Development Update (Patreon)

Greetings!

I apologize for the delay in getting out the development update. I'd been struggling with a bit of writer's block, but thankfully I'm now through it. This seems to happen when I spend too much time away from the characters, like when doing a very long render set (such as the one for 0.8) or plugin work. It's really discouraging when you sit down to write something funny or interesting or cute and several hours later you're still staring at a blank screen, or a page full of stuff you don't like and that doesn't feel right for the characters.

The only thing you can really do is keep going, even if what you're writing sucks. As long as you keep writing, eventually you'll get into the flow again - then you can go back and rewrite all that horrible stuff!

Release Date for 0.8

I have conflicting opinions about this, but I'm going to go ahead and put a release date out for 0.8 - 17 May. It's more time than I think I'll need, but given my horrible record of estimating how long things will take, I figured I should err on the side of caution. You can expect a (probably buggy) version up on the test channel in Discord a couple of days before release.

I find that I really do work better with deadlines. There's a lot of frankly tedious work that goes into making sure a release isn't a disjointed, buggy mess - particularly now that the game has become long and more complex - and I'm sure the extra motivation will help me power through it.

What Remains

I've decided to delay implementing transmogrification; my plan is to release it in the first non-hotfix update to 0.8. The reason why is that it'll involve writing a plugin, but this plugin will require messing with a lot of game engine innards that I'm not yet familiar with. I'm sure it won't be that hard, it'll just involve learning some new stuff and I don't want to delay 0.8 while I do that. Besides, I'm in the writing zone and I need to stay there until it's done!

What remains to be done are quests. This release will have 2 long/complex quests - Shiri's quest and Val's quest - and I'm now done with the former. It'll also have a number of smaller quests, and I've got varying amounts of stuff done on those. I think I'm going to finish up all the smaller quests before starting on Val's quest. I don't currently have anything done on it, but I have been thinking about it, and I've come up with some ideas for what may be an interesting experience.

The Picture :)

Oh, by the way, I hope you like the picture! It's the first image I've done after substantially upgrading a few key parts of my computer. I took a bit of time to make it to test out the new gear, and I'm quite pleased with its performance. I'll talk more about it later, but these upgrades help a LOT, and they'll make doing my 3D work a lot easier in the future.

The picture's just a tease - there are certain fetishes I (sadly) can't touch because of Patreon's policies, but teasing is fun, right?

Anyway, thank you for your patience and your support.