Weekly Progress Report - 4-29-2024 (Patreon)

Hey everyone, sorry I'm a day late with the update! My sleeping schedule has been uhh.. let's just say "not scheduled", and I lost track of the day.

So, to be upfront, the past week didn't go super great for me. I mentioned last week that my depression was flaring up, and that continued through most of this week, amd I've been feeling pretty overwhelmed by responsibilities and general life stuff. The good news is, I was able to get some of that pent-up stress out, and the last few days have been improving a lot. I still don't have a ton of stuff to write about this week, but I'm feeling quite a bit better and my productivity is recovering nicely, so I expect the next week to be a lot better.

I'm going to save making a full dev blog for just a little longer, so I'll have more stuff to go in detail about. In general, I think I'm going to switch to doing the full blog posts once a month instead of every other week, so that they can really be packed full of details. I'll still be posting an update once a week of course, so don't worry about our post frequency going down, but most of them will be in this "progress report" format instead. The biggest difference between the two is that I want to have stuff like screenshots and gifs for the dev blogs, while the progress reports are mostly text, so it's a LOT quicker to prepare while still allowing me to keep everyone in the loop.

This week, once I started getting over the funk, I started work on a few things: multiple save slots (including an autosave-specific slot, so the autosave when you walk over a save point won't ever overwrite your manual saves anymore), visible playthrough stats, and one spur-of-the-moment idea I had that I'm sure you'll all be happy about: allowing the player to save when they unlock the Debug menu at the end of the demo.

Previously, the reason I didn't allow that was so that you couldn't start a brand new update with debug already unlocked, and trivialize/break any new content that was added; I didn't know a way to avoid that issue back then, but I'm a much better programmer now, so now I was able to easily figure out a way to allow you to save debug mode, but ONLY for the major version you unlocked it in. As an example: once v0.48 comes out, if you unlock debug mode in v0.48.0, then even if I release a hotfix (v0.48.1 for example), you would STILL have debug unlocked after updating to that hotfix - but once v0.49 (the next major release after v0.48) comes out, if you carried over your save to that, your debug unlock would be wiped until you reach the end of v0.49 and unlock it again. I know a lot of people have wanted to be able to keep debug after unlocking it, so you'll be able to do that starting with v0.48 when it comes out! Huzzah!

That's all the stuff I worked on this week, so before I go, here's the last week's worth of daily updates:

Again, not a great week for me overall, and I'm sorry for the lack of productivity again - but I'm definitely recovering from my funk and getting back into it.

Thank you all for reading, and for being so understanding! We'll see you again next week, which will DEFINITELY BE A PROPER DEV BLOG I SWEAR