I am a dwarf and I'm digging a hole. (Patreon)

Starting a new route is always a weird feeling. It's like you're on a treadmill and someone changes the speed from 3 to 8 and you'll  do a bit of awkward stumbling before you can find your balance again. At the start of this month I've written and drawn the opening scene for book4's love route, but it'll be a while before I can entirely shake off the slave route feeling.  There's also the fact  the new scenes I'm working on aren't nearly as hardcore as the ones in the last build. That's something to get used  to as well.

Still, I haven't done a lot of drawing this past week. I did some and I sent most of the scenes we'll be using for the first bk4 love route build to the coder. God knows some of those need redrawing(badly), but I've been doing some archeology instead and dug deep into the stratum of FET.  And boy oh boy... what a journey of discovery that is! It sometimes feels like we build FET on  a pet cemetery. With each new hole I dig I find a new horrific oddity I forgot we put there.

What I mean is... FET isn't exactly a spring chicken and when we started working on it neither of us had much of an idea how to do things. It was more of a "whatever works" mentality with which we jumped in at the deep end. Not knowing how sizeable the amount of files would become we weren't exactly too organized with our files. And that's the more benign part of it's inner faults.

Back then we still imagined the other books(2,3 and 4) to be about as big as book 1. Anyone who has reached the end of book 2 knows things evolved in a slightly different direction.

The amount of files FET is using has seen an exponential growth with each book... more like an explosion really.  FET's file structure resembles an explosion as well. Anyone who has taken a look inside can attest to that.

                    Obligatory toph is blind joke!

Of course we've been slowly mending our ways during the creation of each new book, but there's a looooot of crazy stuff going on behind the scenes. I actually tried fixing that a year ago, but I got scared and ran away. Now that we're at the start of a new route and me having a slightly better understanding of what I can and can't do without destroying everyone's savegames I'm giving it another go. 

Just imagine having a plate of the longest, stickiest, overcooked spaghetti and me trying to carefully pulling out a single strand each time without breaking it. It's the most tedious and time consuming thing ever. I can be pretty damn stubborn, but I've had more than a few times where I just wanted to "nope out". I'm constantly reloading to see whether something went wrong, because if you do too much at once without a reload and things go wrong it becomes really difficult  to see what went wrong where.

The upside is that I've discovered the cause for a few weird error reports which I always got when the game broke down and in general it's satisfying to see how it's slowly becoming a bit more organized. But yeah... the speed at which all of this is happening is like filling a bucket of water. One...    drop...    at...    a...    time...

Organizing the mess has some advantages in the long run, but the main reason I'm doing this is the fact knowing the mess is there, lurking just below the surface, was driving me insane. 

Unfortunately I still have to leave a lot like it is because of save-games and time considerations, but looking back on some of the stuff  we did back then makes my toes curl backwards.  Oh and I also made a deal with myself I wouldn't start redrawing anything. that's a time sink I can't allow myself to step into right now.

Quite frankly, I'm not entirely certain I can do this and not have to revert to an older (still messy) version in the end. This is just me giving it my best shot, but I can't be certain until the entire bucket has been filled, and I think I'm only about 20 percent done. If that!

I pretty much have this music on loop for the entire day while working on it.

With all of this going on and drawing/adding the additions to the end of book 4's slave route last month, it feels like a century ago I touched my 3d modelling software! I'm pretty much certain I've lost most of my skills in that department... again! that keeps happening whenever I decide to be a bit more serious 3d modelling. So anyone fearing a future project of us would be filled with weird 3d stuff... don't. The chances of that happening are slim at best.

There's not much else to mention. I got myself a new chair, because the old one was literally falling apart and I'm still super happy with my discovery of frictionless mouse wheels. The feeling of having no skin anymore on the tip of my finger is gone ever since I started to use that new mouse!

Also, most of you will know this already, but there's absolutely no way we'll have a new build ready this month. It's the start of a new route and that always takes more time. Especially since this route will have a lot less in common with it's slave counterpart than the earlier slave/love route combos during older books. I'm certain there's at least a few new people who don't know so I wanted to be super clear about that.

Anyway, that's what I've been doing and will be doing for a while longer. it's super boring, uneventful but I feel it's necessary to at least try and bring order to chaos even if it won't directly benefit the player now... though it might in the future...

And that's already it for this update. Till next time!