art update - rinse & repeat (Patreon)

It's art update time!

Man I'm writing this update so much later than intended I feel annoyed with myself, but I've had a couple of really frustrating days. Let's start with mentioning some nice things first though! 

When I sent off the first batch of new scenes to the coder he got back to me telling me he really liked what I did and suspected it took me quite a while to get it done.  Well, that that's true(the long time it took me). As for the result being nice; the coder's blessing is the second line of defense against feelings of my-stuff-sucks so you can bet your behind that was a major relief. It usually is! 

Oh and if you're curious about my first line of defense, that's me thinking: "I'm sure the coder can work this into an interesting and funny story. It's about the entirety of the experience/game and not about the single brick in the wall." 

My satisfaction wildy swings between the different stages of creation. It's like a sine funtion. If I'm lucky I end at the 1 and if unlucky I'm dipping down through that x-axis into the negatives... I don't really understand math and probably screwed up that comparison.

Anyway, coders says good = me happy!

First batch was pretty much the brunt of what's needed for the next build, but I still had to do some maze stuff and an extra scene. And it's that extra scene where things got wild.  Let's just say I pretty much wasted several days trying to whip something horrible into something at the very least passable. 

I really dislike  leaving or deleting scenes I'm halfway through to start again from scratch. It's a bad habit and if I let myself I'd redo scenes forever. But...I still had to chuck out a bunch of stuff this time because it was just... poop. 

The entire proces felt much like trying to strangle a boa constrictor with my bare hands while it's squeezing the life out of me in return. I did end up with something decent (at least I think I did, but won't feel entirely safe until the coder agrees) and pretty much finished it today.

The new maze part is also finished although that has little new surprises for anyone who has already played book3's slave route.

I did encounter something else slightly bothersome, born out of frustration while working on the "boa constrictor" scene. Do you know what's worse than accidentally deleting your workfile/image? It's saving it, but saving it at a lower resolution than you're working on. 

If you delete an image you can go to your recycle bin or if push comes to shove, install some software specialized in retrieving deleted files. If you're lucking it might still be there. If you resized your image from a high resolution to a low resolution and save it, you could still try to ctrl-z (undo) it. If however you close the program thinking all is fine and come back to it another day... hahahaha.. ha.. Actually, you won't be laughing at all.  

When resizing work 99.9% of the time I copy the files and resize the duplicate file to prevent accidents like that, but this time I opted for the 0.1% and took a shortcut I normally wouldn't have. Long story short, I luckily had a slightly older file(made 20 minutes earlier), which saved me from face-desking. 

Making backups is important. Even quick temporary ones evidently. Buuut I sometimes can go hours without making any so I got lucky!

Btw. I'm never afraid my pc will blow up except right before making backups to my external harddisk. Is that just me? 

Anyway, with those things  out of the way and in a far better mood I started working on a scene for the next build! Gotta get in those hours to hopefully make it something befitting the end of this route. That means we'll try to fit the end (please take this with a healthy serving of salt) in two more builds. That includes the one we're working on now. I think that would make the total amount of builds we need for this route close to (if not the same) as the number it took us to finish the slave route of book3.

Normally we'd like to have a solid two months, without a build in between for the endings and the beginnings. That's because the end and start of a route usually have their own difficulties to consider. When it comes to the beginning we don't really see another way considering our books have steadily been taking on more characters and there's nothing (or at best precious little) we can reuse when starting a book.

However I think we can do stuff in two, monthly spaced, builds for the end of this route. who knows, we might leave you with a horrible cliffhanger this month! Nah, I don't think so. Just remember I suck at predictions. For the love of sanity, don't take me serious when I start giving you predications. 

So I'm currently working on an important end(ish) scene for Toph. Not sure if the coder is going to want to change some stuff for better effect, but I'm creating this as the last sexy scene with Toph and adding in some more options. So far so good and I'm really liking this one (I'm on top of the sine!  Woohoo!!) 

Since We've been hinting at it with the subtlety of a brink through a window, I can safely say one of Toph's new scenes will be all about putting IT in her waste disposal unit. 

I can't imagine this being a surprise to anyone. This was actually the one scene which I talked about a long time ago while still working on the slave route. If you remember I talked about a scene I didn't use because the coder had a cool idea and the already existing scene just wouldn't fit that idea anymore so I made a new one and shelving the other one for later use.

Well, I still had that old one lying around so I took it and have been heavily reworking it. In fact I reworked it twice. Since my first attempt felt weird.. man, I've been redrawing far too much stuff this week. I really don't like being this inefficient, but I'll be damned if I'm putting something in there I can't at least be somewhat happy with. 

Kinda made me wish I had kept on working through our little Christmas break, but taking some time off was also super nice. 

Actually I have been trying my hand at some more 3d modelling during the Christmas break. It was relaxing and I just couldn't sit entirely still. You might remember I made most buildings in book 2 and the tank in book2(!) partly using Blender. That's a software program for modelling.  My biggest problem is when I don't use software like that for longer than a week everything I learned quickly sinks back into the swamp I call my memory. I really wish that was just a joke.

My longterm fantasy is making characters which could actually be used in a game. I'm calling it fantasy because I don't actually ever expect to get there, but fuck it, fantasizing about it makes me happy :) so every now and then I try to regain what meager "skills" I had. 

Some examples of how far I got last time below. 

That's all I have for you this time. I'll be replying to some pm's and comments before I'll go back to working on the new scenes.  There's  a lot to do!