Coup Status Update (Patreon)

Evening all, thought I'd give a general status on the release coming up next week. Mainly I have two areas to discuss, art and programming. Now, I'm a programmer myself, and even I get bored when devs I follow start talking about whatever random issue they battled that week, so I'll start with the art.

So first, work is continuing on the director scenes and specialist hangout backgrounds. There was a bit of downtime for a while with the holiday season, but folks are back on the job now - we have one director set ready to go for the next release, and I'm hoping to have at least one more item ready in time. On the less optimistic side, Vin, who's currently doing our backgrounds, will be taking a break for about a month and a half in the near future. I may be able to get some additional help to cover for part of that period, but there may be a bit of a gap for a while in that department.

Second, on the boring programming front, and when I haven't been writing Hellfire content, I've been deep in...Unity GUI scenes. To get a little bit technical, the entire game so far has just been a single scene - one level. I've been setting up the Exploration Missions to occur in a different scene, as I'm hoping to get a little more complex with them, but this left me with an issue - cross-scene GUIs like the Options menu. Completely recreating it in the new scene would mean duplicating a lot of functionality, and duplication is a sin in good development. 

So, I dug into things, and discovered that by building the GUIs directly into the main scene, I'd done them inefficiently - the proper method is to make them a scene of their own, and load them additively into the main scene when needed. The silver lining is that learning these sorts of things is part of why I started this kind of project in the first place. The dark cloud is that there's more to it than cutting and pasting to a new GUI scene, I'll need to surgically cut out the code and redesign it so that it can properly function in more than one level. The long and short of it is, that if I do everything correctly...you won't be able to tell that I've done anything at all, because it will all appear to work the same as it does now. So while I have started somewhat on the actual new GUIs for the new level, there will probably be very little to show off for this next release.

No worries, though! There's new Hellfire content, new art, and a bugfix or two coming for you all next week. See you then!