A (much needed) progress update (Patreon)

[Abelius]: Hi there people,

First of all, I'm sorry about the lack of updates on my part in the last days.

I relocated my things to the co-working office in the past week, and since then I've been focusing on getting things done. This is indeed a really good place to work without distractions (my daughters making noise at home, mainly), but so much focusing on development has got me a little silent with you guys... :-P

Well, I can just say that I'm trying to make up for lost time now. As I suspected, time spent here is much more productive than in my house. It's Saturday afternoon here and the place is completely quiet. I'm the only person working in the weekend, even when the office is open 24/7...

So, before I plunge into Unity and Spine for the day, I wanted to take out of the way that little anxiety of not being communicative enough about my progress.

If you take a look here, you'll see the (almost) finished dialogue "tree" (more like a spaghetti bowl) for Cenvir.

Each node represents a dialogue line along with the scripting commands that make the "magic" happen. That could be a character speaking, blushing, putting a face after speaking, starting an animation, etc. That also allowing for event repetition and variations according to K's lust levels.

There's an epic work involved in that, because there are a lot of things happening in the background. Even speaking is a different animation that plays at the same time as the others, and not always gets along well with other components of the model... but I don't want to bore you to Hell. Let's just say that those are things that don't happen in other games with static renders and/or simpler models with no mesh deformation, clothing and sorting layering and animation curves.

The important thing here is that this kind of work is, by far, the most time-consuming activity in my to-do list, but I guess that just the fact of having a previously created template like this one will help me a lot in the future.

That said... yes, I should try to find a balance between detail and content.

Every time I estimate how much time it will take me to add something, I end up being too optimistic. And even after a year of working on the game, I'm still finding engine and model structure issues that need to be addressed before the game starts to grow to its intended size.

Thing is...: we're amateurs doing a harder than most amateur game. We're learning every day by finding multiple ways of how NOT doing things. And some of those past mistakes are easy to fix, while others are... well... :-P

Anyway, those are bridges to be crossed at a later time. My intention is that v0.2 and v0.3 end up being much more closely spaced out than v0.1 and v0.2, so I'll need to ignore less-than-ideal engine inner workings for the time being.

And as for when exactly v0.2 will be out to testers, I can't know it right now. I'll work my ass off the next weeks, because my daughters' holidays start on 23rd, so it would be a really good idea to have something before that date, so the rest of the month could be spent on bug fixing, even if I need to take my computer with me again.

But those are not closed plans. The only thing I don't want to do is to rush things up and vomit a broken mess.