HoHH ver0.024 Delayed Because of Bad Software Crash (Patreon)

Rotten news, as the title above.

I was working on finishing off Osculia's repeat visit scenario this morning (the last thing before final testing) when my laptop crashed.  I rebooted expecting to find I'd lost a couple of hours work at the most, only to find the story (aka what Twine calls projects) not there when I started it up again.  After some panicky googling to find where the local autosaves are stored, I found it, only to find that file had somehow become corrupted and Twine wouldn't load it (nor would notepad for me to at least try and retrieve the raw .html code).

Cue much beating of fists and screaming at the sky.

On the positive side, I archive and backup to an external hard drive at the beginning of every month.

On the negative side, having the project crash and the file corrupt on the very last day of the month is the worst possible day for this to happen.

This is also one of the worst months it could happen given all the various changes I've implemented (which are now lost).

Suffice to say, I did not spend this morning in a good place.

But it's happened, so the only thing to do is to pick myself up, dust myself off and work out how to retrieve the situation.

I was able to find an automated backup from the 9th September.  That looks to have been made midway through the .isSingular attribute being added to gifts to resolve 'it/them' usage in harlot scenarios.  I worked back through the harlots until all of them were updated, so that is now the cut off point of where I was up to.

I reckon the damage is I've lost the last 3 weeks of work.  Which sounds horrible, but should be clarified as 3 weeks of implementation work in Twine.

Raw text is stored in word .docs, so that hasn't been lost.

Also, because it was fiddly and the Twine editor runs fairly slowly because of the size of the project, the revamped selection algorithm was typed up in notepad first, so I still have that.

However, I have lost:

Pel-V Gnoi's implementation.
Osculia's repeat visit implementation.
QoL change to skip The Madam's mulligan token explanation.
The revamped transition to Club Activities that allows the Madam skip and for the Barman to give more clues in later rounds.
Reorganisation of harlot factions/round ranges.
QoL change to allow player to use a mulligan token to buy charm of choice.

All in all, I estimate it's probably going to take 1 to 2 weeks to put all of that back in.  So, I'm feeling fairly gutted at the moment.

Literotica's Halloween short story competition starts on the 1st Oct.  Originally, I was thinking of putting out ver0.024 and then spending the 1st week of October finishing off a story I've had on the side for a while.  Part of me wants to do that to take my mind off this.  Part of me thinks if you fall off the horse, you should get right back on, and the best thing I can do for the next week or two is to just grit my teeth and put the lost changes back in and get the project back on track again.

For obvious reasons, I won't be putting out ver0.024 later today.  I feel really bad about that.  I've had a year of fairly consistently putting out a new release at the end of the month, and the month where I have an influx of new patrons to take me above 400 is the one where my computer punks out and eats about 3 weeks of work.  These things happen, unfortunately.

I didn't know the Twine editor handled crashes so badly.  Now I'm aware of this, you can be sure I'll be making manual archive saves a lot more frequently!

To at least give you something, I've attached the raw scripts of the harlots that would have appeared for this release (Pel-V Gnoi and Osculia's new repeat visit scene).

I'd already decided to cut the boobfairy because of time concerns - she's still in progress.  This might not be a bad thing.  As with Osculia, her scenario leads directly on to a follow-up scenario and it might be best to put both the boobfairy and her larger 'friend' in the same release.

It's frustrating, as up until this happened, September felt like a really good month.

Once again, apologies.  I'll try to get everything back on track (and get that public release out) ASAP.