Caught up on all the profile images for the created characters. Now, all character models that are complete also have a profile image in the love interest selection menu.

Moving forward, we will continue this trend of rendering a profile image and uploading it whenever a character model is completed, to better aid in the awareness of the character creation progress.

Added Bahar, an adult female character of Iranian descent. This character was chosen to be added as there was need for a character of this sex and occupation and we were missing someone of this ethnic background. The character is complete along with a profile image.

Did some tweaking to the love interest algorithm to better represent the characters and the intended initial hint functionality.

At the same time, added separate blurbs for main character descriptions to better reflect the character as a human-playable character and not just a NPC.

More characters are coming online with completed models and uploaded profile images.

Fixed several bugs in the dialog for Bryan Baker including a couple spots where dialog wasn't rendering, the first line of dialog after an option still rendering too large, and some broken links.

Fixed a navigational bug that allowed you to go back beyond the first page causing an error. (Now it just reloads the start page).

Fixed a bug that caused the dialog text of the first line of any new page to render at the largest font-size, clipping text off the end.

Rebalanced relationship points for Bryan's storyline to allow access to Emily at Clinic scene (was previously impossible to attain).

Going through and updating all of the Character Profiles to give a broader view of each character's personality traits and background. We're also going through and, as we create the character models, adding profile pictures to be included during character selection for the main character and love interest. This will help readers better choose their characters and love interests through visual appeal as well as personality.

The dialog for Bryan Baker for day 2 is now complete.

We continue to add more character models into the fold.

While doing a bug pass to check for accidental dead-ends and typos, we discovered that with our new navigation system for the AVNs, that once you enter a new scene, it was impossible to move back to the previous scene as, essentially, the previous scene was erased. We added extra cookies to record this transition to make it possible to navigate back and forth between scenes and will work int he future to implement this feature into saved games as well as this information would be automatically replaced should the story be restarted.

The last week has seen minimal progress due to the lifting of work restrictions and the transferring back from work-from-home to setting the office back up and the pile of regulations that go with that. On the plus side, the return to work should see a substantial increase in productivity.

The last week we also experienced electrical storm after electrical storm and a constant dropping of network connectivity and power outages. These setbacks cost us a bit of time but nothing substantial, mostly thanks to the new GPU and render times being drastically reduced.

Overall, we've been proceeding with story dialog for day 2 for Bryan Baker (the father) and have completed a number of characters.

We reworked the way that the system determines which name to use when characters are speaking. Previously, the name would simply be the first name of the character. However, we realize that this may not always be appropriate. With some of the students who are commonly referred to by their last name (common in asian populations and amoungst sports teams ), in cases of children speaking to adults using the formal Mr. or Mrs. prefix and the surname again, children referring to their parents as Mom and Dad, and also in these cases, but the adult prefers the individual use their first name. So, we've set up and implemented a dynamic name system that accounts for all variances using the existing altnames array field.

In further news, we've continued work on dialog into day 2 and continued work on character model creation.

Completed the dialog for each of t he four playable characters up to day two. This is an important milestone as this is where their stories diverge. From here, it is likely that I will focus on writing one story-line at a time instead of writing them in parallel.

The current rendered images were put through their post pass and added to the site. The first-day Kathy Baker scenes had images added for the Kathy-side of the conversations for each of the four story story-lines.

More characters have the models completed including completing the Chen family and most of the tertiary characters required for the father's story-line.

A slight rework to the script is required to include a pair of display name options for characters so that the name displayed in the dialog can be set separately from the character's first name.

Updated the list of available Love Interests to include all potential characters (88). All characters have completed profiles and the character models are now being worked on. The dialog is being worked on as well and we're close to completing the first day for each character inclusive of all branches. The following is a list of all currently completed characters:

Bryan Baker, Lisa Baker, Bobby Baker, Emily Baker, Kathy Baker, Eugene Chen, Emma Chen, Jasmine Etsu, Yoshi Chen, and Kim Greenwood.

Yoshi was a landmark for setting the school's colour scheme, which will be used on all students going forward.

Apologies for the long gap between updates but not much has changed. We took a brief pause to focus on a pro-bono tutorial series that is taking significantly longer than expected to complete. Work has continued on dialog albeit slowly. We received and installed the new GPU and it has indeed drastically decreased render times. We found, however, that load times were still ridiculously high. In an attempt to rectify this, we budgeted, obtained, and installed a dedicated SSD for the project to store the almost 200 GB of data required. We then transferred the files over and had to redirect the software. To our disappointment, the gains were minimal. Further research indicated that it's a software bottleneck that is proportional to the extent of the asset library and with our extensive library, needed for character variety, this will be unavoidable. So we've accepted this and are simply working around it as best we can. We have successfully recreated 2 characters, Eugene and Emma Chen. These characters are considered completed with all passes done. We will start to pick up our stride again and hope to have all characters completed within the month.

