phanes
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0.8.0 Behind the Scenes and 0.9.0 Preview
🕑 Added 2020-04-06 15:53:20 +0000 UTCHi, perverts! My cough is doing fine, although it's annoyingly persistent. It shouldn't hold me back, though! This release will have a scene chosen by the Center of Attention patrons: a play scene between the player and the dominant Esther Shepherd. There's a poll going on right now to pick the next Theresa play scenes, and $5 patrons can also send requests for assorted small snippets any time, so consider upgrading if you're able!
Here are some thoughts on update 8 and a preview of what's going to be in update 9!
Identity and h i s t o r i c a l a c c u r a c y
In update 8, I added the ability for you to choose whether you have breasts! It may seem a little weird that it wasn't already there, considering that you could customize other parts of your character, but I was stuck on a dangerous sticking point: historical accuracy.
Ruin Me is set in a deliberately-vague year between the two world wars, probably before the Great Depression. The 1920s were a time of increased sexual liberation, but they didn't yet have a framework for widespread acceptance of queerness, and there wasn't really a way to have a medically-supported transition for trans folks. So I decided that if your character was a woman with a phallus, she wouldn't have breasts, and decided not to track breasts at all to save implementation complexity and avoid locking stuff away.
But I wasn't being a very good queer writer there. Firstly, there absolutely are people with phalluses and breasts without medical intervention. Second, fuck letting the limitations of the setting force a character into dysphoria; I'd much rather you be able to play a happy trans person from the start of the game than enforce some attachment to one particular aspect of the historical setting.
As part of that shift in my thinking, the upcoming release will let you be nonbinary! As a genderqueer person myself, I probably should have allowed this from the start, but I was again hung up on historical stuff.
Of course, the 1920s were really racist. It was also when Lovecraft did a lot of his work, and he was super-racist even for the time. As a writer who draws from his stuff, I don't want to carry that bullshit forward. So while I'm not erasing that context (Arthur alludes to his difficulty getting work as a graduate of a HBCU, for example), I wanted to make Barrowport a slightly-magical place where all sorts of bigotry just don't rear their heads.
It's still a little weird that the mirror in your room lets you "change" your race as easily as your outfit, but I tried to frame it in a way that makes it clear that it's there to fix misclicks and not implying a false equivalency to gender.
Next Release
I mentioned two of the new things coming in this release above! First, there will be a sex scene with Esther, which will come with an overhaul of her art that I think is a huge improvement. Additionally, you'll now be able to choose a nonbinary gender (at the start of the game or in the mirror in your bedroom) and people will refer to you correctly (using the singular "they", etc.) in the rare case where they need to.
The other big addition coming up is a new training sequence for Theresa in exhibitionism, which will bring her from Depravity 2 to 3. This one will feel a bit like the sadomasochism sequence, I think; the second session is a sexy discussion of the consent and ethics involved in exhibitionism.
If I finish the training sequence with time to spare, I'll probably work on revising some more art.
Please let me know if you have any feedback on this post, or on any other aspect of the game. You can comment here, PM me on Patreon, or write me at: phanes@phanes.me
Stay healthy and horny!
