rewrote this stuff so many times that I forgot what I wanted to write in first place so sorry if it came as some incoherent rambling. Ah and you have voting system now, so in basic it is impossible to make more frequent updates because of that? Don't read to much to that hate speech, it is part of internet now but when you notice to star losing supporters it indeed could mean that there is something wrong. Thanks for the reply windpl. It takes an adult attitude to admit that the numbers weren't based on anything - actual trolls are very childish (I think many of them are actually children) and one of them would never have made a post like your one - they'd have just thrown out an attack post. You didn't do that, and that's something I have respect for. I had seen something similar to the "30 lines" number a while ago on, I think, 8chan so it did kind of push my buttons. You are right that I should try not to let those sites get to me, but you know, it's hard to override an emotional reaction logically. You mention you supported up to before the custom npc content - thanks for that, there were some months early in where I wasn't making enough to cover my living expenses and things were getting quite worrying, so people who supported at that time really helped me a lot. The release immediately before custom content was the first PMW release with rough content back in September That was one of the trickiest updates so far and also one of the least popular ones - and for good reason. I made a lot of mistakes with that milestone and I can definitely understand that some people were disappointed with it. As for voting, I don't think that really affects the release rate directly. The PMW releases will typically take more time for the equivalent amount of content though, because if I'm writing something that I'm not personally interested in then it takes more research to figure out people who like that sort of content will enjoy. The current PMW release is better planned than the one though so I'm anticipating that it'll be received better. Hi XJ A very supportive post - thanks. The large range of variables in Newlife is in hindsight a bit of a design issue: new content is heavily slowed because of the need to write paths for everyone from a shy innocent virgin to a promiscuous flirt, from a kind-hearted angel to a mean-spirited bitch - and then combine that with a similar range of NPC characters. If anyone is reading this and considering starting their own variable-heavy game then I'd advise thinking very carefully about what's needed and what can be left out: a tighter scope would have made Newlife much quicker & easier to write for. Your mention of Sims3 reminds me that I'll need to start looking into more sims/bethesda mods. I've had loverslab bookmarked since before I even began Newlife, but I've never seriously modded any of the games even though I'm aware that there's some amazing mod work being done on them. In fact, Sims 3 was one of the inspirations for Newlife's clubbing scene. I was playing as a single female character in vanilla Sims3, but dating was very frustrating because the NPCs won't really initiate anything. In real life a pretty girl who goes to a club will get hit on a lot even without going up to any of the guys and flirting with them, and I like the idea of that sort of unpredictable situation where you don't know who you'll end up talking (or sleeping) with. I think I already had some sex-simulation scenes for Newlife at that point, so I wrote the club scene to connect with them. I don't own sims 4, but I'd be curious what sims 3 mods would work for someone interested in the sort of content that's in Newlife. If people have recommendations then please let me know!
Hi there, I'm the developer for this game. I've found this thread and I thought I'd post here myself so people can ask me about the game if they want. I won't go through and answer most of the previous posts here, as they're generally months old, but I will reply to the more recent ones. In current Newlife news: - I'm working on some anal sex content for the next release. You can expect that quite soon - probably late this month. I originally wasn't keen on adding anal, but it won a recent vote from the patrons, so it's finally going in. Hopefully it'll be a good one. - There's a big vote going on which will make some important decisions about where development will go in the near future. I'll know the results at the start of next year so you can expect a big announcement around then. - I'm still considering the UI situation: there are some issues for players with high screen resolutions especially. Really, the whole UI could use a complete re-write in something other than Swing. Unfortunately the original UI work took several months back in so I'll need to be careful in order not to risk my minimum update schedule. I'm currently working on a different side-project (a guide for player submissions to Newlife), but when that's done I might dedicate some extra time to experimenting with UI options. Thank you! That's really kind of you to say Ok, so I'm aware that there are malicious accusations being spread by trolls with a grudge against me. I'm not accusing you of being one of them, but it looks like you've been reading stuff they've posted, and so I'm going to set the record straight here. In the past I've usually ignore these sort of attacks, but I do worry that this is making people just accept them as truth, so I'll reply this time. Since early in development there have been some people online who've had it in for me and my game. The initial set of attacks were based around accusing me of being a "prude", so I think that these are people who are angry that I've refused to implement their favourite fetishes. I want to highlight that I'm not accusing you of being one of those people, but I definitely get the impression you've read some of their hate posts and are getting a very extreme view of my work. There are a few places online where discussion of Newlife is dominated by these people - 4chan was particularly hateful at one point, although I haven't looked there in a while. They don't often post where I'm likely to reply myself so forums tend to alternate jarringly between "splendidostrich is a scumbag lazy incompetent scamming cheating thieving prude" and ones that are overwhelmingly supportive. The general tactic seems to be the classic troll one of "throw shit until some sticks", and I've had all kind of accusations thrown at me. Often these are backed up with outright lies or by taking things I've said out of context - this is one reason why I have to be very cautious when I make public posts and I now tend to avoid publicly discussing development if I can help it. The increasing complexity of the game and size of new content means that the number of updates/month has reduced over time even as development time has remained constant (I'll talk about this more below) and so they've had fertile ground with attacks along the lines of "the developer is a lazy scammer". There's also these attacks based on the amount of money I make - I certainly am making a good living at this point, but I'll discuss that as well. I have seen this "30 lines of code" claim on one of these hate threads, so I'm guessing you've read it and mistakenly assumed whoever said it knew what they were talking about. This is not the case - it's an outright lie. Sadly it's much easier for trolls to make this sort of accusation behind my back than it is for me to respond, so on