What's up, guys!
This time, we came to bring you the news that everyone has been waiting for: Living in a Brothel version 0.4.0 has been released.

As always, when it comes to an update that brings new content, it first becomes available to our $25 or higher patrons, after 2 week of release, it becomes available to our $12 patrons, and finally, after 1 month, it becomes available to all patrons and everyone who purchased the game on Steam, Itch and OppaiMan.

In our last post, we promised to release the update within a week, but unfortunately during the testing phase, we noticed serious issues in the Android version resulting from updates to the Ren'py engine, which caused the game to crash frequently on mobile phones.
Because of this, we needed more time to understand and fix the problem, which has now been solved.

We also took the opportunity to fix other bugs that we found during the testing phase and implement some changes that we didn't have the opportunity to implement previously, but would have been welcome.

In short, we took the opportunity to optimize the experience as much as possible before making the new update available to the public, as we want our players' experience to be the best possible.

Let's talk briefly about each point of this new update:

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Exploring the City: From this version onwards, the player will be able to explore new locations in the city by exiting through the bar's entrance door. At first, we only have the gym available, but in the future more locations will be accessible.

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Steam Cloud Support: We have a new feature exclusive to the Steam version, Steam Cloud support.
You can now share your save between different devices using Steam's cloud service, and you can also keep a backup of your save.

This is a feature requested by some players that, for technical reasons, had not been implemented until now, but we have overcome this limitation and made this feature available to players starting with this update.

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Monochromatic Effect: The code related to the monochromatic effect, which is used in character memories, has been optimized. It's now possible to use this effect in animations.

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Updated Achievements Requirements: The requirements needed to earn achievements that already existed in the game have been updated to accommodate the new content available in this update.

This means that, for example, to unlock the "Detective" achievement, which consists of unlocking all Gallery Images, the player will also have to unlock the new Gallery Images that were added in this version.

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Automatic New Clothes: The code related to the implementation of renders that change the character's outfit depending on the day the game is in has been optimized.
Now, new outfits that appears in future updates will be included automatically, without the need for changes to the code. This is a "back end" update and will not be noticed by the player during gameplay, but it'll help in the development of future versions.

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Way to unlock Gallery Images updated: One of the improvements we had previously planned to make was to distribute the Gallery Images that refer to Escort Forum (chapters related to Thomas' story) as Secret Cards throughout these same chapters, as we consider this Secret Card mechanic to be the one that players like the most.

In previous updates, we opted to, as a preliminary step, unlock all of these Gallery Images at once upon reaching the end of Thomas' story, as we did not have enough time to implement them properly in the game.

We have now implemented them as Secret Cards, according to what our team had planned.

The same was done with the 4 Gallery Images unlocked at the end of the scene The Bunny and the Kitty, which have now also been distributed as Secret Cards throughout the game.

If you want to try to find them, but have already finished the game, we recommend that you delete your save and start a new one.

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Jackpot Animation: When you hit a Jackpot in the Slot Machine Minigame, an animation is played along with the previously existing sound effect from now on.

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Performance Boost: We have optimized the use of cache memory and RAM, ensuring a significant performance gain.
On the other hand, the game's RAM usage has increased and, consequently, the required specifications.

This has resulted in faster loading of game files, which can be especially noticeable in animations, which now run smoothly.
You'll also notice that the game will respond more quickly to your inputs from now on.

Some users reported slow loading of animations, so we decided to work on solving the issue.
We hope that with this performance gain, animations will load immediately or, if that is not the case, at least more quickly.

Starting with this update, we recommend at least 3GB of RAM on PC versions and 2GB of RAM on mobile versions.

Using devices with lower specifications than this may result in the game not running properly. In practice, this may make it impossible for the game to run on really old mobile devices, but it generated a significant performance gain on the vast majority of other devices.

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Committed Reader Achievement: We've reduced the percentage of script that must be read to unlock this achievement from 95% to 90%.
This achievement was harder to unlock than we planned, so we've adjusted the requirements to make it easier for players to reach.

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Diagonal Jackpots: From now on, when you manage to line up 3 "7s" or 3 "BARs" diagonally in the Slot Machine Minigame, it'll count as a Jackpot.

We initially decided to only count a Jackpot when you lined up 3 "7s" or 3 "BARs" in the center, as we wanted this to be a hard achievement to unlock, but we felt that the difficulty was higher than we had planned.

This change should make it easier to unlock the Jackpot achievement, while still keeping it sufficiently challenging.

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Bug Fixes: We found some bugs in the previous version, v0.3.1, and took the chance to fix them before releasing v0.4.0.

The bugs we found were minor and didn't have a major impact on gameplay, with the exception of a bug where character icons would disappear during mobile conversations in specific situations.
In these rare cases, the mobile system layout would become messed up and the message would become impossible to read. This problem is now a thing of the past.
We also took the opportunity to fix even minor bugs.

If you want to know more about the fixed bugs, take a look at the patch notes.

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And finally we have reached the end!
We talked a lot in this post, as there was a lot of stuff to tell you, but as we were focused on development, we ended up leaving it a little aside.

You can download the new versions from this post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/living-in-v0-4-0-121082788

We hope you enjoy the new content and the improvements can make your gameplay even better.
Cheers! 🍻