Update - Emi at the beach (Patreon)

tl;dr - I'm working on programming the game, but the gameplay is still not running the way I want it to. I'll keep rolling out content in the menu screen until it does.

This week's images

For this week I decided to post some fun in the sun with Emi! I plan for there to be a big "day at the beach" event in the story, which will change based on how your relationships are going. It's similar to events I've had in past games, including the beach day from PAL. Here we have a scene that's pretty clearly only going to happen if your relationship with Emi is going well. ;)

I posted all three images in this sequence - tell me what you think!

Programming

I've been knuckling down and working on the programming a lot this week, but the dating system still isn't working. It's getting a bit closer, I guess, but when I run into a problem like this that doesn't have a clear solution and I run through a bunch of attempts to get it working that don't work, it does take the wind out of my sails quite a bit. I've got some of it working, as you can see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KwKnsoFy8U 

The problem is that even though that appears to all work fine, it doesn't record the dates you choose as it's supposed to, so the next phase of the game when the dates are supposed to play out doesn't work right. I'll keep working at it, of course, but it's hard to do in an engine I'm still quite unfamiliar with. I'm getting better, but I still don't know how a lot of stuff works.

My alternative

Anyway, for the moment I may have to keep producing more content for the story that I post in scenes accessible from the menu, as I've been doing so far, rather than making it fully playable and interactive for a little while. Believe me, I'd much rather have the game functioning as conceived than just make the scenes available at the menu, but I think that's a reasonable compromise in the meantime.

Do let me know what you think about that, though. I'm open to feedback on how to best manage the slow roll out of the gameplay and rather faster roll out of the content.

One thing I've been thinking about is that I may at some point just have to skip a month of content updates (meaning, I would put out no release that month) and just focus the whole time on technical stuff. I'm not sure how that would go over, so do give me your feedback on that if you have an opinion.

Like the images? Have an opinion on the content/gameplay roll out? Let me know in the comments!