Happy Halloweenmas, or something? (Patreon)

What's been done?

BenX

• Added more dialog

Ecchi Sensei

• Some minor features
• Half of a tough feature
• Struggle
  • A LOT
• Release the Halloween build

Let me start off with an apology. I’ve not just missed one report, but two.. So..

I’m sorry, I truly am. It shouldn’t happen, I suck =<

I want to promise it won’t happen again, but honestly.. I’m not sure if I can keep that promise. I’d like it to not happen again, but it’s very easy for me to fall into a downward spiral and just, keep delaying it.

Why did this happen?
Basically, I’ve been hitting my head against a wall for about a month with Renpy. Because of this I didn’t have much to write about and this is when I fall in the old pit of “I’ll delay the post by a few days so I’ll have something to talk about”.. But instead of the wall breaking, I was starting to show cracks.. I got close once but it soon became painfully clear that this approach could never work for the game.. Which hurt a lot.. If I never got there, that would be one thing, but to get to the door and be shown the exit.. Leaves a bitter taste.. Especially when you’re starting to realize the door might never even open.. Then when switched to something else, it ended up running into the same animation wall and I just broke..

So yea.. That’s why I didn’t write any reports. I felt there was nothing to report besides my struggles with animations and just kept postponing the post until I realized I already missed 2. I did make the sad image above for the previous post, but then when I started writing I just felt bad and ended up delaying it again.

So what’s actually been done?

BenX
BenX was just adding some dialogue, placing the dolls and implementing the choice menus. Though I did have a chat with Newman about improving the dev tool I made for him. This would allow him to go through the game in “dev mode” and add/change dialog himself, change backgrounds and place/change dolls. Which means less work for both of us. Newman doesn’t need to write all the expressions down and I don’t have to set up the dialog.

While I’m not too sure if I can get the actual “dev mode” working, I can at least make it work for adding new content, which is still a big win on time. No clue as to when I’d be able to actually make it either though. On the one hand, it would increase the workflow.. But on the other, it might be better to focus on the actual game for now..

Ecchi Sensei
Suffering, pure and utter suffering.. To the point of breaking down.. Blue wanted some simple stuff, a bar to control animation speed and image effects. Both rather simple tasks. However, you can’t make changes to an animation after it’s loaded. This means that whenever you change the speed, you need to reload the animation.. And because Renpy doesn’t keep track of the frames, it starts from the very beginning. You also can’t make new images after “init” (after you hit start or load a game), so you can’t really recreate the animation before showing it again either.

I found some weird alternate way of doing it through DynamicDisplayable, which would even allow me to apply image effects on the spot. But, because image prediction in Renpy is weird or at least, I could never figure it out. It would result in the first loop being choppy as fuck before running without issue.. Even altering the speed or changing the effect worked fine, just.. Not the first loop. In the nightly version it would work perfectly, but only on my PC, my weaker laptop would still struggle.. So, while it technically works, it’s unusable..

It’s not a complete loss though, it did make me look into pygame more and I’ll be diving deeper into it all. Time to learn how to code like a big boi! Plus since Renpy uses Pygame, tapping into Pygame directly might improve BenX combat as well =D.. So.. That’s something, I guess xD

What’s next?

BenX

• More dialog
• Combat rework
• Dev tool 2.0

Ecchi Sensei

• Optimizing
• Animation stuff
  • Maybe..
• Minor stuff

Creative

• Honey Select scenes
• Pygame, Blender, Unity research
• Tutorial, website? T.T

So.. I talked about becoming more structured in an earlier post.. Yea.. Uhm.. That didn’t really happen.. I make more notes, so that’s something.. But, I’m still a mess.. I’m thinking of labeling days from now on, marking a certain day for a project.. Or, if I allow myself.. A day off. This should help me balance the workload between the two projects at least. And while I won’t be appointing certain tasks to certain days, I do plan on having a clear list of what work is left. So I have a better idea of what’s ahead of me and maybe change some days around. And then in the offtime on those days I can do research or HS stuff.. At least the HS stuff and Unity can be relaxing/invigorating.

BenX
The main priority here is adding more dialog/content but that usually involves a bunch of waiting. So While the latter 2 aren’t too high of a priority, since they aren’t part of the build, I’d still like to get started on them, in my BenX offtime. I’ll probably start on dev tool 2.0, since I feel like that’s attainable with my current skills and would make work for Newman easier as well. The combat currently works well enough and the main changes I’ve got in mind would just be cleaner more efficient code on my side of things, nothing that you should really notice. But I am thinking of maybe making it all in Pygame and see how that runs (and plays with Renpy xD).

Ecchi Sensei
More Pygame research to figure out a way to make my own animations class (the proper way) and see if that’ll play nice with effects and without resetting. Other than that there’s still some minor tasks left and a bunch of optimizations, as a lot of stuff still runs on imagemaps with full resolution images (which I hate xD).

Creative
For my offtime, I’m gonna try and find a balance between gaming and side productivity (think of HS scenes and research into stuff like Blender and Unity). Not sure how that will work out, but I know from experience that HS scenes can at least be relaxing. I’ve done only a little bit of Blender stuff and only glosses over some Unity tutorials, but they do get me excited at times, so maybe my offtime can be a bit more productive?

As for the tutorials and website, I’ll need to plan a proper day for those I guess.. And.. Actually do them.. I realized today that I registered the site over half a year ago.. And..Don’t get me started on when I hit the tutorial mark.. But.. Tbf.. Maybe that one was put a bit too low xD

That’s it for now, sorry for the wall of text.. Guess that’s what happens after 2 missed reports xD

See you all in the next one (WHICH WON’T BE LATE!.. Or at least won’t be skipped..)
A mending Akanoes