Just a reminder that the Fan Art contest ends on Monday — so if you’d like to enter the contest, please submit your fan art now!
We only have one entry so far (thank you, you’re awesome :)), but have three prizes to give out~
Author: Skye
r41.5 – Save/Load & Wyvern TF
Naga Queen is excited about the new build!
My initial plan for this release was to get right back into content updates. I got started with a nice bit of planning for the content update, and then remade the text editor in the new engine so I’d actually be able to get story text back into the game.
Unfortunately, mid-development, I started to realize just how broken the old Flash version is after hearing more and more bug reports for it. There’s a lot of subtle, game breaking bugs in it (like in the dino chapter where depending on which Flash runtime engine you use, Hanako will give you inaccurate directions and make the chapter unbeatable).
The new web version is much more stable and fixes those problems, and it’s the version of the game I strongly recommend people to use for that reason. One big thing that will help with more people using the new version is getting save/load ported over so you won’t have to rely on Flash to access save files.
So, here’s the new updates in this build:
Save/Load
The main feature of r41.5 is reintroducing save/load — a (perhaps) surprisingly large task given how everything ties into the save/load system. The new save/load system also includes new save file slots for subscribers, for a total of 20 slots. More slots support has been frequently requested, so hopefully comes in handy!
The system should be backwards compatible with old save files from previous Flash versions of the game. Under the hood, the format is pretty different, although as much as 10x more space-efficient versus the old method.
If you have an old save file that won’t load, or a new one that doesn’t seem to save/load correctly, please report it as a bug and attach your save file. (Remember, you don’t even need to register a separate account on the bug tracker, it uses your existing one 🙂 If the fields on the bug report confuse you, most of them you can leave blank.)
Wyvern TF
In order to prevent the game getting into a weird state with save/load, I also went ahead and ported the TF part of the Wyvern DLC. Note that it doesn’t include the monster part of that since that was implemented as a mod, and modding hasn’t been implemented yet. Even without, this is still a quite fun TF to play. Until that content comes online, the second easiest way to get knocked up as a Wyvern is to find the Octomaid in the debug rooms.
Login System
Also to support save/load, the login system has been added in the new engine. This mostly is needed for players using the demo without starting logged in, who then decide they’d like to login mid-game so as to save their progress.
In that case, you’d see the new login screen:
Text Editor
The text editor is an important tool that I use to get text into the game and tested. The first part of this release was spent getting this up and running so that I’d be able to eventually get game content added again.
Unlike the old Flash engine where the tool was limited to myself, the parse tester part of this tool can now be used by modders directly to test out your strings… though that may not be overly useful until modding itself is implemented again. Still, you can check it out by pressing ` if you want to.
Misc
- Support for much longer text on-screen (this involved writing a packet splitting system; fixes #83).
- Self-test mode – now as part of automated builds, the game will self-test on a small collection of save files to flag potential issues. This helped find a bunch of potential save/load errors before this build got released. In future, I’d like to expand this to more areas of automated testing.
- UI Windowing system to support the Text Editor.
- When in water, don’t assume slugs are grinding against the floor since there may not be a floor. (Have them grind against themselves instead :3)
- Frogs can now breathe underwater, and won’t produce visible slime when either in water or underwater (Fixes #67).
- Added a quick search bar to the bug tracker header to quickly find issues.
- Fixed bug where frog TF player description is missing player eyes description.
This build is now released in both full version and demo variants.
Fan Art Contest Reminder
Don’t forget there is a fan art contest going on now. We’ve already had one lovely entry (thank you!), but we have three prizes to give out!
UPDATE – Hotfix
41.51 fixes a bug in this version that caused frogs to respawn in ch7 — thanks for the report!
A (Fan) Fan Art Contest
Our resident community member Sly is hosting an Underworld Fan Art contest!
Prize pool
Sly put together the following prizes for the contest. The winner will get their first pick, then the second person, then so on:
– A one month subscription to Underworld (Provided by Sly)
– A one month Discord Nitro Classic sub (Provided by Sly)
– A $25 Steam gift card (Provided by Skye)
Entries
All entries must relate to The Underworld in some way. Anything from simple mspaint doodles of characters to fancily lit full game scenes is great, as long as it has original artwork you made and is about the game.
All skill levels are welcome to enter (beginners welcome!). This is intended to be a fun community activity, so don’t worry if you’re not a pro. 🙂
Ideally, if you can add a footer as described in the footer section of the earlier released fan art guide (basically linking to Underworld as well as your own site) it can be helpful for the game, but it’s not required!
Deadline
All art must be submitted via this form by Feb 21, 2022 Noon US Pacific Time.
You are, of course, welcome to also post your art to FA/Twitter/wherever also.
