Status of 0.5.4.5 (Patreon)

Good afternoon,

again time for a report on the past week and my progress on the next update.

I've gotten a lot closer to 0.5.4.5 over this past week. Most of the material needed for is now completed. I worked more on the maps that I want to add (for now a total of 6 maps: entrance, courtyard, church, cloister, monks' dormitory, nuns' dormitory). Some of these will get more details with the final 0.5.5.0 update, but for now they are at an acceptable state for me. More details will be added as I need them in order to work for daily routines of the characters at the monastery. Today I started implementing these maps into the game, making transitions possible and adding doors (I also made new door sprites for the monastery).

Other maps I want to add in 0.5.5.0 are: a cellar, kitchen, dining room, Monastery Garden/cemetry. I will need them for the 0.5.5.0 update, when the actual story gets going. But as said in my last report for now I want to get a functional version going for 0.5.4.5.

Also the work on the sprites for all 6 new characters is done, together with dialogue images for all of them. I also made an extra sprite/dialogue images for generic monks.

Another thing I have been working on this week are some technical things. I've taken a deeper look into the plugin code for the quest window plugin and found a way to store the current active quest. This allowed me to finally fix the problem that Michael mentioned under the last content poll. So after the serving game with Kate the quest you had in the questlog will be restored and the questlog doesn't jump to the first available quest in your log.

I also found a way to speed up the implementation of new animations drastically by writing a new script to play animations. Before I had to put every single image of an animation into the game by hand. Some animations have over 100 images. So depending on animation this has taken about an hour to do for each animation. I often spent whole days just doing that. Now the script will be able to do this automatically by using parameters which I just need to change. This will significantly reduce the amount of work needed to implement new animations into the game (It has also always been the most annoying part of my job, for which I have long wanted to find a better solution).

So now with most of the material in place I can finally begin writing the story + make events for it. You can probably guess that this will also take some time. I have about 3 1/2 days left this month to make it in time and of course I also wanted to make a new scene for Mira (3+ animations) to have at least something that makes it worth playing the new update aside from the story.
As much as I want to, I doubt that I can get this done by Wednesday. But it should definitely be possible to make it in the coming week. I just don't want to commit to a specific day, because that would only lead to bugs and hastily written dialogues.

I hope you can forgive this delay, I will upload the update as soon as it is ready.
Now back to work, still a lot to get done today.

I hope you all have a great weekend!