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Long post incoming. TLDR if you don't want to read about the polishing process is that I'm currently playing and polishing Episode 10, and animations are rendering. Skip to the last section of the text if you want to read about bug fixes from v0.9.1.
My polishing process
Today, I figured I would describe my workflow during the polishing phase a little more in-depth than before. And I'll also exemplify how I've worked this past week. I've spent the better part of this week playing the game and taking detailed notes of what must be polished.
Until now, while I have worked with every part of the episode and completed all scenes, I haven't played more than a few playthroughs. There are several scenes I haven't even seen in-game yet.
In this phase of the development - the polishing phase - I play the episode and sometimes prior episodes repeatedly to improve the new content in as many areas as possible.
I play and polish in many different ways, focusing on different things each time. In some playthroughs, I focus solely on the visuals, inspecting every render and animation - spotting if something needs to be changed/fixed/improved/removed/added. I write notes in my code and then go back to fix it after I have racked up a decent list of to-dos.
In other playthroughs, I focus on the story, dialogue, grammar, and continuity and stop caring about other aspects of the game. Similar playthroughs happen for sound/music/mini-games/features/phone content, and more.
And when I'm near the end of this process, I play, trying to take it all in at once and absorb the entire experience.
My first week of polishing Episode 10
This week, I started polishing by playing some branches and looking at them with no particular focus. I tried to enjoy the episode and spot things to fix. My first playthrough was on the Jill branch with mini-games enabled. It took me roughly 15 hours to get through episode 10 while playing in a particularly meticulous way.
While playing, I actively made notes and fixed minor things, but I never rolled back to test fixes and always moved forward in the episode.
As a whole, her branch and content felt very good. Things I found that needed to be fixed after this first pass were:
- Mini-games and their tutorials
- Music and SFX
- Choices
- Details in renders
- Dialogue
- Some canon content
This is an example of a render to fix, and errors I find can be as small as this or something bigger.
This is just a reflection error on a bottle that caught my eye.
My second run clocked in at ~13 hours. It was an Others branch game where I saw many exclusive scenes yet missed some of them.
In this playthrough, I got to test a couple of lewd scenes for the first time - scenes that I posed back in January/February but had yet to play. On this pass, I found more things to fix:
- More mini-game bugs
- Bad dialogue
- DIK affinity sections that were off
- Missing music
- A missing animation
- Code that crashed a lewd scene
I made a few more playthroughs, and the to-do list grew longer with each of them. I started fixing the issues I found so I could create a new build. It's easier to spot mistakes in a build where it's a clean slate with no known issues. And that's what I'm working on right now.
The to-do list was pretty long, with minor to major things that must be fixed. After I have fixed everything, I will continue playing more with other types of branches and combinations. Rinse and repeat the process in different ways.
My thoughts on this process
And this is what my polishing process is all about and how I've done it for years. At first, the episode will feel very rough, but with each pass, it improves.
The funny and sad part about this is that even though I do this phase countless times for different branches and combinations, I will still miss things. Eventually, my brain grows accustomed to errors, and I can't spot what's wrong within a scene until it gets pointed out to me by someone else. Even something you would say is a glaring issue/error might slip through. But at some point, I will feel I've done what I could to polish the episode. And when I reach that point, and all art has been rendered, I use my team of testers and proofreader for the extra polishing step.
Even after all of that, the release will still have bugs, typos, and occasional errors, but it will be in a state where it's good enough to be released to Patrons and have considerably fewer bugs than it would have if I skipped the polishing phase.
I carry out this meticulous polishing process because I don't want players to be the game's beta testers. I don't think it's fair to put out an episode that hasn't been properly tested after all this time and causes big game-breaking bugs.
It might still happen, and I will kick myself for every single bug that slips through, but at least I can rest well knowing I and my team of testers did the best we could.
This is what I'll do in the upcoming weeks, and I'll try my best to report how it's coming along and what areas I've been working on.
List of fixed bugs
If there is a bug in the Interlude or Episode 9 (v0.9.1) that you are aware of but don't see on the list below, please report it on my Discord server in the bug-reports room, and I'll fix it for this upcoming release.
These are the bugs that have been reported and fixed for v0.10.0 so far, any other bugs you know of, I am unaware of:
- Fixed a bug where the CHICK response on Elena's cluck would subtract one from the total number of CHICK actions instead of adding one.
- Fixed a bug with the Below Budget perk, which increased the starting budget of the Halloween party by $5.
- Fixed an issue with Sarah's and Melanie's optional event in the final free-roam event.
- Fixed an issue with Sarah's optional event in the second free-roam event.
- Fixed an issue with the timer hampering performance during the drawing mini-game in the Interlude.
- Fixed an issue where a scene with Becky could happen after the first party activity. Now, it only triggers before this activity as intended.
- Fixed a bug where save names sometimes reverted to old save file names.
- Fixed a bug with the Wallpaper setting in the Settings app during the end of the Interlude that caused a crash.
- Fixed an issue where Maya's lewd scene was stored incorrectly.
- Fixed a bug with the truth or dare game that caused an omission of truth when asked how many you've slept with.
- Fixed an issue with Lily's gallery scene, causing an emote to misalign the text chat.
- Fixed an issue with Lily's lewd scene where her tattoos were missing.
- Updated the description of the Multiplier Madness perk. It worked as intended, but its description was off.
- Corrected typos
Have a nice weekend
Dr PinkCake
