March 26 Update (Patreon)
Content
Not sure if the previous posts gave the impression work isn't progressing? When I have a theme/topic for a post, it feels weird to throw in "Oh and there was also other work."
This week I'll do a more rambly walk through my work instead of presenting a focused development. For TLS 0.65.x the scope got out of hand and I was working on everything at once. While I didn't entirely escape that tendency, one of my goals this time was to concentrate on individual pieces. So for the first several days this week, I was working on finishing up Yarra's harem quest.
Just when I thought I had everything set up, I ran into a serious problem. You know the party split system, which has been used multiple times with no issues? It started crashing the game and giving useless error reports. I fiddled for some time, first assuming I'd made some syntax error or stupid mistake, then becoming increasingly frustrated as I couldn't avoid the crashes.
So I had to ask for help, which will never be instantaneous. There are definitely advantages to working on multiple fronts, and in this case I switched to another harem quest. Floundered a bit after losing my momentum, but I did get some stuff done: writing rough drafts for all the sex scenes next update, for example.
Since I was still stuck on Yarra, the next day I switched to assets for the other harem quest: it will involve a lot of crafting and most the remaining unique equipment. While it isn't a herculean effort, it does take some work to set up equipment. You want to balance both individual items to be reasonable, but also a mix of different types: some custom equipment is hands-down best in slot, some is good with potential tradeoffs, a few are red herrings.
Fortunately, around the time I finished the equipment, Decanter saved the day. I hadn't been blundering with the multiple party script, there was actually a bug baked into the code! Apparently it hadn't been used for so many parties before (can you blame Yarra for getting the whole harem involved?). This gave me a lot of motivation to dive back into Yarra's quest: I assembled all the pieces I'd been working on and even ran through the full testing.
There's probably more balancing to be done. This quest is tricky because it's a check on all your relationships. Right now I think I've erred on the side of too easy for games with maxed everything, but hopefully the party split will involve at least a bit of strategic fun for everyone. This is intended as a relatively late endgame dungeon, so I'm not sure how it will feel for less optimized saves. I added a lower limit if you don't have enough characters, to try to reduce potential frustration for saves that aren't ready.
So that's basically how this week went. With some non-creative asides like getting my taxes back from my accountant and having to deal with that. T-T Now I need to focus on the partially finished harem quest and hopefully wrap up all the new title screen/assets that has been soaking up time. Another report next week!