The new GPU is ordered and should be delivered by the end of next week. With this much needed power boost, we'll be able to do all the 3D work significantly faster. As such, and with other projects on the go, we're taking a little bit of a hiatus until the GPU arrives, using this time to focus on work that won't benefit from the new GPU. We will continue to work on dialog, but don't expect additional images for another couple of weeks.

Profiles for all of the characters in the story Coming of Age have been completed. This includes the vital statistics that make up the character's personality as well as their back stories. Each character was uniquely crafted and will have some degree of interaction within the story. To date, there are 90 characters.

The next step is creating the 3D models of these characters.

With COVID19 changing the way everyone does things, our main business is closed until further notice. This has given us more time to focus on this and other projects. In the last couple of weeks, we've been busy working on some renders, adding dialog, and working out character profiles for all of the story's tertiary characters. We're happy to announce that we were able to secure some government funding to keep the business afloat and we've managed to allocate some of those funds towards getting a new GPU. With this, we should be able to vastly increase the rate at which we produce renders so you should be SEEING more regular updates. Pun intended.

With the quarantine in place here, I'm down to one workstation and a laptop. I'm using the workstation to pump out renders but the laptop is useless for graphics, so I'm using it for coding and dialog while the workstation is rendering. Unfortunately, that means that I can either do image post work OR render, but not both, so I've been focusing on pumping out renders. So, while there hasn't been a lot of changes to the story this last week, rest assured, work is still continuing. Once the renders for the current scene are complete, I'll switch and do the post-work for them and add them to the story. Meanwhile, I'm still working on dialog, slowly re-adding the second scene and expanding upon it.

Just a quick status update:

The Kathy Baker character has been successfully recreated. Her college dorm has also been created but will undergo a few more tweaks before it's finalised.

The CAIF engine rework is coming along nicely and the first scene is almost completely restored save for a few rewrites.

We've completed a dozen more renders and will be incorporating those into the story in the near future.

We're happy to announce that the engine rework has been completed. The only noticeable change will be the page number. Previously, the first 2 digits of the page number represented the Scenario and Main Character with the other digits representing each choice made by the reader. With the new system, there are two hyphens added. There is a number, hyphen, number, hyphen, and more numbers. The first number represents the Act, the second the Scene and the digits after the second hyphen represent the choices made by the reader.

We've pulled the story apart and separated each playable character into their own file, then, we can sort by act, scene, page, and line instead of just page and line. This will allow us to consolidate pages at the end of each scene. The benefit to this is that the page number after a fair number of choices used to be extremely long and we would have to include multiple lines of just page numbers for each new page. Now, we can drastically reduce that through the scene consolidations.

With the old system, the page number would define character relationships but it could very easily and quickly become confusing for the writer to keep it all sorted. Furthermore, if we wanted to be able to consolidate the pages into scenes and acts, then we needed a new system to track character relationships. So we added a separate field to do just that. This process adds a slight load to the server but ensures that player saves/loads will never have issues with size regardless of placement in the story. Furthermore, we've been able to successfully add (and retract) relationship points. We track points between the main character and each other character under 3 categories: like, love, and lust. Each can increase and decrease and will determine what choices are made available to the reader. Staying true to our statement of choosing a love-interest will have no bearing on these stats, the love interest highlights will guide you through to the choices that will add points for your relationship but the same choices are available regardless. These choices, will be what guides the future choice availability.

Having done this, we're rolling out the updated story now, but it will still take a little more time to catch back up.

After some careful considerations, we've decided to revamp the engine. The changes we are making will help streamline the dialog creation process considerably as well as better integrate character personalities into the story choices. While we work on this update, the story may become unplayable. These changes should not take more than 48 hours and will likely take significantly less. We thank you for your patience during this time.

Great news, we've completed rebuilding our asset library and were able to recover the last scene, successfully restoring 5/6 of the Baker family members. We've also restarted pumping out renders and should have them posted in the next couple of days. We've also been looking at the possibility of doing batch renders. This would allow us to render during the off-hours and double productivity. We did the first test run last night and although it was unsuccessful, with some adjustment, it may still work. Beyond that, we're happy to announce that we're progressing well on creating the next scene: the Baker's new house. All of this plus more tweaking on the dialog means we're off to a better than expected start.

