art update: summer is over (Patreon)

Summer is over and this is no time to get a tan.

For all of us northern hemisphere people, the summer is gone and the flu season has started. I'm not so much worried about myself, but the coder has a habit of picking up stuff by just looking at it through a binocular so I think I'm going to give him an advance warning about shaking hands with snotty people and keeping that apple cider vinegar close at hand. I already warned him(too late) about something else. Something which is closely related to when you can expect the new build. 

So about a week ago I mailed him asking how things were going with the build. I received an email saying he'd tell me more "tomorrow". When I still hadn't heard from him after a few days I sent another email and got a reply. I'm just gonna copy/paste it below

Gonna be a couple more days my friend. I did that thing I frequently do where I spend a long time working on a complicated minigame that ultimately is stupid and doesn't work and horribly slows down the thing anyway. I've wanted to include a Collectible Card Game in this thing for so looong but I finally accept that it's a dumb idea. It was a kinda important element in progression for the *censored by me* so I've made a quick replacement game to make up for some of that, but it features way less prominently and now I need more things to do. Working on it buddy, coming to you soon(tm).

Internally my reaction went a bit like this.

... Awh shit. As the coder is well aware of himself, he has a strong tendency to want to add "minigames" to the game. It's just like with the crabfighting/collecting "minigame" during book 3. It's a nice idea and I'm proud of him to want to add different and new stuff to keep things fresh and new, but he really has a  bad handle on gauging what kind of scope is appropriate for these minigames.

I knew he wanted to add a new minigame, but I had no idea it was this or I would've tried my best to dissuade him. Bless his "can do" attitude.  FET wouldn't exist without it.  But sometimes I'd like him to be slightly less adventurous. 

He hadn't asked me for any art for a CCG so I just assumed it was going to be a relatively very easy thing.

So there you have it. He says a couple of more days and I really hope that's all it'll take, but I'm not going to take any bets on that. If we'll be able to get the bughunt version out before the end of the month I'm going to consider us lucky. Just trying to be realistic here.

I was actually working on a new scene for this build the last couple of days which I thought we could shove in sideways if things were going smoothly but I don't think that'll happen now. Maybe something to add  during the bughunt days if it's stable enough.

So with that kind of disappointing news out of the way, the good news is that the art stuff for the next next build is mostly wrapped up. I think I already mentioned it in the last art update, but I've started work on some of the scenes which will end the current route. Mostly because I want to give those more time to "sit on the stove" and possibly change things if I decide it's not good enough. 

Doing stuff in advance also made a bad habit of mine resurface, which is: not properly saving files in folders with a logical name. This means I slowly started losing files again.  In fact I lost something which had me extremely cranky and angry with myself until I remembered I might be able to find it in a recent backup I made. Luckily I could and after a small sigh of relief I've been spending some time going through all my current files and giving them proper names and adding them to a folder in which I'll actually be able to find it when the need arises.   

And finally I made a picture for all of us who are already longing for the next summer. As much as I like listening to the rain(which there is plenty of during autumn) I don't like the days getting shorter and having less daylight.

And that's already all I have to say this time. I'm seriously hoping the coder is giving us a realistic estimation of the time needed to finish the build, but keep in mind,  his glass is pretty much always half full, never half empty. A great mindset to live by but less when you're trying to pin down dates.