Voting
After the submission deadline, all valid entries will be posted on the research blog. There will be a two week deadline for people to vote using the usual Underworld voting system. Then prizes will be awarded from first place on down.
Legal
No purchase needed for entry. Contest is open to all persons aged 18 and over.
Entries will be submitted under the User Generated Content License (same license as mods, this just allows me to reshare the art on the blog — you can still post your piece to wherever else you like, too!).
Questions / Discussion
Feel free to ask questions in discord, or if you don’t use discord, the blog post comments here is also a good place.
r41.4 – Demo, Mobile, Legacy, and more
A new Dragon Queen publicly transforming.
[Portrait] [Landscape (full scene)]
Release 41.4 is out, and brings forward a number of features from the Flash version into the new non-web version:
Demo – Try out The Underworld without having to download Flash. As with the old Flash version, the first three chapters are fully playable (today’s art is a scene from one of them).
As the demo hadn’t been updated in a long time, new demo users will probably notice the most changes in Haven. Haven has NPC’s who comment on you when you’re exposed, and the trading outpost has a couple side-story scenes with Elijah.
Fullscreen – Activate in settings.
Queues – This isn’t a new feature, but it might now be visible depending on how much traffic the demo gets. If a lot of people are playing the demo at the same time, you may have to wait in a queue. (Previously the server would just crash / not respond if it had too much activity, so this is actually an improvement ;)). Anyone subscribed gets priority entrance through the queues. Ideally there’s no wait time even for demo players, so if wait queues become a common occurrence, I do plan to look into how to do proper autoscaling so no one has to wait. But overall, a short wait is still better than all of skycorp breaking entirely as sometimes happened with new releases back in the day.
Mobile / Touch – A number of new changes make it possible to play the game on mobile devices again. I’ve tested it in both Android Chrome + FireFox. Also, for the first time ever, this should mean you can play the game on iOS via chrome or firefox without needing a specialized flash-compatible browser. (Take that, apple censorship! :p).
Mobile devices should be auto-prompted to rotate to landscape and enable Touch Mode:
This will allow the game to be played as usual, without even having to download anything to your phone:
As before, touch mode enables larger sized buttons and the ability to scroll the text panes by touch-dragging them. Touch-drag is currently very slightly janky on mobile firefox, but works well on mobile chrome. (If you’re using mobile firefox and this is important to you, please post a bug to the bug database and I’ll investigate it further in future)
Legacy mode – If you got legacy way back in the day, the web version should now work for you.
Adjustable font sizes – Modify in settings.
Name entry – Enter male & female names during the intro.
~
I know it’s been a while since there’s been new content, and so my plan is to put engine work on hold for a bit to make some fun new content for the game next. There’s also an awesome TF/TG art sequence that goes with it by a very talented TF artist that I’m looking forward to sharing, but have been holding until the accompanying game content is ready — so look forward to that!
After the content update, I’ll return to engine work to finish things up (ex: modding, save/load, wyvern, etc).
In the meanwhile, please do report any bugs you find!
Art at the top is by myself — please excuse the programmer art! I’m still a beginner, but it’s fun to do art during the discord voicechats sometimes and more game art is always a good thing?
r41.3 – Whoredra Ported + Bugfixes
Have you missed being a multi-headed draconic prostitute? :3 The new engine has been updated with the Whoredra content ported over from the old Flash engine! Your fellow Whoredra heads, Emerald and Violet, are eager to welcome you back~
In the process, I also fixed up Whoredra AI to be much harder to get into softlock states. For instance, Emerald and Violet should no longer infinitely try to put on the same top if your belly is too large/pregnant to wear it. Note — it’s still intentionally possible to get into playable Bad End states by design… Violet does love her cursed piercings, and if that means your shared body ends up unsuitable for adventuring and you’re now relegated to only whoring up Haven, well… the other heads are fine with that 😉
This update includes the following changes & bug fixes:
- Whoredra ported over to new engine
- Fixed bug where Public Use Tattoo was causing High Metabolism effects instead of Public Use effects
- 74 – Added horseshoe to debug rooms
- 32 – Fix Whoredra gets stuck in farm
- 71 – Prevent Emerald from trying to grind mobs for money if wearing a nonviolent or obedient aspect (fixes first case #71)
- 71 – Whoredra heads remember which items fail an equip, and won’t retry them for a while (fixes second case of #71)
- 77 – Fix poll results not displaying
- 76 – Fixed cookie warning
- 33 – Fix cow transformation removes Whoredra heads
- 31 – Whoredra will no longer attempt to wear clothes in slots that would immediately burst due to horsecock or too large belly
- Whoredra head will not do a takeover for something that isn’t bugging them just because they’re in a bad mood because of other things
r41.2 – Porting Ch7, Succubunny, and Sell Scene
The new engine has been updated with content ported over from the Flash engine:
- Ch 7 (Aquarium Chapter) — Become a mermaid, shark, and whale
- Succubunny (Part 1 & 2) — Become a shortstack succubus bunny for a drakeling dom
- Sell Scene – Sell your milk & eggs to Elijah
All active subscribers (playing on PC) can check out the new build in the Researcher Intranet.