Finally, I wanted to mention in the last post but forgot, while we didn't hit the stretch goal to create an offline build (which I'm slightly relieved about), we did decide to go ahead and look into the possibility of creating a web-app and have decided to implement it later down the line. A web-app basically takes a website (such as CYOeA) and gives it the appearance of an installed program. The installer and installed portion of the program are quite minimal and the bulk of the data is still streamed in as temporary files. This gives us all the power and flexibility off a web-based program while also giving the advantages of an installed application. On a mobile device, it's easy to locate the icon and open the application, which will automatically be full-screen and give us better scalability. The main difference between a web-app and a full-app is that you trade file size for requiring an active data connection, so you still can't play the game off-line.

It's been a week since the last update and in the spirit of open-development, I want to keep everyone apprised of the project status, especially in light of the current pandemic.

So, firstly, I'd like to talk about the good news: the Kickstarter campaign was successful and raised enough funds to justify pushing forward with the new cinematic/AVN engine and visually-focused stories. The money raised is going solely towards the acquisition of 3D assets and that process is relatively complete. A big thank you to all those who backed the project. If you haven't, but would like to have alpha access (access to the current work-in-progress), you will need to purchase a platinum subscription. No other subscription level will provide access during development. When the story is near complete and moves into the beta stage, it will be opened up to gold-level members as well and then everyone else once it goes live. It will be at that time when the clocks will start on the pledges and, depending on your pledge level, your status may decrease from platinum. Most of those who have pledged have completed their surveys and now have access. If you do not, you must complete the survey that was sent out by kickstarter. If you do and can't access your account, you may need to reset your password. If you are having difficulty, please contact us through the site or via kickstarter to have the issue resolved as soon as possible.

Now the bad news. While we did meet our basic needs, we did not reach the second stretch goal for a budget for a new GPU. After a budgetary review, we have spent an approximate $3500 on 3D assets for this and future projects. The kickstarter reimbursed about a third of the overall expenditure. Which means that while a new GPU is on the list, it's going to be a while before we can get it, which means that the road ahead is going to be a long one, so we're going to ask for your patience while we continue development.

We also have to deal with the current COVID19 pandemic. While this doesn't directly effect development, family needs means that there is less overall time to focus on the project and the workflow is going to be slower than predicted during this time. Again, we ask for patience.

The ugly news... If everything else going on wasn't bad enough, we suffered a catastrophic hard-drive failure. Rest assured, the CYOeA website and all data on it is safe and secure on redundant servers with multiple backups in place. However, maintaining a 3D library of over 250GB of data and climbing meant that we used traditional local storage. To accomodate speed an efficiency, we used multiple drives in a RAID0 configuration, which if anyone knows, is fast but drastically increases risk. Lesson learned, we are now using singular drives with multiple backups to prevent this from happening again at the cost of speed and time.

What this means is that all of the 3D assets used to create the story are gone. There is good news though. All of the free 3D assets we had amassed were backed-up as were all purchased assets. The only assets lost forever were the custom ones, which means all 28 created characters will have to be recreated. Fortunately, the only characters used so far are the main family and all 6 of those characters had undergone an optimization pass and a part of that process was consolidating the character morphs and those morphs were saved separately and were saved. Furthermore, the crash happened during a render and I had the common-sense to save the scene out to a functional drive. This means that the main family, excluding Kathy should be preserved completely. Kathy Baker, who is the least used character of the family, may have some subtle changes, but chances are good that there won't be any noticeable changes to any of the family members. All other characters will need to be recreated from scratch. While this process shouldn't take too long, this, plus the time to rebuild the asset library and putting all of the redundancies in place is taking some time. We've been hard at work on it for the past week and are making good progress but we expect this to cause an approximate 2-month extension of the project length. Essentially, it took a month to build it all the first time and it'll take another month to rebuild it, during which time we lose that month of normal progress.

To summarize, we've had our fill of hiccups and delays recently so we need you to be patient and rest assured we are hard at work on the project, even if our efforts aren't visible. We hope to be able to start producing new renders within the week and in the meantime, we are working on the dialog. We already created a good outline of the first act of the story with all the expected scenes, characters, and activities and, as mentioned, are now working on filling in the dialog while we wait for the ability to start up on the renders again. Thank you and stay well.

Tweaked the layout of the news-page to better incorporate larger articles and scalability.

