August Summary - News (Patreon)

Hey everyone!

Quick news:

I've been quiet on here the past two weeks, and that's mostly because I've been in somewhat of a crunch mode. Not the bad kind where you burn yourself out, but the good kind where you get extra focused say "not today!" to the thousand little tasks that can wait until later. Normally I try to multi task, but to finish up an update it seems I need to disappear into a hole for a bit.

Right after I post this, I'll post the tester update for the higher tiers. It's still missing a lot of renders, so I don't recommend it for the average player quite yet and would suggest waiting for the completed product.

I'd hoped to have Endowed out by this month, so if you were kind enough to support me through July or August and aren't planning on continuing through September, shoot me a message and I'll send you the link when it's finished.

Alright, that's the important info. Want to hear more about my progress lately? Cool! I'll continue.

I recently read an article about game updates, and how they should actually be about the game, and not the developer's personal life and all that. I felt a bit called out, which means I tend to ramble on here too much. So let me see if I can keep this new post relevant!

Why is the update still not finished when I claimed it was "almost done" a month ago, you ask?

Valid question! 

I had a surprise at the beginning of the month, which ended up being both good and bad. Basically, working with Honey Select, I have a folder full of mods and customizations making it look like a shop full of mismatched machinery held together by duct tape. When I download new assets like characters, clothing, environments and objects, there's generally about a 1 in 3 chance it shows up in the program.

This is frustrating when I find the perfect asset, usually in the unofficial Honey Select Discord channel, and can't find it when I go searching through my thousands of files for it. "Hey, a burger diner! This would be great for a casual dinner date! Aww, can't find it."

Finally, I got fed up with it. I've already tried my best at researching things, but I've always felt like there were pieces missing. Reference guides with broken links and key files only kept on websites that no longer exist.

So, I got brave. I started messing around with things, knowing I'd "break the game" trying.

Of course, I made sure I had several backups on other drives first. Because I'm not that dumb.

So I jump in, find a program I'd overlooked that organizes, sorts and renames files. I had thousands, so I went through and clicked "optimize" or whatever button for hours, wishing there was a "all files" button. 

Then, of course, I found the button I was looking for right there once I figured out how to make the program fullscreen.

The program inevitably broke. The English translation went away, and my knowledge of Japanese is right at a 0. A lot of my mods disappeared. But eventually I found how to redo all the mods, and went back in.

I go back into the game and it's all there. Thousands of files I'd found and downloaded and hadn't had access to. Holy shit, it worked!

Of course, now I had to go through and look at them! I now had the cruise ship pool I'd wanted for the last Hypnosis update! A ton of new outfits, maps, objects...

So this took about a week.

Next, I realized that as much as I could try to get the program to look the same, I simply couldn't. Skin tone is a subtle thing, and now that I had access to five different customizable programs all competing with each other, it all looked considerably different. What combination did I have before? I have no idea.

So I went through and tried every combination I could think of. This lighting with that one, turn off this program, oops, that takes away the girl's makeup, try this one...

This took another week.

Of course, I could just revert to my old game settings by loading up my external drive. But saving/converting the program over and transferring the files takes about 10 hours, because my folder is several hundred gigs. And I'd be missing out on all my new progress...

Finally, I found some combination of lighting I was happy with. In fact, I might like it better. It's more customizable and more powerful. So, now I can make scenes easier than I struggled with previously.

And this allowed me to remake scenes. However, there is one moment where I tried for the subtle "hey, can you turn off that orange light? It's in my eyes" to handwave the difference.

So a combination of all that and a whole lot of editing the game, and I now realize this update is twice as big as previous ones. At first I thought it was light, but by the time I added all the code for visuals, animations and all, and it adds around 50% to the game's length in total. Oops.

I'm super excited for this update. I'm hoping it's the one to bring over the general opinion for Endowed from "this has potential" to "damn, things are coming together! I can't wait for the next update!"

There's also a part of me that hopes it makes the previous update with the "Going Home" ending a better experience. As I'd mentioned before, I'd originally meant to release this chapter along with that update, to bring a combination of main game content along with the side ending. The reason I didn't finish it was it was taking longer than usual, and I thought I'd come right back to it after another Hypnosis update.

Now, I've slipped into this "each game update is bigger and taking longer than the previous one" pattern despite my best efforts, and I need to keep adjusting to fix that.

I'm currently thinking I simply need to plan out (and stick to) shorter updates. I keep adding more than I originally plan, making my estimates worthless when I end up with twice the amount of content I planned.

For example, the outline is tighter with Endowed, as I have a much more in depth outline for it. That used to be true with Hypnosis as well, but the Broken Watch Branch was essentially veering off script, so I had a harder time containing it all. Don't jump in without an outline, even when it's requested/voted on, is the lesson I learned there.

But with Endowed, I'd designed it to have shorter updates initially, but it had been a year since I'd had the chance to work on it, so I got overly excited and basically put what I'd planned for multiple updates into one. It was starting to feel too short, but I need to keep in mind it inevitably all grows longer with edits and rewrites.

I need to get away from the "aw, man, it's been two months since I started this update, I want to make it worth the wait, so I'd better add a little more" mentality.

Alright, that stayed fairly on topic!

By the way, the picture is of Jazz, another dancer we'll meet in the next update. I'd show you more, but I'd rather you see them in the game.

Once again, thank you everyone for all the support! 

Love you guys.