View attachment 1475627
Time to do this again, so let’s get to it.
Progress
Production is going good and things are still moving forward. The new production cycle is working very well but has been stalled by code refactoring.On the downside, the new code caused a number of problems that seemed like they were going to require some ugly work arounds. But in the eleventh hour a single discovery was made that seemed to solve multiple issues at once!
You can read my rantings at the time of discovery
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on the discord where I was bitching and having a eureka moment simultaneously.
Now that the string interpolation issue with my nested objects is solved I can now give players access to an unprecedented number of variables in the game. Names, nicknames, relationships, etc. And not just with the MC between non-MC characters as well.
This of course meant I needed to do a quick two day redesign of the planner feature so that players can easily access all of these variables, but all the hard stuff is now done.I have a little clean up to do on the back end and the new code and script converter are up to date and ready to work.
Improvements
Some invisible improvements were also made on the back end to simplify things. The number of custom classes used to manage the different aspects of the game were cut from 14 down to 4.
I consolidated a lot of functions and the new data structure used to manage all these player changeable variables is actually much simpler than what I built before and doesn’t require as much overhead to maintain.
We can now add characters and variables on the fly with out any need to recode or rebase. It’s honestly as simply as me opening a text file, adding a line with the variable name and the value and saving. When renpy starts it does the rest.
And if I need to change something about a character, I can just modify the file without having to push out any kind of corrective code. There is also a layer of protection built in where if I change a variable in the game, but a player has already modified the variable themselves, then my change will be ignored and player customization is prioritized. This way no matter what changes I make to the game, your personal changes will always be kept.
To Do
So to give you greater visibility into the production process I’m including a link to the Trello board I recently started using to track the production tasks.
This will open up the production process and allow you to see what is on the slate, what is done, what needs to be done. Etc. Feel free to check it out here:
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Once the tasks on the ‘Current Update’ list is complete, I can push out the first update and immediately start on the ‘Next Update’. Once the current list is done, the next update list should hopefully take less than 2 weeks to compete! So let’s make November awesome!
That’s it for now.
We’ll talk soon and as always, thanks for hanging in there!
Salute,
Roman