The Kickstarter campaign has officially ended. For all those who backed the project, thank you. Your account will be upgraded as soon as possible. Please be sure to complete the Kickstarter survey so that we can match up your pledge with your account. Thank you again for the support and we hope to keep the updates rolling in as we continue to progress on Coming of Age.

If you are having issues logging in, you may need to reset your password. https://cyoea.com/reset/

Fixed the Save/Load Game process for the Cinematic AIF section. You should now be able to properly save/load games. This will also work with the quick save and quick load options. Note that quick-save uses cookies, so if you delete the site cookies, you will delete your quick-saves. Quick-saves are one per story. Because quick-saves are stored as cookies, they will not persist across devices. Normal save games are stored on our servers, so they will persist across devices. Save game slots are total across the site, not per story. When loading, you will only see options for the selected game, if any exist.

Any bugs not identified, please contact us so we can resolve them ASAP.

Added security to the Contact form to help reduce the amount of spam coming in through the contact form. Also added bypasses for logged-in users, so if you're logged-in, you shouldn't have to enter as much information to contact us through the form.

Added a feature to reset your password:

https://cyoea.com/reset/myUserName

where myUserName is your username.

This will bring up a popup that will have your email address on file and your security question. Answer the security question, type your password twice, and send. It will generate an email with a link to reset your password good for 2-hours. If your password is excessively long, this method may not work do to GET limitations. Contact us if you are having issues and we'll be able to help.

Thanks to a massive egg-on-my-face bug in the system, a glitch occurred that partially wiped 97 accounts. Oops. Fortunately, the only things effected were the password and story preferences. Story preferences aren't a big deal but passwords sure are. Rest assured, we're working on a solution and it will be posted asap. Sorry for the inconvenience. The bug occurred approximately 17.5 hours ago.

Added keyboard commands for the Cinematic engine. Essentially, the Left-Arrow or A will go back, Right-Arrow or D will go forward, Up-Arrow or W will toggle the menu show/hide, and Down-Arrow or S will toggle the show/hide for the dialog. Depending on whether the menu is visible or hidden, the Q-key will either quick-save or skip and the E-key will either quick-load or resume.

As an added bonus for our Patreon subscribers, we've added a section where we review other adult visual novels and provide links to download them for the android operating system. This is only available to patreon subscribers at this time.

Fixed a bug where you would get a "could not validate IP address" error when attempting to send a message through the contact page.

More 3D assets purchased that were required for Coming of Age.

Test render that resulted in learning how to remove stray pixel noise from renders for higher quality images and removing default dome lighting from scenes.

Work has progressed significantly on Scene 2 of Coming of Age.

With all the recent changes to the AVN engine, it was time to update the template file to fall in line with the new format.

Also took this time to begin work on the dialog for the second scene of Coming of Age.

Added a screenshot of the actual game code to the patreon section as well as to the kickstarter page to give people a better understanding of the code layout and how easy it should be for writers to adapt their work to.

Updated the title image for the Baker Family in Coming of Age.

Fixed several bugs relating to changing the page numbering.

Reformatted how the system handles window resizing and different aspect ratios to ensure the images are never clipped.

Changed the dialog text to automatically scale in size based on length and, if over a certain amount, split into two lines.

Changed the Save and Load buttons to use icons instead of text to save on space, added visual hover of green for save and red for load to aid in identification.

Verified back/next navigation working bug-free, auto-save works as intended, quick save/load should be working. Regular game save/load may need additional work.

Completed work on the patreon section's image gallery.

Completed the rework of the first scene including reformatting the page numbers to incorporate the main character choice as a page, adding love interest choice highlights where missed, reformatting the dialog lines to make them more intuitive for other contributors, fixed a bunch of typos, added code to allow a continue option where a page update is required but no choice is needed, and verified all the chains were complete to the end of the scene.

Completed optimization of Lisa Baker character.

The dialog for the first scene of Coming of Age, Scenario 1 is being revamped to incorporate character selection as a page choice. This is ongoing an may temporarily break the story for a day or two until the upgrade is complete. This just helps streamline the process a bit.

Completed the body-morph consolidation for Emily Baker character. This method should help reduce load time for bringing the character into a scene. Also added a smoother look for the character.

Completed the physics pass for Emily Baker.

Created before and after renders for kickstarter and patreon pages.

Collecting image renders for patreon section.

