September 6 Update (Patreon)

Okay, so the public release is done. Extra done, because I just put out a 0.53.3 that fixes the Ginasta bug and includes some more polishing. Thanks to everyone supporting me throughout the process. ^-^

Annual Memberships?

Something I've been putting off while working: what do you guys think about the new option Patron offers for annual memberships? They've been messaging me a ton about it, but I'm not sure how much they message patrons. What it would mean is that you pay for an entire year of patronage up front and get a benefit like one free month. Is this something people are interested in?

From my perspective, I'm not quite sure what to think. It probably promotes long term commitment, but I'm actually not overly enthused. A lot of you are already pretty committed, so if everyone switched to annual, it would just mean an 8% drop in support. I think it would also result in a huge chunk of income up front, then much less through the rest of the year. That's technically to my advantage, since I could earn interest on it, but lumpier income isn't always ideal.

All that said, if this is something that you guys want, I'll definitely turn the feature on. For that matter, feel free to mention if you think my logic on this is incorrect.

OEA Work

I did some work on OEA between updates... and honestly moved backwards. I was doing some work on fancy attack animations when suddenly every battle in the game started freezing at the beginning. I didn't see how the animations could be responsible (individual animations had tested fine) but I laboriously rolled the new ones all back... and everything still froze.

Random testing revealed that a previous plug-in I used to make enemies appear in unique ways was responsible. I didn't change a single thing about it, and I don't see how any of my other changes could suddenly break the entire game. But anyway, unless I can figure out this inexplicable problem, all the work I spent giving every single enemy an entrance animation was just wasted. -_-

This is really pretty discouraging. The entrance animations weren't the most amazing thing in the world, but they took time and effort. Now they're just dead, without any kind of error report, and I can't think of a plausible reason to even test.

On the bright side, all attacks in the game have more animation now. That part worked fine and I finished it, though more refinement to many attacks will probably be needed later.

Whew

I think this year is getting to me, because I'm not at the top of the game. I have a paranoia that I've already written this, but anyway: have you noted that 2020 is two thirds over? In the facetious sense of this being a cursed year, that's a good thing, but when I took inventory of everything I want to accomplish yet this year, it's more than I'd hoped.

But ultimately, even splitting time in between projects, it comes down to doing one thing at a time. So I will turn my attention to the next thing. I hope to be fully focused on 0.54.0 for a while, wrapping up the Gathering with plenty of explosive events.

Back in a week with another update!