Art update: I'm doing it! I'm doing it! (Patreon)

Heya fellas! The coder gave you a small update a short while ago, but I should give you some signs of life as well.

I have no idea how long it has been since the last art update, but it feels like an eternity. Man, I've really been hitting hermit mode lately. Part of the reason is game related but the other of a more personal nature. My mom discovered a lump in her neck/throat area and went in for a scan. She now has an appointment to have some tissue removed to find out what it is exactly. I wasn't extremely worried or distracted because I thought it was a simple inflammation of a lymph node but a remark from a specialist has me started doubting. So right now I'm more than slightly looking forward to the biopsy and it's result.  Unfortunately all of that will still take at least a couple of weeks to wrap up which sucks hard. It can probably be a million things besides you-know-what, but with the whole coder and his mom business awhile ago it's the first place your mind wanders.

Anyway, back to FET stuff. What's the other game related reason? Well... I've been lying to the coder! Sort of. Okay, not really but the result is just about the same. I already told you guys about the proof-of-concept thing I had written for book 4 where you can move your character along in the world like a top down rpg, but after some more thinking I told him we were best off forgetting all about it. Too much risk of stuff breaking down, too much drawing backgrounds etc etc. He was a bit sad about it(me too), but ignoring practicalities is something which will quickly come back to bite you in the ass so we decided on the safer way of doing things.

Anyway, I'm blessed/cursed with the opposite of what the "frozen"-song is all about,  so despite what I told the coder I returned working on it with a "this is probably me wasting our time"-mindset. 

It turned into a veeeery limited version of the initial idea. No more than a few limited areas would have some of it. In part because working some more on it made it clear the initial idea is just not doable and in part because we're still not sure it won't create more problems than it's worth. Btw. I didn't set out to put up a smoke screen for the coder. I meant what I said when I told him it would be a bad idea, but like I said earlier I couldn't let it go and came back to it working till I knew for certain I had come up with a version which wouldn't be impossible.

In fact I've rewritten big parts of my initial proof of concept! It was a truly horrible unreadable piece of script originally, ready to break down whenever you'd cough too loudly in it's vicinity. Does that mean it's good now? Naaaah not at all!! But it's a lot better. There's still a million things I'd like to add and change which is part of it's deviousness. You put in one thing and you think to yourself...okay now that I've put that in and it's still not breaking down... wouldn't it be nice if I'd also...... and off I go into dangerous territory. 

I spent a fraction of the time it took me to rewrite it compared to the first time because I had a better idea of where the pitfalls were, but I'm still super inexperienced at this stuff. Meaning a fraction of the time is still a long time. 

I created a tile based system (that sort of jargon feels way too haughty for my messing about, but what else can I call it?) which pretends you're freely walking around. I tried making a free walking system too, but I only got parts of it working, with other parts breaking down again. I probably(maybe) could get it working, but again do I really want to spend time on what's in essence already doing what I want? ...Well YES!! But I'm not gonna because ain't nobody got time for that. In fact you probably won't even see any of this in the first book 4 build because it's highly unlikely the coder can work it in that soon. Yes, even though it's very limited in scope compared to my initial idea.   I did do my best to set it up in a way to make it relatively easy to expand upon, but that's more of a pipedream right now.

All of this takes far more time than we'd like and even though we've warned you the start and end of a book breaks our already very shaky mold of a new release a month...I can't help but feel bad when we don't have something new for you each month. I hope we can quickly pick up a more or less normal schedule again once the first build for this book is out. We'll give it our best!

To speed things up(or rather reduce drag)we're also trying  a new thing where we're internally developing book 4 as a standalone thing which we can plug into the entirety of FET when it's time to create the real thing. As FET's getting bigger so are the loading times. Not a major disaster when you're just loading the game to play it for some time, but if you're creating it and need to test/change it a lot those 20 seconds or so are quickly starting to stack up and turn the whole proces into a major timesink.

Soooo.. what about art? Yeah, I've been doing that too! But man I'd love to gather all the moments in the past when I was bored(definitely pre-FET) and siphone all of that wasted time into the present. I'd have no problem filling whatever wasted moment in my life with FET related things : )

Since it's the start of a new book, most of the new scenes I'm drawing are still comparatively tame. And damn it, I can't be truly happy when drawing people wearing clothes!  Why can't ATLA and TLOK be set in a universe where nudism is the standard?  Then again there'd be far less need for a game like this.  Still I'd know what I'd  prefer....  damn the consequences!  Uuh wait, old Katara and Toph would also be.....  

Oh well, the clothes "problem" will solve itself over time and I can't wait to show everyone what we've been working on. Clothes or no clothes!