The current development tasks are split between writing dialog and doing physics passes on each of the characters. Basically, what a physics pass entails is modifying objects to account for physical conditions such as overlapping and gravity. This adds realism to things like hair and clothing. It's not as simple as clicking a "Simulate Physics" button in an engine, though that is part of it, but also creating custom morph controls for clothing objects to not only properly fit characters, but properly fit stacked layers as well, for a more realistic look. For example, a woman wearing a tank-top. First of all, most clothing items in most render engines will adapt a "character fit" where it molds the clothing item onto the character and adopts the character's rigging. When it does this, the "molded" clothing loses a realistic look. It's rare to find a woman that would wear a tank-top without wearing a bra underneath, especially one with larger breasts. So we add a bra first, then a tank top. It's easy enough to do but since both items are designed to fit to the same "parent object", a.k.a. the nude character, the two items will overlap and visual clipping occurs. If the base character isn't used (and to make characters look unique, none of them are base-models) clothing may not automatically fit properly either, causing the clothing to clip through the character. This is all corrected by manually "morphing" the clothing. We also use this process to add more realism to the clothing. Again, using the tank-top, the default is that the tank-top will conform to the shape of the body, but in real life, the material between the breasts will stretch-flat. These are considerations we are taking into account and working on now.

We also hope to be able to add a render showcasing all of the characters in one group shot for use in the kickstarter campaign and for the patreon section.

Created the title image for the scenario selection for the Chen Family.

Continuing work on Coming of Age dialog and setting up the scenes for the renders.

Completed Amanda Parker character.

Completed Steve Parker character.

Completed Charles Parker character.

Completed Arnold Kimble character.

Completed Alejandro Lopez character.

All primary and secondary characters for Coming of Age are now complete.

Completed Paddy O'Neil character.

Completed Oliver O'Neil character.

Completed Sorcha O'Neil character.

Completed Kaleigh O'Neil character.

Completed Siobhan O'Neil character.

O'Neil Family is now completed aside from a physics and posing pass.

Completed Yoshi Chen character.

Completed Jackie Chen character.

Completed Emma Chen character.

Completed Jasmine Etsu character.

All 6 members of the Chen family are now completed aside from a physics and posing pass.

Completed Tanice Williams character.

Completed Jamal Williams character.

Completed Maria White character.

Completed David White character.

White family is now completed aside from physics pass and renders.

Completed Sonja White character.

Completed Laura White character.

Changed Joe White character was renamed Joe Williams and given a new parent, single mom, Tanice Williams.

Also added new character Maria White to replace Joe in White family. White family is mixed-race African/Hispanic and wanted to keep Joe primarily of African decent.

The rework on the Cinematic Engine is now complete. The back/forward/skip functions have all been restored and work better than ever. Fixed an autosave issue so now manually loading lines works as intended and doesn't kick you back out to the main page. The dialog entry has been reworked so that it takes less work to add new lines of dialog, making it an overall smoother experience.

Added option highlighting. Now, the background of an option choice will change colour if it has a minimum subscription level requirement and the text colour will change if the option chosen has an effect on your relationship with your chosen love interest.

There may still be issues with saving/loading games.

Rendered the first test images for the Cinematic: Coming of Age.

Created a title image for use in scenario selection and the first image of the story past the introduction.

Added character renders for each member of the Baker Family.

With the first few images in place, it was clear that the Cinematic engine needed to be re-tuned in how it processes the images. A rework is currently in progress.

The end-goal of the rework will be streamlined code that actually reduces the overall time to add dialog as well as pre-loading images for each page.

Completed the Joe Chen character.

Completed the Eugene Chen Character.

Created a Patreon account as another source of potential income. Patreon subscribers have access to a section of the site that show additional updates, sneak-peaks, and works-in-progress.

Fixed a bug where the system was not properly recognizing character spouses.

Also tuned the Love Interest matching algorithm to better reflect relationship difficulties.

Added an automated script to check for expired subscriptions and downgrade the account at login. If logged-in, it will automatically log you out.

Reorganized the site files, dumping many of the secondary files into the Resources subfolder.

Added FAQs regarding account subscriptions.

Fixed a bug where, if you update/renew your subscription, it doesn't take into account your current subscription's time remaining. The system will now calculate the value of your time remaining and subtract that from the price of the upgrade.

If you are downgrading, the time purchased is added to your current time remaining and your membership status is decreased immediately.

Completed the character Cyndi Baker

Completed the character Kathy Baker.

Modified character statistics for Cyndi and Emily Baker to make Cyndi more extroverted and Emily more introverted.

Fixed a bug in the Cinematic engine that prevented pages form rendering text past the first page.