Optional Build E-Mails
If you’d like to be notified of when new builds are available (and other posts on this blog), there is now a system set up to do exactly that!
For easiest access, just login to the Researcher Intranet, and accept the prompt at the top (which will prepopulate your existing e-mail, so you don’t even have to type it in again). Or, you can also access the system directly here, including if you don’t otherwise have an account.
Tip: It is recommended to also add no-reply@updates.skycorp.global to any safe sender list or set up a gmail filter to allow messages from it, to ensure messages aren’t accidentally routed to your spam folder. Here is a page with instructions on how to do this for various platforms.
r41.01 – New Engine Released to Private
The new (non-Flash) engine discussed in the last post is now released to all active game subscribers!
With this new engine, you don’t need to download Flash. The game is now playable inside a desktop web browser with no additional dependencies. See the last post for details on what content is available in the new engine so far. Please do report bugs affecting Ch 1~6 content, as that’s all expected to work now.
- The map bug affecting r41 WIP should now be resolved.
- New servers have been deployed for European and Australian regions.
- Some misc backend improvements.
r41 WIP – New Engine is Playable (Non-Flash)
After much re-coding, the new engine is finally in a playable state!
This version is completely Flash-less, and will run right in your desktop web browser (tested in Firefox & Chrome). Support for mobile browsers & a mobile progressive web app will be added in future.
Currently chapters 1~6 should be playable in the new engine, though these haven’t been thoroughly tested so there will likely be some bugs yet. (Speaking of, if the minimap looks really weird, try refreshing the page to fix it.)
For now, this build is only available to WIP subscribers via the usual Researcher Intranet, though it will be rolled out to all active subscribers soon.
Cookies / Log-out
This is about seven years overdue, but the researcher intranet now supports cookies so you don’t have to manually log in every time. You can also log out, too.
Automated Builds
In the Researcher Intranet, you will now see a new WIP build labeled “autobuild.” This is currently available to all WIP subscribers and reflects the absolute latest content in source control. Just like all WIP builds, these aren’t recommended for typical gameplay as they haven’t yet been tested. However, it may be fun to take a look at the absolute latest changes to see what’s coming.
Similarly, there’s a new #builds discord channel, which gives a sneak peek into what’s being committed into source control as our trusty BuildBold tries to build each new commit and make it playable.
Currently, the #builds channel is viewable to everyone in Discord, though this may change to all subscribers, WIP, or no-one at all depending on if I’m working on something I want to surprise people with. (Similarly, autobuild may sometimes be unavailable).
Artist Info Page
There’s now a specific page for people to find out about contributing art for the game. Sign-ups for that are open on an ongoing basis, and we already have one super awesome TF sequence complete. I won’t be revealing it until the accompanying game content for it is ready, but the artist did an amazing job and I can’t wait to share it with you!
Backend / CDN
Lots of changes and upgrades to various server stuff on the backend, including: new OS, improved caching on the blog, in process moving a lot of static blog assets to a CDN, etc.
Seeking Artists + Engine Status Update
Flash Version Still Playable
First, an important reminder that even though you can’t play the game in most browsers due to Flash’s death, you can still play the game outside of browsers. Either download the standalone Flash Player Projector or install the APK on Android. Instructions are on the download page.
Call for Artists
As we get closer to getting actual new content again, I’d like to prepare by meeting more artists interested in contributing chapter cover art. If you enjoy drawing furry art, and want to do some for this game, please click here.
Non-Flash Port Progress
Work on porting the engine off of Flash is going well, with much of the recent work focused on getting the game to be playable with only a web browser (no install needed). There is still more work to do here, but the basics are functional now. It’s been a bit slow going as, among other challenges, I’ve had to learn a whole suite of new technologies. However, I’ve been making progress and hope to have an early beta to backers before too long. Again, thank you to everyone for your patience and support!
If you’d like to see some occasional work-in-progress screenshots, I typically post them to #research-lab on Discord. (Although they’re probably not super exciting to look at yet :P)
Also — in case you were wondering about the previous DLC/mod vote, I do still have plans to get to it. But once Flash stopped working in browsers, that bumped up the priority a lot for getting the port done as fast as I can manage it. New TF content will be the thing I work on next, right after the new engine.
Today’s research blog art is by the very talented AnthroMage; I am definitely imagining this as a transformation sequence 😉