House of Hellish Harlots v0.024 (to be new public demo) released

I was able to recover from the computer crash mishap a little faster than I was anticipating.  This means "House of Hellish Harlots" ver0.024 is now ready for release for patrons at:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/house-of-hellish-57036705

This is what I'm hoping will be the new public demo.  It covers the first 5 rounds and ends after the first 'special' round.  I'm going to release it here first to check there aren't any obvious bugs, and then put it up on the public website in a week or so.

Here are details of the new additions:

NEW HARLOT: PEL-V GNOI
Just the one new harlot this month (because of all the other changes). Pel-V is one of the Doctoress's artificial beings.  She's inspired by the watermelon girl from Monmusu Quest crossed with Pel-O.  Her scenario is vore-y.  You have been warned!

REPEAT HARLOT: OSCULIA SUFFOCATI
Osculia gets a new repeat scenario.  This follows right after her first and makes her a lot more dangerous.

The reason there are only the two new scenarios is I had to make a lot of other changes last month, which I'll list below:

QoL: ACCELERATED START
Now with even more acceleration.  I added The Madam's explanation of mulligan tokens to the list of things that can be skipped for subsequent playthroughs.  This option will use up 3 actions, but introduce all of the NPCs and fastforward through explanations of some of The Madam's functions.  It still leaves one action left for the player to grab an emergency potion from The Doctoress, etc.

As part of the implentation for this, I cleaned up the transition going from The Madam presenting the next round of harlots to the Club Activities phase (visiting the various NPCs before pucking a harlot).  This gives me a spot to add little warnings from The Barman to indicate he has new information to impart.  (In this case, a warning before Round 5).

I also fixed the bug where using a mulligan token in the 1st round would force the player to go through the Barman's full intro (again).

QoL: BUY ANY CHARM
As also requested, I added an option to the Buxom Lolibaba where a player can have the option of buying any charm for the cost of a mulligan token (similar to the select any harlot option The Madam offers).  I doubt this will be in the finished game, but it's probably useful now for testing purposes.

SELECTION ALGORITHM
I tweaked this to allow some repeat visits to show up more frequently and also to give harlots the ability to schedule future round appearances.  You'll see what I mean if you run into Osculia.  You won't have to wait long for her to show up again for her repeat visit!

I also designated some rounds to be special rounds with slightly different selection criteria.  These are primarily for the mini-boss harlots when I get around to writing them.  In the meantime, it's a good place to dump the late-game harlots that require stricter conditions to survive.  From the player's perspective, it means they're less likely now to get an unwinnable combination of harlots on the 1st round. 

GRAMMAR FIX FOR PLURAL GIFTS
I fixed a few things that readers have pointed out.  The major one is that gifts now have an .isSingular attribute.  Items like 'grapes' should now be referred to as 'them' rather than 'it'.  It's a minor change, but I know it was bothering some folks before.

Overall, the game shouold now feel like a proper demo that covers the 1st third of the game and has an ending message should the player survive the first 5 rounds.

Unfortunately, I couldn't fit everything in, so this was what I had to cut and hold back for a future release:

NEW HARLOT: BOOBFAIRY
I have about 5K words typed up and just one scene to finish.  She should be showing up in the next release and will also bring a friend.  As with Osculia she has a more dangerous follow-up scenario and putting her back a month will give me a chance to finish that as well.

BARMAN ADVICE
Along with the round 5 warning, I was going to give the Barman new advice he could give out on the relative strengths of harlots.  Then I realised having him talk about Tier 1 harlots after the player would stop seeing them didn't make a lot of sense.  I'll look to have him speak briefly to the player at the beginning of Round 2 and that unlock advice on harlot tiers.

MINI-BOSSES
They're still on the way.  For the moment, high tier harlots like Hiru and Tete can fill that role.

VISION CHARM FIX
This is currently delayed until the beginning of the next round because the round the player buys it causes an issue when they'd see Anna Boa as a human during the introductions and then as a lamia when they went back to stage to make their choice.  If this happens, they should comment on it!

Also, a more unfortunate oversight:

NURSE HONEY'S CURE FOR LIPS FIXATION
This makes Osculia's new scenario a little more dangerous than I originally intended. (I forgot I only added implementation for the ailments currently in use and didn't update to add Lips Fixation.)

Once I've fixed this and any other bugs patrons have noticed I'll update the public demo on the https://houseofhellishharlots.com/ website.  (In a week or so, at a guess).

HoHH ver0.024 Delayed Due to Computer Crash

As I reported to patrons yesterday, I wasn't able to put out my regular monthly release.  My computer crashed while I was in the middle of working on a repeat scenario for Osculia Suffocati.  This managed to corrupt the story file and I wasn't able to retrieve it.

Thankfully I have backups (I backup to an external hard drive at the beginning of every month) and was able to also find a more recent automated backup.

Unfortunately, I still lost the last 3 weeks of work I'd done in Twine.  As I told patrons, this was only the coding work.  All raw texts are in MS .docs, so they were fine.  I also typed the new selection algorithm in notepad first (because the Twine editor runs very slowly now that the project is as big as it is), so I still have that.

I did lose a lot of the QoL changes I made as well as the implementation of the two harlots I was planning to add with v0.024.  This is a massive nuisance as I'll have to redo them, but it is what it is.  No sense crying about it.

I estimate it'll take about a week or two to get caught up again.  Depending on where I am in the month, I'll either put the release out then, or hold it back and treat it as a bumper release for October.

I'm planning for this to be the new public demo as it removes a lot of the repetition on restarts (especially the Barman's intro), moves a few of the dangerous harlots back to later rounds so they're not murdering noobies on Round 1, and a proper demo ending checkpoint rather than the nonsensical "we've run out of harlots" message the Madam currently gives you.

As for guarding against this happening again, now that I know Twine handles hardware crashes very badly, I'll switch my archive policy to after every new feature.