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Blog 156-160
Hello all and welcome to another blog post! We've been hammering out a lot of things these few weeks, so a bit of technicality in this post!
So, regarding our latest version of Claire's Quest, as with all major area introductions we've run into a couple of persistently recurring bugs and glitches. However I feel we've pretty much caught and ironed them out at this point. Chief problem identified is some of our custom scripts clash 'visually' with the more generic scripts we're using. Basically they don't play well together and mess up the UI of each other but we've sorted that. It did delay a lot of custom stuff like alchemist jobline for a time though.
Also as we've re-introduced Rathpike we have a few transition problems where there's missing fadeouts and fadeins and things like that but I think thanks to our patrons and their early access we've weeded them out.
We've also had recurring hiccups with the CG sets, particularly for the breeding ranch segment. Specifically regarding the costume and corruption aspect, we've listened to some feedback from the concept art reception and gone back to the drawing board to tweak certain things. For instance, body piercings, apparently not everyone's cup of tea, but we'd still like to make it an option, so we've worked at making it an "addon" type item on top of existing costume design (removing it as a 'must have' option).
We also redesigned the costumes pertaining to the corruption of breeding ranch employees a bit. And that's had us go back to already-complete CG sets and redo them to match them up, so that's obviously a timesink. But the framework and foundations for the first breeding ranch scene is extremely important because we pretty much can't change anything once it's too far in.
Aaaaand we've also had to wait on some new assets because I realized quest progression was confusing when all the mercenaries looked the same in Rathpike. This is a no-no because they're actually working out of different factions so should have a visual difference between them. So, had to wait on new assets and assign them to different factions.
We've also had a few staff discussions to iron out the kinks in the development process, and that will hopefully streamline things a bit. Our team has grown over the years and it felt necessary to pause, take a breather, and coordinate our approach, as going forward we've had a few unnecessary roundabouts due to so many people working in conjunction on different things at different speeds, not to mention the multitude of areas, characters, and questlines.
However we should be all set now. And the wait is good, too, because we've been able to successfully wait on a couple of new scenes that I'm really quite excited for and wanted to bring in ASAP. In particular, we've got the first alchemist scene, which comes after the culmination of Karland's questline, and the return of the Badlands area!
Would ideally like Dargan Mining Town back in as well, but the whole area needs more testing due to the tileswap from default and I may drop Badlands first.
Possible approach is public release of 0.17.3 first, for the public players, which will be a mostly-unchanged 0.17.2 that catches all the bugs and glitches we found there.
Then patrons will get 0.18, which will go out to the public afterwards. 0.18 will have both Badlands, Dargan Mining Town, and breeding ranch from Chemont.
Only question is whether or not to put Badlands into 0.17.3 for the public version, but it's in need of a lot of hammering out due to the foundations for the new alchemist content so I guess it'll depend on whether I'm confident in it's playability by this week.
Anyway, that's all for now, tune in next time for more news!
