10/03/2024 Patreon Devlog

Helloooo~oooo everyone! Time for this week's update. Sorry it's a bit late! Spouse got back from Japan recently and I've been swamped with bug crushing. So let's jump in.

Summary

• Finished Kav's CG

• Worked on Daaz's CG

• Released the beta to the black tea patrons...

• Lots of bug fixing

• Worked on the guide

• Added status bars to the game for the affinity "stat"

Art 

This week for art I worked on a couple of things. First of all I finished out Kav's CG to have it done in time for the start of beta testing.

Then I worked on Daaz's CG which is now about half rendered. And Finally I worked a bit on Noel's CG to clean up the lines in preparation for rendering the line art.

My goal is to slowly finish out the remaining 4.5 CGs over the course of beta testing and early access.

Coding and Other Stuff

The main thing I did this week was actually work on the walkthrough/guide which doesn't seem like a big deal but Chapter 5 is....complicated.

So it did take a couple of days honestly. But despite there being a couple of typos. It's mostly done now too, which is nice.

Another code-related thing I did was add in status bars that work in conjunction with the affinity indicators. With the status bars, accessed through the arrow button on the affinity indicator screen, you can see the accumulation of your affinity vs just the most recent addition or subtraction.

Even though it's useful to be able to see the most recent addition/subtraction in a clear visual, I think it's also useful to be able to see the overall status of the affinity. 

I do think that affinity indicators with the arrows are still useful since, unless you have a really good visual memory, it's not always easy to tell if a choice actually made the bar go up.  In this before/after image, it's clear Asher's bar went up but without the side by side comparison, it's not so significant that everyone's visual memory will be reliable enough to say it changed beyond all doubt.

But side by side with the affinity indicator you know for sure that it went up.

Additionally, being able to compare with other characters means that unlocking certain variations will be easiest as well as just showing you which LI your "natural" choices are leading you towards for those who prefer that play style.

So yeah, I think having these two things together works nicely.

Beyond that, the last few days have been bug crunching

That's why I ultimately didn't post this update yesterday when I normally do There have been a lot of bugs in this chapter because the chapter is very big and very complex and I really was not able to test all the variations myself. 

As a result, testers have found some substantial issues with the branching through the more complicated parts of chapter 5 as well as some other stuff.

While some of them were as simple as me defaulting a variable in the wrong file, other stuff has been more tricky to locate and figure out.

Fortunately I've been able to to resolve all the major issues so far I think. I'll be pushing out a new beta build after I get the next round of typos fixed.

Upcoming Week

More bug fixing and more CG art.

That's it really. With beta in full force, at this point I just have to work on fixing all the broken stuff and getting the remaining CGs complete.

So yeah hopefully by the end of this week I have at least one more CG completely done. It would be nice if I could complete two though (Daaz and Noel).

And hopefully we get a lot more bugs smooshed and a new beta version pushed out. So yeah. that's my upcoming week.

I shall see you all in a few days!