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I completed posing all scenes this week, and after that, it felt like a whole new world of steps in development opened up, which means I've reached the polishing stage.
I have coding tasks left here and there, but all the scenes (story + lewd + branches) have been posed and written, so I can finally start playing the episode for real and polish the rough areas.
Before playing, I quality-tested the special renders and lewd scenes. I ensured I could reach 100% collectibles on a mini-game playthrough and unlocked all lewd scenes. I then tested that all rewards and lewd scenes were viewable and playable - this step usually results in many bugs, and it was a bit buggy this time, too.
After finishing with that, I started playing Jill's branch. Most of the static renders in the render queue are in other branches or late game, so there weren't a lot of missing content areas.
I reached a part of the episode I knew wasn't coded properly - a big free roam - and fixed all the code to make it playable and work as intended.
While playing, I found issues here and there, be it renders that need to be touched up or re-rendered, code that needs to be fixed, or dialogue that can be trimmed/altered. I don't stop to fix that while playing, as I don't want to lose immersion. Instead, I keep playing and make notes in the code for all these spots. Once I reach the end of the episode, I fix all the issues immediately before playing another playthrough. Rinse repeat.
I just finished my first full playthrough of Jill's branch, and I overall think it was a long and eventful episode. I have made over 100 notes on issues to fix, and I'm currently fixing them before I continue playing.
I also worked some on Episode 12 planning to ensure that I had all the story I needed in Episode 11 in preparation for the season finale. Checking the plan ahead of schedule is a great way to ensure all planned content is considered. And from my plan, I could tell that I don't need more story content in episode 11, which is great.
99 static renders and 61 animations are currently in the queue. It will mostly deplete from now on, except for any renders/animations that need to be re-rendered.
This is how my days will look like from now on until beta testing. I will play, make notes, and fix issues. I have the following tasks left to complete:
SFX & Music
- Some scenes still miss SFX & Music, and I want to expand the song selections in some areas after playing the episode.
Coding & Other tasks
- Rooster needs 1-2 more clucks.
- The phone gallery most likely needs a few more images for some branches.
- Phone chats are near completion, but I don't want to remove this bullet point until I've played all branches.
- Add Bios to the entire episode. It's a couple of hours worth of work.
- Add girls and their lewd events to the Stats app. It's less than an hour's worth of work.
- The end of the episode report needs to be written.
- The "Previously on Being a DIK" section needs to be written. It's in the planning stages and will take a couple of hours to complete.
- Discord rich presence functionality needs to be quality tested before being considered complete.
Polishing
Play through all branches and all conceivable variations to quality test the episode.
Play the episode with a focus on
- Overall story
- Continuity
- Spelling/grammar/words/dialogue
- Inspecting images and animations
- Music & SFX analysis
- Checking that phone apps/stats update accordingly
- Mini-games (winning/losing)
- Mini-games disabled mode
Fix all issues encountered during playtesting.
Add any content that I feel is missing.
My thoughts on all this
Now it's time to cross the t's and dot the i's and ensure that the hard work pays off for me and you. I hope you understand what I'll be doing daily from now on, and I'll try my best to report this process throughout. Polishing the episode will require time, as will the 61 animations in the queue. Once all static renders have been rendered, all my systems will work on animations, and the speed should see an uptick.
This year, I'll be taking December 23-24 and 31 off and work as normal as possible other than that.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you!
Love
Dr PinkCake
