Yesterday’s patch introduced a new bug when saving before a match, here’s a quick bugfix that corrects the issue.

https://mega.nz/#!eQZjVCYR!OMgQpAFZjzGLxpNNS2xQ3-Q57pjnctNSklAPdcTEQqM

Hey everybody.

I have another bugfix update that address some recently reported bugs and add some minor visual improvements. This is probably going to be the last bugfix unless something critical comes up. We’re preparing new content for the next major update, and I want to be able to integrate it into my main build.

https://mega.nz/#!OBYWkJrT!DFs2LsRT4NBcZqJh2jFczP1wPz0U7wfzZRB9HWIQECY

• Fixed rank 4 and 5 morning scenes not triggering
• Fixed an issue where disabling sprites would leave already loaded sprites in place
• Fixed an issue where buttons from previous scenes could remain in Night Off introduction
• Fixed an issue where saving on Sunday night would load on Sunday morning
• Fixed an issue where Yui’s affection would increase each time the game was loaded
• Fixed an issue where Player would retain stolen clothing after winning
• Player will more often take opponent’s clothing after combat if they share outfit items
• Reduced rate of affection gain with Yui
• Added messages to indicate affection gain during daytime events
• Added sprites to Cassie and Mara’s Night Off events

Hi all,

I’m trying to gather some ideas for the next feature for Night Games. If you have a few minutes, please stop by this thread: http://www.silverbardgames.com/forum/index.php?topic=1172.0 and post your thoughts.

Thanks

Hi Everybody!

The new update for Night Games is now available to everyone.

I hope you’ve all been enjoying the game. You can download the new version from the most recent Patreon post or from this Mega link:

https://mega.nz/#!GU4XgKqB!CFq5_glCcab6gMP-2C64DOOIHUNQ8IAP8y1lp_bbTWo 

If you’re interested in getting that extra event CG you keep seeing teased in the promo art, you can pledge at the $5 tier and get the Premium build.

If you guys encounter any bugs or want to give general feedback, I encourage you to visit the forum at http://www.silverbardgames.com/forum

Changelog:

• Added Reyka’s sprite
• Added Eve’s sprite
• Fixed an issue where Lame Glasses handicap triggers Mittens handicap
• Added an Image option for Exact Match Only.
• If Exact Match Only is set, skill art will only show up when in combat with the girl depicted in the image.
• Added a bunch of icons and filters over sprites to visually show active status effects
• The effects are going to be too cartoony for a lot of people, so I have them off by default, they can be enabled in the Options
• Added a bunch of error checking for missing images. This shouldn’t be relevant to most people unless the jar file is corrupted
• If status effects are enabled, they’ll also show up for the player on the clothes diagram in the inventory panel
• Fixed a cosmetic issue where arousal and mojo appear maxed immediately after loading
• Added tooltips describing all non-combat actions
• Added a warning before initiating combat if additional opponents are in the same area
• Removed the Mojo cost for Slime pets
• Alarm traps are now detectable at any distance
• Refactored some combat stuff, which you shouldn’t notice unless I broke something
• Added a couple alternate messages for running out of stamina
• Redid all the math for calculating and reporting different types of damage.
• I think I fixed a couple things while doing this. It’s entirely possible I broke some other things.
• Changed how Actions are organized, so they should be listed in a consistent order now
• Reimplemented and enabled Locate. The new version is not very elegant, but it shouldn’t blow up every time I touch the GUI
• Made the Inventory panel scrollable for the rare situations where the item list doesn’t fit
• Changed the way penetration is handled. All penetration positions cause automatic pleasure each turn
• Using Fucking skills will change your pace, adjusting the amount of automatic pleasure dealt
• Hopefully fixed the phantom strapon issue
• Changed check for intact underwear after combat to be more robust
• Added Submissive skill: Honey Pot
• Added Submissive ultimate skill: Pleasure Slave
• Squeeze Balls now scales with Power, and if user has a Shock Glove, also Science
• Buffed Handjob and Finger so they deal more consistent damage
• Two new Fetish training scenes by KajunKrust
• All EX skills have been replaced with Adaptive skill variants, which will scale with your highest primary attribute
• Probably fixed Workshop training scene randomization
• Daytime scenes with girls now allows you to select the specific scene you want instead of randomizing them
• Sunday nights now don’t have a match, instead you have unique events for ways to spend your night off.
• Added Stay In night off event
• Added Cassie Date night off event with two outcomes by Snake
• Added Yui intercourse defeat scene by Rex
• Added 2 Yui daytimes scenes. One of them by CK
• Added Eve intercourse draw scene by Marcus Koen
• Added Strip Top art with Jewel
• Added Strip Bottom art with Yui
• Added Ass Fuck art with Jewel
• Added Doggy Style art with Kat
• Fixed message for Adaptive Thrust
• Fixed an issue where all characters were trending towards Horny mood when nude
• Buttons exceeding window size will no longer wrap to next line, which caused them to be obscured by the next line
• On smaller display sizes, Only 4 buttons will be on each row
• Struggling or Reversing Flying stance when you also know Fly now puts you in control of the stance
• Struggling or Reversing Flying stance when you know Ninja Leap lets you land safely
• Added more expressiveness to the sprites in Threesome scenes
• Added Workshop training scene by DJWriter

Premium Only:

• Cassie Sex scene CG
• Kat Sex scene CG
• Reyka Sex scene CG
• Yui Sex Practice scene CG
• Yui Exposure scene CG

Hi everybody.

