News update & important poll! (Patreon)

Hey all! Status update. Just wanted to give you guys an idea of what I'm working on, what's holding it up, and ask for feedback on an important question.

So the big one is HAA. I was posting about it in the discord, but basically what makes the update take so long is because I'm trying to move each character's content from a single switch tree to an encounter list. Here's a messy flowchart for what Jean's content looks like in the dom route:

Basically in v1 each character was essentially contained inside a single encounter. The game would check their corruption (score) and then check items and such with unique failstates for if you were missing something or if the character wasn't ready for a new event (like if you hadn't corrupted them).

While it functions and works just fine, it means I can't trigger events for a character anywhere except with that character's normal home, so I can't have Ava appear in your sister's room for example. More than two dozen lines of code are in the classroom area just to make it so that Kendra doesn't appear at one point in the sub route.

I take the big trees and transform it into this flowchart, all this is just to make the encounters trigger, the actual content and scenes are the easy part. It's mostly just tedium and complexity, a bad mix for my sporadic attention span.

I made a lot of coding mistakes and bad practices in HAA, although this wasn't one of them. It's just a completely different system than what I use today. Flowchart scene building is a lot faster (it's why twine is popular), but it's a lot more limited than encounter lists with custom requirements.

So, I take the branching paths of v1 and break it down in the opposite way (focusing on the encounters and then listing the requirements, rather than using the requirements to create a flowchart)...

And finally use that knowledge to convert the right screen (old v1) to the left (new v1.1) Not something I can automate, unfortunately. Plus there's a lot of room for a typo to break everything. This is the really boring part, but afterwards I can add new scenes just as easily as I can with university and even easier than anomaly vault.

It's a massive pain, and it's important to bring up because there's a jam I wanted to ask all you about. Basically Crypto's real life university term is starting soon, so Hentai University v13 will be coming out on the 14th. However because of that he won't have as much time to write, so he did a quick impromptu poll on whether he should focus on either a girl or a trap character for the update.

So, here's my poll to you guys. If you want I can put HAA on hold and write whatever he doesn't. (IE if traps win I'll write some girls, maybe Cassandra & Emma, if girls win I'll write a new trap boi). The work is slow, I wouldn't mind putting it totally on hold until I finish the PTSA and then focusing on it while HU goes on hiatus. Plus moving away from it to focus on other stuff means it's hard to get back to work on HAA because the complexity means I can lose my place easily. Formally putting down HAA for a while means I'll just focus on HU and Anomaly Vault, maybe even medicenter until the PTSA is done and pick HAA back up later.

On the flipside, I keep focused on HAA. I'm only one noodle after all, so HU's v13 will probably have only one character being the focus (trap is currently winning at the time of writing, so it might be the first ever trap-only update). After v1.1 is done I get back to university to do the PTSA, then keep bouncing between projects maybe getting an update of HU, AV, and HAA done each month.