Fixed a bug where, in Cinematic Stories, if you reach an options screen and go back, the options menu remains over-laid on the screen.

Completed the Lisa Baker Character.

Completed the Emily Baker Character.

The 4 playable characters for Coming of Age are now created.

The next step will be completing the last 2 family members and then set work to create the sets for the story. Then we will work on creating the secondary characters.

Integrated online credit-card payments so you can now sign up for a membership via Stripe and have your account membership instantly upgraded instead of having to wait for manual payment confirmation.

We also added the Contribute page to the main menu for information on how to contribute to the site.

Fixed bugs preventing FAQs and Contact pages from displaying properly.

Created Character Bobby Baker

This is the second character to be created. These Characters contain both statistical data in our character database to be used for both Interactive and Cinematic stories. It also involves the creation of a fully-rigged 3D model with a single profile render.

We hope to release one character per day until all the Characters for our upcoming Coming of Age story are completed.

Ran through the site and did several bug fixes and updates to bring all the code in-line with the new status ranking system.

Fixed a bug preventing uses from being able to properly accept the terms of service and thus create an account.

Fixed a bug that prevented accounts from being created due to legacy code requesting date of birth information.

Provided proper permissions for users with access to access administrative sections of the site.

Re-added banner ads for non-paid members and guests.

Added error pages with ad redirects.

Fixed issues with insecure cookies.

Found bugs in FAQ and Contact Pages yet to be addressed.

Prepping the site for upcoming Kickstarter Campaign.

Completed the dialog for page 1 of Coming of Age.

Completed Character Bryan Baker

We are proud to announce that V 1.0 of our Adult Visual Novel Engine a.k.a. Cinematic Adult Interactive Fiction is now complete. With this huge step forward, we can now begin producing our first Adult Visual Novel.

There may still be some bugs in the engine, especially in regards to saving and loading games, but those will get worked out once we have some more content loaded up to test with.

While our main focus right now is to begin production of our massive project: Coming of Age, we may decide to throw in a significantly shorter story as a first-attempt in order to better demo the engine. All of that is yet to be decided but we will keep you all posted.

Switched from 3 membership levels (Regular, Silver, or Gold) to 5 levels, adding Bronze and Platinum levels. These new levels have been integrated and a new page is being created to describe the differences in membership level as well as allow users to purchase subscriptions.

Created a page to explain how contributions are added, tracked, and paid, hopefully explaining the entire process. Once this feature comes online, a link will be added to the main menu.

Work has begun on creating the back-end for the Cinematic section of the site.

Increased the width of the default box-size so that there is less unused space on smaller screens.

Fixed a bug where the main page (about) was not properly displaying.

Fixed a bug where clicking on the latest news article in the News and Updates section would cause an error and not display the popup.

Fixed a bug preventing character updates if the user has more than one character.

In order to meet browser compliance for the use of cookies in websites, we've had to go through and update all of our site cookies and upgrade the version of PHP the site uses which exposed several compliance bugs. This patch should fix those issues and restore functionality to both CYOeA and SPG, which may have been temporarily down over the past week.

This upgrade should enhance the back-end persistence services to some extent but possibly not significantly to the average user.

Updated Character Creator tool.

Added feature to use character as self/reader.

Added in-depth Clothing options for characters.

Completed New Character Creation process.

Several bug fixes to character creation process.

Work-in-progress, edit existing characters. This should be completed shortly in a follow-up patch.

Completed the writing template for interactive stories. All back-end work for these interactive stories are now complete and work can progress to create interactive stories. Stories will be sorted by general theme and then subdivided by different scenarios within the main theme. Incomplete stories will automatically be disabled and completed stories will be active but visible only if the reader's preferences qualify them for the story. For example, a specific scenario may require that the reader is not single or be a specific gender.

Did a general bug pass, fixing missing elements such as story preferences from user registration form.

Reworked buttons throughout the site including the story sort drop-down to better fit with the site theme.

Added tool-tips to all icons on form-fields to aid users in understanding what each option is for without sacrificing screen space.

Added an auto-format function to news updates.

Fixed a bug where the static stories weren't showing when you clicked on their corresponding links.

Fixed a bug where the author's name was hidden behind the story text.

Added a Back button to the end of stories for easier navigation.

Implemented a custom character creator tool for readers to be able to create their own custom characters for the interactive stories.

Fixed a bug that prevented front-end addition of news articles by admin.

Fixed a bug in SPG that prevented users from being able to send Help requests.

Added the functionality for users to update their settings/preferences

Reworked the sign-up form to the new style and updated the security on the back-end for the account creation portion.

