Weekly Update/Preview Aug 7-14 (Patreon)

And we're back. Y'know thinking about it, it's pretty convenient that I just so happened to skip the week that would have made the title formatting uglier due to splitting between two months. I guess saying July 31 - Aug 7 isn't so bad but whatever.

As for this week, I've been busy but not as much on the game as would be ideal. My mom is moving, which it turns out is pretty similar to me moving, in a way. At the very least it takes up a bunch of my time because I have to go over to her place and help her while also digging through boxes of old stuff that was mine and decide on a bunch of keep vs throw away and so on. I'm sure people have had similar experiences. Not fun. Nothing to do with the game in particular, just a previously unexpected time sink/obligation.

In any case, moving on to the tweets.

Feed Him

Not a huge amount to say directly about this one, since it's pretty obviously just another miscellaneous threat being previewed. One thing to comment on it is that it's also another case where the line between what should qualify as a trap and what should qualify as a monster is somewhat blurred. As far as gameplay goes, there are a lot of small distinctions (traps trigger immediately, don't attack if not attacked first, don't get opportunity bonus, get guaranteed hit on rearm, etc), but I may have made a small design oopsie when I decided to get rid of what is probably the biggest and most obvious one: the stats that each threat type used.

I mean, it's good in terms of flexibility, it just kinda makes things less clear cut. You could probably pretty easily come up with a monster that would be attacked with Reflex and targets a knight's Willpower, just like you could probably come up with a trap that is attacked with Physique and targets Health. You have to make a call on whether such things should be monsters or traps based on what makes thematic sense and it isn't always obvious.

Like in this case, this portrait (currently just called "Hungry Room") is inside the trap folder, but should it actually be a monster? I had a similar problem with the Slime Room, and switching it from trap to monster mid-development is part of the reason it ended up buggy. Dunno, things can just get messy sometimes.

Alpha 14.1 Release

Bugfix release happened, which is good. It covered most everything, but... There's a pretty major bug where Parting Shot (and most likely other directional target skills) freezes the game after being used. Actually it's not exactly freezing, it just never clears the "disallow turn advance" flag when the direction is chosen by clicking the mouse. This can actually be avoided by using the space bar (or whatever the next turn button is mapped to) instead, but yeah. Icky bug. Certainly not intended. Everything else seems to be going fine, but that part sucks.

Will there be a 14.2? Maybe, but I'm not sure yet. Parting Shot being broken is unfortunate, and I will fix it, but I probably won't want to take my focus off of other things for it unless people start clamoring for a fix. The upload process is kind of long and annoying (blame f95), and there is a workaround, but I don't know if people will be able to hear about that workaround easily. It seems like a lot of people haven't even moved up from 14 to 14.1 yet (I'm still getting some miscellaneous bug reports from here and there for issues fixed in 14.1 at least). It's a problem, but this kinda gives me the impression that it isn't as big of a deal for people as it is really annoying for me to know that I didn't test thoroughly enough (again).

Adding Stuff

Today's tweet, though I put it out a little early so that this devlog thingy could also be tweeted at the usual time.

Research notes on the main menu (so you don't have to start a run/load in to look things up) and the ability to view scenes from the perspective of the other sex without changing your inquisitor's appearance for a run. These are a couple of features that I've had requested more and more recently. I never really considered either of them to be all that important, but I figured I could take the time to put them in today. Turned out that they have some unforseen roadblocks that people probably wouldn't have thought of, but I think I've got them mostly worked around now.

Basically, a lot of data in the game isn't loaded at all on the main menu. All the json files and stuff are only read when starting a new game/loading a previous one. In order for the research notes menu to function, it expects a lot more things to be loaded. There was/is some messiness to it, and I still have to test it more, but I don't think I need to go into the full details. Suffice it to say that when it gets to you, it will (hopefully) be working around those problems just fine and give you a nice way to remember all your favorite plot or sexy times.

And that's it for this week. See you in the next one.