I don’t remember how publicly I talked about this, but a while back I decided I should spend some of our growing Patreon income on commissioning more writing. I contacted a couple writers to request 3 or 4 500-1000 word scenes per month. Unfortunately, that ended up falling through as both writers became too busy to write for me. This past month, I’ve been too busy dealing with a job change and moving to look for a replacement.

Now that I’ve finished moving into my new place, I do have some time to seek out and vet people. There doesn’t appear to be a good hub for adult writers looking for commissions, so I’ll probably post on reddit and then look through individual tumblr and deviantart accounts.

However, if you’re here because you enjoy Night Games and you have some writing experience, I’d be happy to hear from you. You can email me at thesilverbard@gmail.com with some of your writing samples, and we can discuss rates.

It should also be noted that we’ve cleared our $1000 goal to commission someone to consult on our UI. I think finding a freelance graphic designer who is open to small scale adult game work is going to take me some time. I’m also probably going to need to set aside some money for a few months so I can provide a decent project budget for them.

If that happens to be something you have experience with, by all means you can contact me for that too, but I’m less optimistic about this one.

Today is the last day of the year, and since I don’t have any exciting plans tonight, I wanted to take some time to look back on where we’ve come in the past year, and where we’re planning to go next year. While there’s plenty to be said about the state of the world or one of the best years of video game releases, I’m going to limit my scope to Silver Bard Games.

The first and biggest change was partnering with AimlessArt and turning my one-man development site into an actual team. Technically, he started last December, but his work didn’t get released until last year. This was frankly a huge stroke of luck for me. When I started looking for an artist to recruit, I wasn’t expecting someone of his experience and skill to respond. I was nowhere near able to pay what his work was worth. He took a big risk partnering with me and I’m glad to finally be able to pay him properly.

The influx of art was a huge boon for Night Games. Character sprites was never something I had planned, but they improved the game far more than the equivalent amount of inline art. I appreciated Nergantre’s portraits, but having a quick visual indicator of the opponents’ state of dress and arousal is a big deal. I think this was a key factor in finding a wider audience for the game.

An event this year that I was quite pleased by, though many of you may not have noticed it, was the release of Trounce Tickle Tease. This was a small rock-paper-scissors game I put together to get some practice with Ren’Py. It was exactly the sort of small, cohesive game that is poison for Patreon, but I always enjoy seeing. I originally wasn’t planning to release the game and just use it as practice, but testing the early build was more fun than I expected. It was also a good tonal match for the other games I had put out, the light-hearted competition of Night Games with the giddy sexual exploration of Seven Minutes in Heaven.

Unfortunately, with AimlessArt busy working on Night Games and the sudden disappearance of the other artist I routinely commissioned, the art for T3 ended up both more expensive and less consistent than I was used to. Still, I’m glad I was able to finish and release it. While the response to the game was very quiet, the people who did play the game seemed to enjoy it. More importantly, it was proof that I could handle a side project while still continuing development of Night Games. Perhaps sometime in the near future, I’ll have the extra art and writing budget to add the additional endings I’ve planned out.

The biggest event of the year as far as our Patreon is concerned was the release of the premium version of Night Games. This was something I had planned before I hired an artist, but I was still concerned about how people would respond. Since I make games as a hobby rather than a career, I want to put out complete and satisfying versions of my games for free whenever possible. However, if we want more out of our games than I can do alone, we need money to hire people. Making a version of the game with some bonus art for our patrons seemed like a reasonable compromise. The fact that our Patreon income tripled the month after releasing it makes me feel like that was the right decision.

As far as other improvements for our flagship project, Night Games, I probably shouldn’t rehash the last several change logs. The game is quite a bit more balanced, stable, and full of content compared to a year ago. At this point I feel comfortable saying the game’s development is not just mature, but within sight of completion. There’s plenty more content we’d love to add both before and after our 1.0 release, but we’re beginning work on the last big milestone. With that in mind, let’s discuss plans for the coming year. I’ll probably post this next part to various forums, for all the people who don’t care about the rambling retrospective I just wrote.

In 2018, we can predict a much higher budget than I’ve been used to working with. Half of that is earmarked for art, which we should be able to put out at a faster rate than usual. I am working on something on a side project, which I’ll talk about later, but I expect most of our art production is going to continue to be for Night Games.

