The most recent version of Nothing is Forever is now free to download! With 3 chapters of around 1-2h each, there's now a lot of content in the game. Version 0.3.2 also comes with many fixes and quality of life improvments. See all the changes below.

Changelog:

• Fix of a couple bugs and slightly improvement of performance of android version
• Extensive proofreading of chapter 3
• Introduction of a “hint menu” with information about future skills needed for each girl
• More elaborated “lovemeter” menu
• Removal of a couple of useless game mechanics/info
• Removal of special shader effects

Detailed explanation of changes:

This patch comes with a bit more changes than the typical patch for Nothing is Forever. It brings the complete proofreading of chapter 3, thanks to a generous help of a native speaker, and the correction of a couple of minor bugs that went unnoticed until now. Besides that, it also introduces a new mechanic, improves upon an older one, and removes some functionalities that were obsolete or were causing too many compatibility issues to be worthy keeping.

Improved lovemeter menu:

This menu was quite lackluster so far, so I thought it needed to present a bit more information. This information will become more and more useful as the game progresses.

The idea is to have a place to show the player the result of his actions and how his relationships are changing. This is a visible representation of what I’ll call the lovemeter mechanic: a system on top of the personality points that helps give the main character a constant personality, can define which options/paths are available or not, and gives consequences to the player's choices. Basically, making sure your choices matter for the outcome of the story, and not just the amount of points you get, or skills you have.

For example, until Jen's hotel room scene, if you look at the lovemeter menu, you'll see whether you have always been professional with her, if you can't help but get too close to her, if you find her beautiful, etc. That's decided based on several choices you made. Then, in the hotel scene, you'll be sent into a different path if you have always remained professional, regardless of skills or personality points.

In the future, similar mechanics might allow or block some other paths, opening new choices, give the chance of gaining new skills for free (like the Sweetness skill in chapter 3), limit which skills you can use, define who your official girlfriend is and what kind of relationship you have, check if you are cheating on her or not, etc. 

I'll admit that all of this is still not very clear in my head and I don't know if it'll ever become a fun and interesting mechanic, but I want to have a good foundation to work on.

Introduction of a "hint" menu for skills to use:

I've never liked when I have to follow a walkthrough or “read” the developer’s mind in order to figure out what choices I need to make to get the outcome I want in a game. I tried to avoid that in this game by giving a lot of information to players (unless they want to play on blind mode), but there was still a place where this wasn’t working well: figuring out what skills might be needed for a given girl. I thought that the “kinky hints”, the “guess the kink” menus, or just talking to them would be enough, but it’s not. All of that is enough to try to guess what kinks they might be into, but there's no way of telling what their next lewd scene will be like, when it will happen, or what skills might be required.

To try to help with that, I made an extra menu in the “skills menu” that looks like this:

This gives an estimate of the skills the girls might need in the “near future”, so players can better plan for it, although it won’t be 100% correct and the “predictions” won't be too far ahead.  It will just be what the main character can realistically figure out with the information he has.

As it says in the image, this menu is updated when important information is given to the player. It will also change depending on paths taken, choices made, etc. 

Removal of a couple of useless game mechanics/info

This concerns the “tasks” button on the phone that was never used and also the tutorial message that said you’d receive messages throughout the game and you could choose to answer them or not. Turns out that I haven’t used any of that and it was just confusing, so I removed it.

Removal of special shader effects

This GitHub repository has what I think is the most fascinating add-on for renpy. The problem is it doesn’t work on mac or android (I’m not sure on linux actually). It was really fun to learn what it can do and I used the shader effects at points to increase immersion: the 3d section during the panic attack in chapter 1; when talking with the different personality voices; the shadows effects when the light went out in the hotel room with Jen; and some windy texture effects at a couple times.

While I really liked those things, it was causing too many errors and compatibility issues between versions. I tried to make some other interesting effects with renpy’s native tools to replace some of those effects. Namely, when talking with the personality voices because that happens a lot and I wanted to keep the same eerie feeling of those scenes. I don’t think it works as well, but it’s okay. The rest of the effects are gone.

As much as I liked all those effects, they were just used very sporadically, and not worthy of the few bug reports I got. This was a needed choice to prevent more future problems.

Save compatibilities:

Nothing of this should affect your saves. Except it they are near one of the sequences that used the shader effects. Your saves contain a bunch of past info (I think it’s like 50 text lines) so that the rollback function can work. If any of that info contains one of the effected scenes (panic attack, talking with the voices in your head, hotel room with jen), you’ll get an error when you try to load it. I'm sorry about that. Any save sufficiently way from those points, like at the end of any chapter, will work.

Free version:

The complete game with this patch - version 0.3.2 - will be available for free. This will (probably) be the latest free version of the game and act as a demo. Any future updates will be behind a pay wall: either a one-time payment at itch with access to all future updates, or a monthly subscription at my patreon that gets you the most recent version besides a few other perks

This is all for today. Hopefully, everything in this version works well and the next one will be the release of chapter 4. Cheers