Rogue-Like Update 12/21/2019 (The night is dark and full of terrors) (Patreon)

So it's the winter solstice, longest night of the year, so I figured I'd give you guys a spooooooky story. . .

I'm rebuilding the underlying code of the game.

I'm basically rebuilding the variable system to use a more object-oriented design than I started with. Remember that when I started on this game, I didn't really know how to code, I was just using the basic functions of Renpy to do fairly basic things, plugging in some pre-built example elements without really understanding them, and then attempting more and more ambitious elements as they occurred to me and my skill improved. I avoided using object-oriented elements where I could, because I had trouble wrapping my head around how they functioned. Over time though, I got more and more comfortable with the basics, and started to realize how much more flexible the game could be if I shifted the way it handled these variables.

What does this mean to people who just want to play the game? Well the next release won't be all that different from the last as far as how it plays. Most of the changes just duplicate the things the game was already doing, but hopefully in a more efficient way, and with the potential for more flexible use of certain stats. It will be easier to expand in future, and easier to add new elements onto it. I expect the first release will have a decent number of bugs to chase down, because there are a decent number of places where if I missed changing something over it will throw an error, but once detected, fixing those sorts of problems will be pretty quick.

There is one problem though, it will break the existing game saves.

I had initially hoped I could avoid that, because I hate having to replay content in games, and it's always been a pet peeve of mine that I wanted to avoid doing in my own game, but the deeper I got into this process, the more unavoidable it became. If you load up old saves in the next version, there would just be too many errors to patch over, at least under natural conditions. My HOPE is that by the end of this process, I will at least be able to carry over a "save state," that if you have a save in the player's room, with nobody around, that the data from that save can be converted over to work in the new version, basically remembering everything as you had it, but I won't know if I can get that to work until I'm mostly finished.

But, that annoying hiccup aside, the game should run and save smoothly from that point on, is much more compact, and will require a lot less copy and pasting every time I add a girl to the game. :D I'm sorry for the inconvenience involved, but I think it's worth doing at this point. Oh, and this shouldn't set the release of the next version back too far, I'm already most of the way through the tricky bits.

As for other stuff, the girl 5 poll will wrap up at the end of the month, and due to patron feedback, we'll do a quick run-off for the last few candiates. Have a merry Christmas all!