I’m happy to report that the sprites for Reyka and Eve are complete and will be in the next update for the game. Before you get too excited, there’s still plenty of work to do before that update is finished. I asked AimlessArt to finish the sprites first because they were a Patreon goal, but I always plan multiple months worth of content for each update.

Meanwhile, I’ve already told people who have asked what the next gameplay change I’m adding is. Currently participants have matches all seven nights of the week. I figure that’s probably pretty exhausting, so I’m giving everyone Sunday nights off. On this night off, players will have the opportunity for longer, more involved events than they get in the daytime. I haven’t sorted out all the mechanical ramifications of this, but I’m working on it.

In proportion to the whole of Night Games, that’s a fairly minor addition. The big obvious thing the game still needs is an end. I’ve already laid some groundwork for the game’s neutral ending, which is going to focus on investigating and meeting the mysterious Benefactor who is funding everything. However, I figure that’s less interesting to most players than the character specific routes, so I don’t want to implement it first.

A long while back, I storyboarded the events of Mara’s routes and implemented her specialization skillset. I ended up shelving that when I added more work to improving usability, but she’s still probably going to be the route I finish first. I have Cassie’s and Angel’s routes mostly planned out along with their specializations, so one of them will probably be next. The biggest question mark is Jewel. I have some ideas for her, but nothing concrete yet. I may make endings for some of the unlockable opponents, but that’s not planned yet.

On the subject of Night Games, people occasionally ask me for the source code so they can extract scenes or develop mods. I decided to upload the source to Gitlab, since they’re apparently more tolerant of adult content than Github. I’m not storing any of the art in the repository, so you’ll still need to come to either the blog or Patreon to get new builds. I’m also not sure how frequently I’m going to push my local source to the repo. However, if you want to look at my code for whatever reason, you should be able to clone and build from https://gitlab.com/SilverBard/NightGames.

However, Silver Bard Games is more than just Night Games. Before Night Games is done, we need to figure out what will replace it as our main project. To minimize downtime, I plan to start development of the next major game as a side project. As many of you may remember, I’ve put off finishing the 3rd girl for Seven Minutes in Heaven so long that it’s essentially a running gag. I will eventually finish that. I’d also like to add some more endings to Trounce Tickle Tease. However, those are both nice compact games without a lot of room for expansion. Neither of those is going to replace Night Games.

I’m currently working on a proof of concept for an RPG about monster girls, taking a lot of design inspiration from the Monster Hunter franchise. Thematically, it plays with the idea of a non-combat focused adventurer. In most fantasy video games, the vocabulary of the adventurer is all about fighting. However, high fantasy is full of intelligent magical humanoids who probably require more tact than simply hitting them with swords. This is a game about playing a specialist who finds creative solutions to conflicts involving monstergirls, often with seduction.

Mechanically, this will be a turn based RPG, but I want each enemy to be a unique puzzle with multiple solutions, similar to an Undertale pacifist run. Much like the Monster Hunter games research, preparation, and observation of each type of enemy will be critical. There will be no random battles, only quests, so you’ll have the opportunity (and expectation) to prepare for each encounter.

When I say I’m putting together a proof of concept, I’m not talking about a demo. I’ve never seen this type of combat does in a turn based RPG, so I actually do need to make sure it’s viable. If someone else has seen RPG combat done like this, please send me the game title so I can use it as reference. If this prototype is successful, it’ll have plenty of room for expansion and will be a worthy successor to Night Games when that is finished.

There’s probably more I could talk about for the upcoming year, but this post is already incredibly long. If you have any questions or comments, I’m always listening. If you’d like to support Silver Bard Games ongoing work, our Patreon is at https://www.patreon.com/silverbardgames. I’ll end this post with a friendly reminder that all $5+ supporters gain access to a premium version of Night Games containing more than a dozen bonus event CG.

I decided today to remove comments from all the permanent pages on the blog to give the site a cleaner look. Most of those comments were old enough to no longer be relevant anyway.

Commenting on posts is still fine, of course, but if you have questions or feedback, the best way to contact me is on the forum:

http://www.silverbardgames.com/forum

To celebrate the holidays, AimlessArt is planning to do a livestream at his Picarto.tv channel. Stop by and you can watch him work. https://picarto.tv/Aimlessart

Hi Everybody!

It’s been a week since the current update released for Patrons, so you know what that means. It’s now available for everyone!

Mega Link

This update obviously includes the sprites for Kat and Samantha that were our $400 Patreon goals. You’d never know it by looking at our current Patreon status, but we actually hit that goal quite recently. We’re going to have the sprites for Reyka and Eve in the next major update.

We’ve also got a lot of major mechanical changes designed to let you tailor the game difficulty and pace to your tastes. Old saves are compatible, but you may want to start a new game to take a look at the new modifiers that are available.

If you want to discuss the game, please consider clicking on that Forum link in the nav bar. It’s pretty quiet right now, but I’m hoping more people will join.

The full change log is very long and only a post back, so I’m not going to paste it in a again. Just scroll down a bit.