Update 19th Feb '23 (Patreon)

After a couple of weeks of technical problems, it's great to report that this was a really good week.

First up, whatever was wrong with the houseofhellishharlots website was fixed by ringing up the people managing Wordpress for it.  As I mentioned in the last update, while I was mucking around with that, I added a few new features.  There is a password-protected area (password in the pinned post at the top) where patrons can play the latest version without having to fiddle around with .zip and .html files.  I also added a harlots section with a gallery of the various art I and others have had commissioned.  There's also a segment plugging my books.  And, rather than last week where I had to be 'trust me, you'll see it when the damn page updates', you should be able to see it all now.

The bigger news is with the House of Hellish Harlots project itself.  The Twine Editor was getting more and more unmanageable and I knew I needed to break the project up into smaller modules.  I'd done some research and found out Tweego was the way most developers were solving this problem.  Still, it looked a little fiddly with a command line prompt and reorganising big projects at this stage is always fairly scary.  I had a plan to duplicate the project 7 times and then delete everything from each duplicate until they formed 7 modules - core, and a module for each faction.  I figured this would be tricky, things would break, and it would take me the rest of the month to get everything running again.

Instead it took about a day to figure out how Tweego worked with a 'toy' project, and then another day to reorganise the project files.  The thing recompiled and worked first time.

In all my history of programming, I think this is the first time that's ever happened!

I made an alpha release of v0.042 for people to try out and I encourage people to do so and let me know of any bugs I might have missed.

This is pretty big as it would have been a very scary roadblock for development.  Now, I appear to have a working fix and can work on some things that were previously borderline impossible.  (I've finally fixed that bug with Suka where she doesn't give the correct Black Rose behaviour on a repeat visit.)

After that I spent the rest of the week chugging away on H-space bestiary story rewrites.  The plan for this is to write chunks of text fleshing out character, world and story backgrounds and then splicing in the good ones.

Great to have good news this week.
- manyeyedhydra