Twitter, TFTycoon news, and other updates (Patreon)

https://twitter.com/BlueFairyMedia1 

So I've had a Twitter account for a few months now but never did much other than follow a few people. I might try and get in the habit of posting to it more regularly with small updates, little "what I'm working on" kind of things, etc. You can read or follow the account linked above.

Second, a small update on what's been going on.

As Bimbocalypse: Rise of the Bimbies wraps up and nears its 1.0 release, mainly waiting on the last Agent artwork to come in and me to add in some balancing tweaks and quality of live improvements, we've begun work on the next project, nicknamed TFTycoon for the time being.

The idea of this game is that it is a fairly light business tycoon / management simulation type game where you run a small clinic that transforms clients into their desired forms. In typical tycoon fashion, you'll be able to research new technologies and equipment to assist, hire staff, maintain a reputation, and of course, stay profitable and expand your clinic.

This project is focused on several new aspects of Unity game development for me, such as:

- Learning how to add in unit tests, which if you aren't aware, provides much faster feedback to make sure your code is as bug-free as possible as you develop more and more of it. This is a practice used in professional software development, and something that has greatly paid back for itself in time saved hunting down bugs in Exile of Aphrodisia's development.

Sexy, huh?  https://imgur.com/fMB4tXy.  For reference, Exile has 687 of these and counting.

- Learning how to create a decent-looking user interface in Unity with all the elements one might expect in a UI heavy game: scrollbars, grid layouts, tabs, charts, etc. Not only that but having it scale nicely to different screen resolutions.

- User content creation. One of the best things that I did when I created the singleplayer Transformania Time gameshow game back in 2012/2013 was to create a character creation tool, and thanks to the efforts of some talented community members, the number of user-submitted characters far outweighs the ones I wrote myself.

Much of the TFTycoon code I've worked on in the past few weeks will make it possible for players to write their own client scenarios with built-in tools, and with a bit of grooming and balancing, they could officially be added into the main game itself with April and my review. Client encounters are far more brief than any any project I've done in the past which should hopefully prove less intimidating to learn.

Screenshot of client writer tool: https://imgur.com/cvdKMCt  . Pretty, no, but functional for the time being, enough for April and I to start inserting client content in a fairly streamlined fashion.

There are not currently any planned player character transformations in TFTycoon as I'm not sure how that would fit into the gameplay. (But then again, Exile of Aphrodisia didn't originally have them planned either, so we're not ruling it out, either!)

TFTycoon will likely have more limited artwork. Client encounters have typically a few short paragraphs of text (compared to 8-50 pages in Exile), so illustrating all of them is inconceivable given the volume. As we progress farther into the game and start releasing playable alphas, we will consider if we can do this cost-effectively such as keeping all client artwork in black in white or flat shading which can be done more cheaply and quickly by artists. Patreon backers make having art at all possible, so thanks to all backers!

For the foreseeable future, Exile will continue to receive content updates every few months with monthly polls alternating between fully illustrated player transformation encounters and 3 regular encounters. Bimbie does not currently have any plans to receive regular updates after its 1.0 release, but it's quite possible new Agent and Bimbie characters will be added in later, and potentially a "no escape" third game mode where you play as an Agent collecting respawning samples and trying to dodge an ever-growing Bimbie hoard.

Stay tuned for more info on this, and feel free to post any questions you have as comments!