Reworked the admin form for adding news articles in the same manner as the account creation process.

Reworked the news/updates section including reworking the layout and pagination to match the static stories section as well as migrate the news articles out of the main content section into their own database.

Several days worth of bug-fixing in association with the site changes.

Rebuilt the Static Stories section, including the previously incomplete options to sort stories by preferences or user-settings.

Bug fixing in association with the static stories section and the pagination for loading pages of stories.

Adjusted the UI for an overall better user experience and to give the site a more universal look throughout the site. This effects menus, forms, pagination, and general page layout.

After a couple years of downtime, a lot is about to change. The first is that the Sexy Party Game sister-site has been completed and is now available. There is a free trial and paid-per-play add-ons available for it.

The rest of this site is also undergoing major changes. Much is in relation to the layout and framework, but also in the content that will be available forthcoming.

Primarily, we're completely removing the parody and pictoral sections of the site. What will remain will be the library of static stories, the CYOeA original stories, and a new section that combines the interactive stories with the two removed sections. Going forward, we'll be heavily focused on adding interactive content that is either pure text or as interactive cinematics using high quality CGI. The initial wave of these cinematic stories will take quite some time to produce so we'll try to pump out a few pure-text interactive stories in the mean time, so that there's more content for the site as we realize it's been severely lacking for quite some time. For now, we'll focus on the site rework to lay down the foundation for the interactive elements, conforming to our current standard of scalability.

Added contact form to email site admin securely

Future updates will be significantly fewer for the next few months as the site admin are forced to shift our focus to another project. Rest assured that work on this site will continue in due time.

Added the first story in the pictorial section (from the archive). This helped flush out any remaining bugs in the system. We spent a lot of time trying to find a way to render the images from an archive to minimize file capacity but in the end could not find a way that worked for our needs. A function was also added to maximize the size of the images on-click with a return toggle.

With the addition of logging in and out, user registration was also made available but never mentioned in previous updates.

The admin menu item for adding updates from the front-end is now functional.

Completed work on log-in and log-out functions complete with persistence across pages. Preferences page shows minimal information but will be expanded to show all relevant information as well as the ability to easily edit/update settings.

Work has begun on the implementation of an administrative front-end. This will provide simple tools for admins, editors, and authors to easily and efficiently add content to the site.

Work has continued on bringing account creation online with the ability to set preferences. The system is up but there are still a few bugs that need to be fixed.

Work has been delayed due to hardware issues that have since been resolved.

A security pass to further protect the site from hackers has been implemented.

Added a section for Pictorals, though no stories are currently in the section. Added an error code for no stories in a section. Bug appeared that caused stories in the pictoral and parody sections to no longer render the story content -- only scripts and titles. Fixed the issue.

Completed an optimization pass that incorporated the javascripts for pagination in the main code, greatly optimizing the process and got the next/previous buttons to hide when no longer valid. Pagination should now be complete and future-proofed.

Finally got around to revamping the bootstrap template and fixing all the visual bugs, making the site template more cohesive.

Found and fixed a bug with the Parody Story navigation. The scripts weren't formatted properly, causing all of the buttons to have no effect. During the course of this bug-fix, the scripts themselves were optimized slightly. The bug also translated into the newly created Author Template, so that was also fixed and revamped as well.

The pagination code optimization used for the static stories was integrated into the pictoral section as well as the news section, which required a bit more tweaking to get working properly.

Lastly, a new story was added to the Static Story section.

Added another story to the Static story section.

Set button-links in the parody section to be full-screen justified to make them easier to click on mobile devices and touch-screens in general.

Completed an optimization pass on the story pagination that will carry forward into other pagination sections.

Attempted to (and failed) at completing an optimization pass on the story links. Right now this takes up a huge block of code and we're looking at ways to drastically reduce the code but haven't found a way that works yet.

Added a couple more stories to the Static Stories section.

Completed the rework of the Parody story section and then added the first story, ALF, to it.

Still need to add more levels to the code for future parody stories. This code will also be used for both the pictoral and main CYOeA story sections.

Work has begun on setting up the user registration, including adding the Terms of Service page complete with a link from the FAQs section.

Two stories from the static stories archive have been added back, one of which required some major editing before it could be included.

Along, with adding stories, additional story tags have been created to provide even greater filter-control when looking for static stories. With that addition, all current stories have had all their tags updated.

The reworked pagination has been incorporated into the Static Story section successfully. There was also a minor bug fix and optimization done to the pagination code.

