2.2.444 Release – A Fungal Infection (Patreon)

(Download links can be found at the bottom. If you’re upset with how development has been this year, we ask that you please read this post.)

We’ve touched on a lot of the struggles SR7 has been working with this year but haven’t really taken the time to fully explain it because of the technical aspects involved. However, we feel like it’s time to explain these issues in a bit more detail. 

A Fungal Issue

As we’ve stated many times before, SR7 built SU using Fungus – which is essentially a sort of Ren’Py for Unity add-on. It’s a visual editor that more or less removes the need for coding and is meant to ease game development for people who lack the ability or desire to deal with programming their own games. 

What you’re seeing in the title image is Supergirl’s cell. For comparison’s sake, this is what the entire Yacht event looks like:

Each square is a scene or selectable option. You can only have one scene or selectable option for each square. If a square is not connected to or manually set to lead back to another square, the game will result in a black screen that leaves the player stuck. If there is an error in a square’s logic for whatever reason, the game breaks and goes haywire. 

Add to that the inability to call or assess more than one variable at a time and you have a nightmare scenario of epic proportions. Frankly speaking, having built the game this way with these restrictions, options like costumes should not be in this game at all. The spaghetti code manner in which Fungus forces SR7 to make something as simple as the Galatea spanking scene with multiple costumes involved is staggering to say the least, and required 69 (Giggity) pieces of art variations to be made before he could start the massive spider web of IF statements required to make that one scene functional in-game. 

With Fungus, SR7 cannot use bread and butter aspects of game development, like Switch and compound IF statements or even create basic functions.

Frankly speaking, SU’s scope is far beyond any type of game Fungus was meant to make.   

But wait, it gets worse…

RNG Game Development

As we’ve stated before, it became obvious early this year that SU could not continue being developed by Fungus, which led to the creation of the Rebuild project. Things quickly became worse than we ever thought they’d be though.

Shortly after April, when we unveiled the Rebuild for the first time, SR7 ran into a brand new hell of a development issue with Fungus. Whenever he saves the project, there’s about a 10% chance a random variable in the scene he’s working on will be disconnected. This chance seems to increase depending on how large the area in question is and, due to the layering of Fungus on top of Unity, no error message occurs when this happens. So the only way to find out is to play test the build or go through and check every single square individually to see if a variable has spontaneously been set to null. 

To make matters even worse, SR7 just learned with the Supergirl update that the disconnect errors might not even appear visually unless he clicks on the effected line within the square. So his preview looks all good, like this: 

But he won’t see the error unless he clicks on every single line to see if he comes across something like this: 

Each square has tens, if not dozens, of lines like these. It’s literally RNG development. Each time he presses Ctrl+S, something could break and he won’t know what. 

And this is just a single piece of the puzzle. A few of a variety of cogs in the machine that can go wrong from the time SR7 comes up with a scene idea and the moment you experience it. 

Not an Excuse, Merely an Explanation 

This is why we’ve had problems all year, and we promise you that no one is more fed up with them than we are – especially SR7. Yes, it’s the bed SR7 made for himself 4 years ago when he started making SU with Fungus and we’re well aware we put ourselves in this corner. But frankly, you don’t become an industry professional overnight. You do so by fucking up over and over again until you gain the experience to start fucking up just a little bit less.   

The only solution is a complete ground up Rebuild. But building something from scratch with sweeping improvements that SR7 has spent 4 years tirelessly adding to takes longer than the blink of an eye to accomplish, i.e. we’re working on it. And the fact that it’s even going to be close to being done by the beginning of 2020 with all the improvements we’ve already shown you – let alone those you haven’t seen – would frankly be a miracle in-and-of itself. But Locke is working pretty damn hard and fast to make that miracle a reality, on top of doing other shit like writing this nearly 1000 word post most people still won’t read even after yesterday’s lesson all because we want to do our best to represent the change we wish to see in the gaming industry at large. 

All that being said, feel free to tell us how simple these problems actually are to solve because of what your professor said in a lecture once in the comments below. 

The shitty amateurs with crazy aspirations clearly just milking their patrons,

Gunsmoke Games