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Weekly Status Report
Coldstone EstateGood morning,
It's still early, and before I continue working on new dialogs I wanted to give you a short overview of the things I got done in the past week.
I started the week by finishing the exterior map of the Coldstone estate (as shown in the title). After that, I worked on the sprites for the chickens.
Originally I had the idea to make them very detailed (differences between male/female age and a saturation level). I had already roughly thought of a visualization of the possibility to visit the chicken coop and have all the chickens sitting on a perch so that you could click on them and inspect them. That way you could have slaughtered chickens that were too old or superfluous males to make room for more. In addition, a hatchery system in which eggs can be hatched.
After I presented the whole thing in the discord, however, objections were quickly raised that this idea would overshoot the mark somewhat. And yes, I admit that it wouldn't have been easy to implement. I wanted to represent each chicken as a separate object with the aforementioned attributes (sex, age, saturation). This would probably have taken several days to implement. And in the end, I would have to ask myself whether it was really worth the effort. After all, it's not supposed to be something the player interacts with on a daily basis, but rather something that might happen in passing by.
So I have now greatly simplified the whole thing. Attributes have been cut out. There won't be a distinction between male and female chickens or chicks. Chickens lay eggs with a certain chance, depending on the number in the coop. If there are eggs in the coop for a longer period of time (and more than 1 chicken is present) there is a chance that offspring will be added (if the capacity of the henhouse allows this).
First chickens can be caught via the trap system (I have already adjusted the traps). Of course there are also new recipes for chicken meat/eggs. Emily now also accepts chicken meat when cooking dinner. And I've added new temporary foodbuffs to the special meals of Emily, Claire and Penny. - This is something I want to expand further in the future and will need some testing aswell since I don't want to make it to weak but also not too strong.
After all of this was done I also edited the Arenfield map a little in order to make room for the new building projects on the map (one of course being the chicken coop), but I have some others planned as well.
Next I've started working on the character sprites + dialog images for the new characters (not completed yet) and also wanted to get back into Penny's story. For that I decided to actually play it again from the beginning to get a better feel for Penny's character (I usually do this everytime I make new content since I try to think from the characters perspective). In the process I've edited some of the dialog slightly and also fixed some of her sexual interaction (in the evening when you found her masturbating you weren't able to do vaginal, which is something I changed now).
I've also been cleaning some of her code which was in part difficult to read through (Back then I tend to do things different than today). This is where I'm currently working at. I want to get everything ready for the expansion of the events and the next thing I want to work on today is the introduction of the new characters by visiting their estate with Penny.
On a sidenote: I also made use of my newly found way to adjust character descriptions and adjusted Penny's description after Henry got back or after the MC kicked him out.
More detailed: Before the text was hardcoded and to adjust it I had to make a new entry each time I changed something in the character description (Like I did for Athia or Gwen or Natasha). Since the number of entries is limited, I was very hesitant to do this in the past (to leave room for future characters) if the changes weren't significant. But now I've found out that the description texts can be stored in variables which I can then edit to make adjustments (as I have done for Ayita lately). This will allow me to adjust other characterpages as well in the future to reflect to changes that might have happend to them over time. It will take some time, but I will constantly work on this when ever there is time.
So I got a lot done over the week, but it's still not enough to be close to the next part release.
I haven't been working on a new scene for Penny yet, although I have something in mind already.
So today more writing and then I will start working on the new scene. After that is done I'll release the update as 0.5.8.5 Currently I assume it will be done around the 12. of June - For 0.5.9.0 I'll then work more on the Coldstone estate interior map as well as the new characters (daily routines and interaction). But one step at a time
Now I'm back to working,
I wish you all a nice weekend!