Another story has been added from the archives to the Static Story section. We will attempt to continue adding stories back to the site on a regular basis until all the archived stories are restored. New content will probably not be added until the site is fully functional. This includes but is not limited to: the registration page, user settings/preferences with the ability to edit, membership levels, parody story section, pictoral story section, and the main, CYOeA story section.

Reworked the site pagination. The new system is visually the same but is significantly more compact code-wise resulting in faster rendering and now includes functional next and previous buttons.

This new pagination has been implemented in the news and updates section and will be rolled out to the stories in the next update.

The Static (or User-Submitted) Story page is complete. The stories are listed in order of date with the newest story listed first. Each story can be selected and opened to view with the stories rendering and scaling properly.

Future considerations, there is a drop-down selector that, when implemented, will allow readers to resort the stories by date (default), by pre-selected preferences (when logged-in), or by settings which will be available. These options will be implemented at a later date as the need arises and once other key features have been completed. Another consideration will be pagination, as set in the News & Updates area. This will also be brought online when needed.

A large step forward as work has progressed and the News and Updates section is back up and running. Not all features are completely online yet but primary functionality is in place so we'll be moving on to the next step of getting the static stories back online followed by returning functionality to user account creation and login.

Also added a generic error message for missing pages so that visitors understand that the site is not broken, just that the links do not all work as the content has not been reworked yet.

The site rework continues. We've completed the homepage, the FAQs page, and the login page (though functionality is not implemented yet). The next step will be to complete the rework on the News & Updates section. This framework will also be required for the static stories, as well as all other story categories going forward. After that, plans to incorporate the Login and account creation will commence.

After a long absence (sorry), the site is now undergoing a huge rework... again. After switching formats, the site was suffering from some issues with dynamic scaling as well as having hit a few blockers when it came to dynamic content rendering. Solutions have been found and are now being integrated. This major update includes converting the site over to the bootstrap framework and utilizing jquery components. It will mean taking more time to get the site back up and running, but further updates will come more frequently and lead to better site functionality overall. This also means the site will be significantly more mobile friendly and generally just more user-friendly.

Setup the static story page so the restored stories can be accessed. Had to adjust the link system to accommodate the stories and then fix several bugs that sprung up as a result.

Modified the copyright to show the start-through-current year. Major part of the update is the creation of a functional login page with site persistence. The next logical step is to create and include a form to register an account on the site. There is already an active link on the login page for this but the actual form has not yet been created. If you are not logged-in, going to Preferences will take you to the login page.

Restored another static story from the archive. Also added more filter tags for the static stories. Fixed a bug with the date-time stamps for the publishing date where updates posted on the same date may appear out of order.

We set up an email account to handle questions from our readers and as a contact point for anyone looking to contribute to the site with an addition to the homepage listing it.

Furthermore, we have restored two (for a total of three) of the static stories from the old site. Most of them require a little reformatting before they can be added and read-through to ensure they have the proper tags added to them. All the static stories have tags that will be used for an advanced search filter similar to what the old site had for listing stories. This process takes a bit of time but we're working hard to get everything back up and running.

Finally worked out all the bugs for the News & Updates section of the site. It took a while to get the layout just right, but it's a big step moving forward. The homepage (about) is also fully streaming and the news links are on live rotation with links to the news section and individual update pages. We also set up a functional Error page for when things go wrong. The next step will be to create a functional login page and integrate persistence into the user preferences.

The database back-end is connected and running and the first stage of connecting the menu is complete (note that the links will now change the page header). Also began uploading the archived stories into the system though they are not yet accessible. More to come in the following days, including properly viewing these updates.

All aspects of the old site were removed, after carefully siphoning out any relevant data (eg the stories). The new site is live, though it's filled with place-holders while the background technical framework gets sorted out. We will slowly start to replace the placeholders with live data as the systems come online.

Unfortunately, the new CMS or Content Management System that we were using to streamline the site was relatively insecure. Mostly due to its popularity, that particular CMS was the constant victim of hack attempts. While not all attempts to hack the site were successful, many were and it made site maintenance overshadow site updates. It got so bad, we actually got locked out of the site's back-end.

To make a long story short, we decided to abandon the old site and create a new, more secure, more simplistic site. The new site should have a similar look and feel to the old one but it abandons all the frills that the previous site had in favour of streamlining the core purpose of the site -- to bring our readers online erotica where you can craft your own stories in a unique way.

More updates will follow as the conversion process takes place so please be patient and we'll have the site functional again as soon as possible.