Progress report (Patreon)

Howdy! Here’s what’s up:

We’ve consulted with our buddy and with his fresh look on the situation, our collective efforts paid off, we’ve managed to resurrect the game, it’s alive!

Last week it wasn’t even playable, and now I think we won’t even need a loading screen for it to run.

It still has a minor issue right at the beginning, when Kira’s character art appears on the screen for the first time, but we’ll get rid of that too.

Moana was busy figuring out how to further optimize the game and insure its stability, collectively with our friend, and she’s now separating regular waitress job from the bar one, so you will be able to choose what shift to take.

In V0.4.5 we had 3886 pictures and their size was 1110 mb.

Now we have 2422 pictures and their size is 90 mb.

We’ve managed to keep all our systems except for the outfits in two poses - cover and self-grope, those two poses will only work on a nude Kira.

I wasn’t of much help in this issue, so I was doing my own thing and now I need to draw a flute (it will make sense later on).

I’ve added outfit layers for Kira’s hacking pose, changed jacket-based outfits to better match her pose, redrawn her prison outfit, written a bunch of new stuff (mostly avoidable lore) and improved the artwork in some events even further.

I’ve started resaving events again (that’s why I’ve edited them again), this time because they were drawn correctly (layered) and I’m currently categorising them into separate folders, for us to implement “event” system in the future.

Here’s an example:

Even though you’ll have a visual representation of our hard work in the form of redrawn art, it was still a complete waste of time. It took me forever to save the events in this fashion for v0.4.6, and we will need to change all of them to our layered system eventually (the sooner - the better).

We need layered system for two reasons:

1. It would be impossible for the game to process the art if we’ll continue to add picture chaotically, because they will multiply. Layers allow us to add in stuff (breasts, tattoos, piercings etc.) later on without stressing the RPG Maker and us out.

Example:

With our old system we’d need 1 198 080 pictures right now, instead of 2422 that we currently have;

2. It will allow us to use existing art in events if we’ll need to use it by switching some layers up plus it unties our hands and makes the game more “open-world”, previously we couldn’t do that.

The variables for this system are in place, but there’s another issue - Older events are coded with an intent of showing second and third breast sizes, only the second and the third. And now we will show (in events) - first, third, fifth, seventh, ninth and Fake (voted in the spring content poll) and I’ve drawn the new artwork with those sizes in mind.

Which means that if you’ll get the fourth breast enlargement - you’ll see the first “basic” breast size in the game right now.

Moana will do her best to change the code in events and make it so the fourth enlargement leads to the third breast size in the game (instead of the first one). It is ultimately just a waste of time, because we still need to change the code for the new system, but who knows when it will happen.

What’s the hold up?

Our game now works, new quest is finished and the art is replaced, but I don’t want to release it.

Here’s why:

1. Moana and our fresh buddy will continue to look at the game, there might be other ways of further improvement.

Not because of perfectionism, but out of necessity. I’m going to assume that all of you will play this game from the beginning, because of the replaced art. And I want to take a break from our systems, which means that we will work only on the new content, probably for at least two updates.

We’re currently changing the roster of plugins that we use and the overall code - this stuff tends to break savefiles, and I don’t want to break your saves three updates in a row. But that’s not the main reason, the main reason is that I want to put this behind us, I want to be done with this, once and for all.

This system was designed for the “endgame”, not just because of your saves, it’s so complex because I hate working on this stuff and/or doing the same job over and over again. So we’ve thought of absolutely everything and did it all at once, “ripped off the bandaid”. The artwork replacement is secondary, it actually taken much less of my time than every other aspect of this rework.

Other developers can “move on”, they do a new quest/new event and move forward, while we were never able to truly forget about older events, because of the games open-world-ish nature and physical/mental changes of the heroine.

New systems take care of that and greatly ease our development. Without them in place everything we do is pointless, because we will have to redo it again in the future.

2. Separation of the waitress job and breast size issue. I’ve mentioned both of them above and Moana needs more time to work on this stuff.

3. Because I wasn’t able to help with the “game not working at all” issue, I’ve started working on the artwork and writing once again, adding even more stuff to this version which is one of my problems. It’s just like John Smith said in the comments to my previous post, every time I disappoint you with a delay - I add more stuff to the game and inevitably delay it even further.

Right now I really want to redraw a couple of characters, draw a new outfit for a particular character and draw a flute, all of this for a silly joke. Well, not all of this, I also really hate the fact that everyone looks so bad compared to Kira, I really want to upgrade their artworks to match my new style.

There’s only a couple of days left until the end of the month. There’s changes all over the place and there will definitely be some inconsistencies or bugs, so we want to spend the remaining time on polishing it.

I kind of went off the grid right now, because checking both Discord and Patreon scares the Stalin out of me. That’s not right, and I hope this feeling will pass once 0.4.6 will be out.

I feel extremely self conscious and defensive, so I feel the need to repeat what I’ve said a couple of updates ago - Consistent updates with two events brought us roughly +100-200$ worth of new patrons and they are not hard, we were steadily growing and everything was fine, if I was a fraud I’d continue to do that, there’s no reason for me to go through this development hell, it has no financial benefit, it only benefits the game itself. I really underestimated the time it took us to do this, but it wouldn’t be possible in the future, since it’s already waaay too much for just the two of us.

I will release the game on the 30 or 31 of October 2019, if you don’t believe me (and you have every reason not to believe me) how about this:

If I will delay the game again (which I won’t) and you do not intend to continue supporting us - DM me here on patreon, on Discord or email me freshmulan@gmail.com and I will send you the game.

In conclusion, thank you for putting up with my amazing project management skills! this thing is almost over.