Bloodlust: Santa Monica (Definitive Edition) has been awarded the 5th Best Game of October on Newgrounds! 🏆🎉

Wow! I can’t thank you enough for playing, commenting, and sharing your feedback. I’ve received tons of suggestions and bug reports through the in-game feedback form and the forums. After reviewing everything, I’ve tackled some critical bugs, added a few quality of life improvements, and identified some more complex ideas to explore in future updates. Here’s what’s new:

🛠️ Bug Fixes

I'll start with the most bleeding bugs, such as the fateful typewriter effect that skips the text to the next sentence when you click on a dialogue. The bug was caused by PowerQuest, affecting all games with portrait dialogs. Fortunately, I was able to integrate the fix from beta 0.19 without needing to upgrade to the unstable version. From now on, no more skipped dialogs. 

There was also a bug when displaying the cab that gives access to the end of the game. The bug literally did not allow you to finish the game, so the fix has been simple and will allow you to finish the game and see the final slides with the results of your playthrough.

In general, quests had several bugs that showed the content of the quest ahead of time, offering the solution to some puzzles before they even come up. As there are 20+ quests in the game, correcting all the bugs has been quite tedious but totally necessary. Now no quest is ahead of time and you can complete the quests in any order you wish. Special mention for the Juliette/Tess quest where there was an extra bug that allowed clicking on the sister who is not in the room as I forgot to deactivate her collision area when she is invisible. This is now fixed as well.

I also fixed the bug when talking to Jack again after he gave you the quest to collect the skill books. The game would get stuck with no dialogue options and now simply returns to the last available dialogue tree.

🌟 Quality of Life Improvements

As quality of life improvements I have changed the skills to be used as inventory items. This way you can choose to use your skill in more situations and it generates more fun interactions (or so I hope). When you choose one of the 7 vampires you start the game with the initial item corresponding to their skill. For example, Gianna starts the game with a bunch of bills that allows you to use her bribe skill. This allows you to try to bribe any character in the game, whereas before only the Bribe dialog option appeared on the characters that could be bribed. 

I've also added a couple of buttons on the home screen that redirect to Itch.io and Newgrounds in case you want to leave your comments or download the Windows version. In fact, the message that warns you that you can't save your progress in browser now appears right when you start a game, so it won't catch anyone by surprise.

Additionally, I have changed a couple of puzzles that generated problems: the dog puzzle on the stairs of Santa Monica suites in main street and the metal door that blocks the access to the beach house.

🚀 Coming Soon

For future updates I will try to eliminate the excess of useless items and redesign the Malkavian and Nosferatu playthroughs to make them more in line with Bloodlines. I would like to add achievements and maybe some unlockable characters, but that will be in future updates. Thanks for playing!  See you in the next update!

PS: Mac and Linux versions are now available too!🍎🐧 I haven’t tested these yet, so let me know if you find any issues.