Fortnightly Progress - 8th August (Patreon)

Well that last week was a thing and a half. As you might have guessed from the lack of streams it's not been ideal to put it lightly.

I knew I was going to be away for the weekend for a family thing. Which was why I'd originally moved some of the planned nights around, but due to an event out of nowhere it turned out to be a lot more involved for everyone concerned. 

Added to that I've had not one, but too major appliances break in my flat with one needing out right replacing and the other repairing warranting some very, very early mornings. 

So that's been fun. 

Please accept my apologies for the lack of progress and missed streams over the last week. Not happy with it either.

Thankfully all that's now sorted with even the family issue being thankfully solved yesterday.

Looking ahead now I can't think of anything coming up from now all the way up the end of the year to get in the way of me cracking on with things. Course there's always the chances of more events of the unexpected, but I like to think that optimism springs eternal. 

• No Haven

Due to the above I'm now aiming for ideally by the end of next week in terms of getting the update out, and absolute worst case by the next one of these fortnightly's.

Did get some stuff done though. Two of the aspects will involve assigning a slave permanently to your slavers for an ongoing bonus. That took some working out of just how exactly that was going to be done in a sensible manner, but I've now solved it and I'm happy with the implementation. 

Thanks to that new mechanic I've also done a proper rebalancing of owned slavers so that now they will no longer contribute towards crushing it and their traits will be a bit less effective than before. The assigned slaves will work the same way. 

I've also done some more working out of the new assignments with my main focus being on the ooze recruitment one. This has also involved expanding the lore examine for that race to account for a potential 'reward' you might end up with from that one. 

• The No Haven Conversion

It's still maybe going a little too well. 

Hell, it's arguably not helped with getting out the actual NH update, as it's been very tempting to work on the conversion instead outside of the agreed upon streams. Understandable really as RAGS has never exactly been quick or easy to use, and it's far more satisfying converting such huge swathes of code all at once compared to a single bit at a time. There's also the problem solving aspect of how to put together the regular expression in the exact way to get the desired result which has always been the kind of thing that I've found to be entertaining. 

Before you get the wrong impression I don't in the slightest regret starting this. 

Arguably it should have happened well before now in terms of making the game easier to use and waaaay more accessible.  It is though a challenge working out how to integrate the conversion into my work process so that it's less of a disruption to everything that needs to be done and when.

In terms of actual progress I'm tackling the last of the commands in terms of setting and displaying the many different variable text strings. These have been crazy complicated as the way RAGS handles them and the way Twine handles them is very, very different. There's also taking account for the different array formats, arrays within arrays within arrays within arrays (I wish that was an exaggeration), that setting them and displaying them have to be completely different when in RAGS they could be identical, and it's a lot of a mess basically :D

I think I've done a reasonably large percentage of those by now, and after that theoretically it's just conditions which is going to be by far the part I'm going to do most careful with after thinking I'd have to do them all manually in WR. 

Still, at this rate it's entirely possible that you'll be playing at least some kind of twine version of NH before the end of the year. Given I thought I might still be sorting out the images out at this point, and possibly even still by that point, I appear to be seriously ahead of schedule. By comparison after this amount of time in WR I'd only done the very start of the game and that was it. 

• Commissions

Did an update on these in the commission poll I posted earlier this week so will just quote that for those who don't have access to that: 

May - Asanei Maid: Just finished and ready to go for the following update where the new related assignment will be included. 

May+June - Cheerleaders: Currently at the colouring stage. With two out of the five mostly done at last check in. It's a big one so next couple of weeks for completion I'd guess?

July - Hidden Temple: Got an artist who is interested and I'm going to be sending them the details and references for it today. Right after I've got this poll up to be exact!

Bonus Commission - Oozes: Thought I'd talk about these here too for the first time. Thanks to a generous contribution by a patron there will along with being a new ooze recruitment assignment coming next update there will also be a commission to go with it that will be coming later. Just had an initial agreement from an artist as I was writing this and so I'll also be sending them the details today. 

Bonus Commission - Discord Assignment: This one is also being funded thanks to generous contributions from patrons. We're discussing just what this will involve exactly on the channel this week. 

Since then both the Oozes and the Hidden Temple has had all the details and references sent over. Artist of the Oozes one has also confirmed receipt and that I'm in the queue. 

In regard to the commission poll so far the Deep Mountains Slave Caravan, Watchtower, and Fake Herald of Paradise have taken an early lead, while second and third place are very close indeed. 

• Picarto

All of these will be at the usual time of 22:30 BST outside of the odd occasional one where I need to catch up and so start an hour earlier or change the planned day. 

Back to the regular schedule. As mentioned last time I've caught up with Iwara and as of last night I've started streaming the over 14 hours worth of new videos. 

Fri 9th Aug

Sat 10th Aug

Sun 11th Aug

Mon 12th Aug

Wed 14th Aug  (Twine Conversion day) 

Fri 16th Aug

Sat 17th Aug

Sun 18th Aug

Mon 19th Aug

Wed 21st Aug (Twine Conversion day)   

As always I hope that was worth the read, and thanks again for your support!