What I'm Working On This Week - February 21, 2021 (Patreon)

If you were hoping that I'd spend all week working on To Be A King, you'll be a very happy panda. I'm afraid that what I worked on isn't very interesting until you see it in the game. Most of the week's work was coding, as well as making some adjustments to my story outline.

Coding was a mix of cleanup, reorganization, and additions. I learned a whole lot about Renpy this last week. The cleanup and reorganization of code wasn't because Xor did a bad job at all. In fact, the code was easy to understand. But I needed to get it organized for the way my mind works, add some UI improvements, and get the game setup for some exciting additions with Chapter 5's release. That is all done, except for playtesting from other folks during the Chapter 5 beta. I play tested it so much that I feel like I could recite the dialogue in my sleep. Good news is that there were very minor hiccups with everything. I'll still be adjusting the code a bit as I work on Chapter 5's story, but I don't anticipate any massive work remaining unless there is a show stopping bug I've missed. I also left a shit ton of comments in the code for future Roy when he inevitably has to revisit the code in a few months and can't remember why something was there.

Coding was a big success in that I was able to code all the new additions I wanted to include for the next release. Still a few ideas kicking around for later too. But the new stuff is coded, adjusted, and tested with some basic playthroughs. More testing will be needed to ensure I cover edge cases, but that can happen when we get to a beta of the next release.

The new game outline is done. To give you an idea of where we are in the story, even after Chapter 5, we will not be halfway done with what I have planned currently. As with anything, that is subject to change during development, but these things tend to get bigger, not smaller, in my experience. Chapter 5 is going to be larger than any To Be A King release so far. That means I've got more writing to do. The release has grown, now that it is my sole focus. Writing is usually one of the easier parts. Just ensuring I have continuity, proper dialogue, and interesting scenes. And if you're worried about me burning out from larger releases, I'll be settling into a comfortable schedule here. No long days or crunches.

I've still got some improvements to the environments and models remaining for To Be A King, as well as some renders needed for the UI overhaul. That should be easy to knock out. I promise that I'm going to limit any of these improvement breaks mid-game going forward. Just a few massive things that have been bugging me for the past few months that I want to get updated for the next release.

Very soon I'll be starting on actual game renders. I'm looking forward to that as all the prep work has definitely taken some time. It's been good to try out new things with Renpy though. I still have some ideas for future changes, but I'll wait to see how Chapter 5 works after its release before trying to tackle too much. My to do list for the Chapter 5 release was at about 85 items, at one point, though we've cut that by about 75%. As with any development, things will soon be added to the list, but I'm confident it won't get anywhere near that high again. As far as ETAs for this next release, I'm sticking to my new policy of not announcing anything. There are just too many variables with my day job, potential illness, computer troubles, etc. You may get a couple of days notice before a release, but that is going to be it.

These posts may be boring for awhile, but I do plan to share render counts and scenes written as I work on that in the very near future. Until next week, take care!

P.S. Also got a new logo done (I cannot take credit for this one, but the artist who did it knocked it out of the park).