plenty of places I've let this sort of claim go unchallenged. If you're interested, I don't typically count up the number of lines I write, but a quick check at the current dev code reveals that it's , lines. That counts code comments (which, after all need time to write too and I can't easily exclude them from the search) but doesn't include blank lines, any files I haven't written myself, or any non-java stuff like the custom NPC guide. The recently-added blackjack scene by itself is 3, non-blank lines. If it gives you a hint as to why releases have slowed down, the three-way lesbian dance scene (an older scene which was also written in just one release) is just The second point I'd like to address is the game being accused of being a scam. This seems like a very bizarre accusation to me, because no-one should be putting money towards the game without their eyes complely open. After all, the game is free to play. Completely free. No need to make an account, promise any money, nothing. No-one should be supporting me on Patreon without having played the game and had a good idea of what it's like. And if they don't want to support me or don't have the money then they can continue playing the full game for free. The update schedule is also easily available. You can just look on my blog to see the time between updates, and I maintain a dated list of every update in the first post of the original release thread on Hongfire. Newlife has been online for over 2 years and I've been working on it for more than 3. That means that you are not going to see dramatic revolutionary change: a month of development is only around 1/36 the time that's already gone into it, so you can expect incremental improvements rather than massive jumps in what the game can do. I'll also point out that I have a monthly patreon account and that I have never even once gone a calendar month without releasing a new update. In retrospect a per-release one would probably have been better, but it's impossible to change now as that could lead to people being overcharged. I don't see what could possibly be a scam about Newlife under those circumstances. All the information needed to make an informed decision about the game is completely public and easily available on my own site. This isn't like, say, Steam where people have to decide on a purchase based on advertising and reviews. If someone doesn't like the game then they can play it as much as they want without paying a penny and find out. If someone doesn't like the update schedule then it's trivial for them to see it before committing any money whatsover. Thirdly, the money thing. I do make good money now on Patreon, although for over a year I was working on Newlife but making nothing at all, so averaging my income over the game's lifespan it looks much less impressive. Ultimately though, I work full-time on the game and making more or less money is not going to affect that unless I make so much that I can bring more people in or so little that I have to find other work. At the end of the day, I'm not going to apologise for making a good living. I've spent years of hard work making a game that people can play for free, and I manage to get a good income because some people are willing to pay me for that even though it's entirely voluntary to do so. If someone's working a crappy minimum wage job then they should not support me on patreon even if they like the game, because they need the money more themselves. But while I don't expect their money, I don't think it's fair to attack me over what I do make. It's especially odd considering that the angry people are generally not the ones supporting me, so they've played and enjoyed my game for free. In the very rare situations where I've had an angry post from someone claiming to be a patron, I've asked them to PM me on Patreon so I could refund them - I don't recall even once being taken up on that offer which makes me suspect that those anonymous blog commenters claiming to be furious patrons were just troll accounts. Fourthly, the pace of releases. This certainly is a real thing: the time between releases has tended to increase. That is the case and it may well continue to do so although I certainly intend to stick to my minimum of 1 release per calendar month. Why is that? Well, there are a few reasons that all contribute to it: - First, as new stuff gets added the game becomes more complicated. Newlife has a huge number of variables that need to be considered when writing new content and as the number of variables increases the time needed to write to them increases non-linearly. It isn't quite exponential because I take steps to avoid haing to literally multiply out every possibility, but every new trait or game mechanic takes more time to add than the one before. - Second, and probably the most significant effect: when I write new content I base it on the best stuff I already have. The best stuff is usually longer, often significantly so. This means that new scenes tend to grow larger than older ones. A good example of this is to compare the "ask him to wear a condom" action which was in the original release with the similar but much newer "ask him to remove his condom" action. The latter has lots of variation and clocks in at around lines of code. The former is around 40 lines, but it was around half that in the original release as it had some content added later. The line action is IMO much better than the line one, but it takes significantly more time to write. - Third is one I didn't realise at the time, but a lot of the very early stuff was heavily planned out before I officially started work on it. The final step in getting Newlife online was sorting out things like the UI and save system. During this I stopped myself from writing much new content, but I was still thinking about it and making notes ahead of time. When came out I had a very good idea of what I wanted to add up to and quite a lot of the stuff up to was planned too. Things like planning scenes and deciding what to write take up a fair bit of time, but a lot of that work had already been done by the time I started on new scenes early on. - Fourth is the grain of truth in these nasty accusations. When Newlife first came out it was overwhelmingly exciting, having a game actually released online. I couldn't think about anything else for weeks. I remember waking up thinking about Newlife, working all day, maybe 16 hours straight until I had a splitting headache from staring at the screen and then doing it over again the next day. So, it's true that in the first month or two I worked more time than I do now, but that sort of lifestyle isn't healthy or sustainable. I've now dropped down to a normal full-time schedule and even then I had a mini-intervention from some of my friends around something like a year or eighteen months ago because they thought I was spending too much time working and getting too stressed about it. Well, this turned into a bit of a long reply - no doubt you can tell that I find it very frustrating to get this sort of hate directed at me. I hope now that I've explained my position you can see that you were being mislead by the "30 lines a month" type of lies that some people have been throwing around behind my back. Of course I'm not expecting you personally to sign up as a patron - that's fine. By all means keep on playing the game and I hope you enjoy it. Well, that's all I have to say for now. Have a happy Christmas everyone!
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