One of these things is not like the others (Patreon)

What's been done?

• Depression
• Dialog for Scooby
• Cursing at Ren’py
• Jumping through 5 hoops to accommodate rotation
• Crying in a corner
• More depression
• Finally fix bug that’s been destroying me for weeks

Fucking.. Hell.. This has bothered me for weeks now.. I’ve talked (complained) about it a bit in the last post.. It was driving me crazy, it made no sense (and still doesn’t) but hey, it’s fixed.. Soo.. That’s something at least, considering it wasn’t helping my depression at all. Just thinking of work would drain me cause I had this insane bug pestering me. Combine that with the hoops I had to jump through to implement rotation.. It was not a fun time =<

Rotation is all kinds of messed up in Ren’py and documentation is.. Lacking. It needs to be applied in a transform, which is fine, but the moment you apply rotation all the positions get messed up. It changes the anchor of the image (I think) and it seems to differ per image size. So I couldn’t just use one static offset to bring it all back to 0, 0 and still have the tool by dynamic. I thought I found a command (rotate_pad) which I thought would help but made matters worse. It seemed to help within the screen, but when I tested it with a proper composite image the positions were all over the place. Even though they both used the command, they both produced different positions.. After jumping through several hoops I made it work, somehow so that’s the 2 bugs “fixed” and my mind a bit more at ease.

This experience however has worn me down, a lot.. And I think I’m done with Ren’py. Whenever I think of something “cool” or useful, Ren’py usually comes in with a kick in the balls and tells me no. I’ve been able to make a lot of things work but it’s always required jumping through too many hoops. I’ve had simple ideas before which consumed a bunch of time cause Ren’py didn’t like it. Like rotation for example..

What does that mean? For now, nothing. I want to move the games to Unity, but I don’t want to use some pre-built system like Fungus. It might be really good and useful, but before long I would probably run into the same issues I had with Ren’py so I want to try and build my own systems. I don’t know how hard it will be or how long it will take, so for now the games will continue to be in Ren’py. But I do think I want to move them to Unity at some point. I know that Ren’py is more suited for VN’s but the things I’ve been doing have kind of outgrown the platform. (Especially stuff like Ben X’s combat xD). But don’t worry, I’ll do my best to implement rollback again, since that’s that very useful feature in Ren’py that I use all too often :P

If I can’t get it all working in Unity (and by “all” I mean Android as well), We’ll stick to Ren’py, but just for my own mental health, I do hope we can move to Unity. I feel like the freedom will do me good and it might even help us add some cooler stuff that Ren’py would never allow for. And of course I hope the move will impact your experience as little as possible, trying to mimic the Ren’py experience as much as possible.

What else? Not much I’m afraid. I added some more Scooby dialog I guess, helped Muplur a bit by testing Book 5, made a small update for the gallery tool that I made for BadSpider and very little tutorial work T.T. As to why I haven’t been up to much? Let me get into that with another wall of text =D

Boring life stuff

Depression sucks. It’s been pretty bad ever since winter started. Every time I think I’m out of it, it just comes right back round. Having these 2 bugs around didn’t help  much either. Most days I would be too exhausted to even look at code and the days that I wasn’t would be quickly ruined by those bugs. I need things to make sense, when they don’t.. I get angry, which will just drain more energy. So when I had these 2 bugs around, that made no sense to me, it was just slowly eating away at me.

Luckily, I’m back in therapy. Sadly, we aren’t doing much yet. It’s mostly just tests for now, since it’s been a while since I last went and they wanna double check on everything. These tests usually take a toll on my mind though and will leave me exhausted for a day or two. At one point I had 3 appointments in one week and that pretty much killed that entire week for me =<. Add some social stuff and that’s me out of it for a while.

This is also the reason I missed out on one of the reports. Whenever I have an unproductive 2 weeks I tend to put off the report for a day or two and get some extra work in. However, this time I didn’t manage to get extra work in and just kept postponing, until it came too close to the next report and I didn’t know if I wanted to throw around the whole release schedule or wait for the next report.. So now I also had anxiety added onto the pile of shit stopping me from working.. Fun times.. T.T

It wasn’t until last week when BadSpider poked me about the gallery that I started rolling out depression loop. I’m slowly getting back into it again. I’m having some good days again =3. And also started drawing a bit, to try and relax more. I’m also trying to get some structure in my life but am failing miserably at that.. So not sure what I’m going to do about that =< But hey, at least I’m crawling out of this depression hole again, let’s hope I can fill it up before I fall in again this time T.T

What’s next?

I’ll try and keep this bit short :P. I plan on going through Camp Pinewood this week, to see if I run into any further bugs. Just need to pick a day to dedicate to it, so it’s not just floating in my head as “Someday, probably”. I think I’ll have it be a Friday, if the depression allows for it.

Since I have an appointment on Wednesday, I’ll try and finish up the Scooby animation before then. Two days should be enough if my brain doesn’t shit itself.

That just leaves the tutorial I guess. I’ll try and finish up the research and a base script this weekend. Not sure when I’ll be recording anything though. That’s all still a bit scary =<

Let’s hope Newman (who’s found more time to work on the games again) has come up with some more work for me in the week after that, if not, I’ll go dive into Unity I guess =3

See you guys in two weeks!

A very tired Akanoes