I don’t know why you need these crabs. If you use a topic search, you can easily find the answer to this question. Also a good read about what the game is.
Someone already did:
In other news, we're now only one week away from "the end of this month".My crystal ball(s of steel!)
Time for an update to let you all know what to expect from us this month! That's right! It's crystal ball time!
On the first of this month I started probing how the coder was doing. I also started work on the real next build. From scratch(!) using the stuff I had already drawn and sent to the coder, with the same sort of zeal I slapped the Halloween side story together with. Just a matter of being super cautious and proactive about the current state of things. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst etc.
I learned a few things along the way of creating the Halloween side story and figured I might as well assume a worst case scenario until I was proven wrong.
One of the things I suggested to the coder was for him to just send me all of the things he had already finished so I could try and tie it up myself. If he didn't feel up to doing anything serious himself yet I'd have been happy to jump in. I'm even happier to say he was very much against that idea. Sometimes you suggest things the same way you use canaries in a coal mine. I thought suggesting something like that and the reaction to it would tell me a lot more than just a simple "hey how are you doing?"
I think it's a good sign he doesn't want to take the easier way out of letting me handle things, but I also want to be very careful of not having him immediately jump into the thick of things once more.
He still hasn't entirely convinced me he's back to full power so I suggested he'd slowly start poking the new build (if he feels he's up to it) for literally five minutes a day at the start and just work his way up and see how it goes. Depending on how far he got until I told him to take that break a couple of weeks back, I figure an end of the month build should be possible.
For some of you that might not be nearly fast enough, me neither, but I prefer being careful/safe now and not being sorry later. Also, I very much doubt the coder was creating his best stuff in the weeks leading up to me forcing him to take that break. He pretty much already admitted as much in between the lines. I've put my own efforts to create a new build of the main story on ice and hopefully it can stay there forever. But if worse comes to worse I'm ready to fire up that plan B once more.
Soooo... what am I doing right now? Mostly going through the scenes I had already finished and taking the opportunity to add some small things I hadn't at first because the time/result balance wasn't in favor of doing them. But I'm also noticing some small things I hadn't at first. That's the advantage of not looking at something for awhile. When you come back to it, it's almost like you're seeing it for the first time and pick up things you hadn't noticed at first.
It usually is something like a head which is too big or a skin color which isn't entirely fitting anymore when combined with a darker background. Simple stuff, but still the sort of thing which can be a timesink. So I'm doing that sorta thing right now. When that's finished I'm going to work on the art for the final build of this route.
I've also had to take measures against getting thin skin this week. Literal thin skin. If you'd ever see me draw for a few minutes you'd probably have to puke. I zoom and rotate pics so often it's like a roller coaster. I mostly use my left index finger which races along the mouse wheel to zoom in and out, but the skin on that finger started getting reeeally sensitive. I try using my other finger, but that one just isn't positioned right relative to the mouse wheel. I came up with a solution which is more of an improvement than a solution, but still much better.
I already told you guys I'm pretty much a dumping grounds for family who has an old pc etc so I rummaged through my collection of old mice and found what I was looking for among them. Now naturally this just happened to be the one mouse whose scrolling wheel was broken, so I had to fix that first (using glue, a screwdriver and a sharp knife.)
What was so special about this mouse which I wanted to try out? It has a rubberized concave wheel instead of hard and convex one! And that... helps a lot. I'll sketch up a quick example for you to instantly see what I mean.
I'm still trying to use my ring finger (instead of the sensitive index one) to scroll as much as I can, but whenever I do forget, this new mouse wheel is much preferable.
If there's anything to take away from this update, it's the following.
We're not out of the woods yet, but we're slowly walking in that general direction and I hope/expect to end this month with a fresh new build which doesn't smell of overworked coder. And that's a good thing because my motivation takes a hit if I don't know when or if something will get done. I'll admit it, I'm the sort of person who likes to have dates and schedules and can become fidgety without them.
Peace!
It has been a while since I was there if I recall you need to speak with Shady for the first scroll
I can only buy exercise equipment off of shady right now... I have trained with spinners to level 12, I've brought Korra's resistance down to 90, and I've participated in 2 probending matches. Now the game won't progress any further...
To put it another way, I personally wouldn't be happy with the organizational side of things if I was MITY. As in, if I was the actual person with the exact same time and resources available to me, I would be embarrased by the current state of things and me not having improved it yet. It wouldn't be up to MY standards, so I'm annoyed by someone else not doing it either (especially as someone making a game with way less time and resources on my hands).
Completely agree, but it is worth correcting that it's a two man team at this point. MITY is no longer just one guy.
Yeah, and that's also kind of the elephant in the room. I don't know where MITY lives or how much of that number gets taxed away, but 20k is more than what most people I know make in a YEAR. I find it amazing that he still hasn't hired a guy to at least do cleanup work, or backgrounds, or writing, or spell checking, SOMETHING. I mean fuck, find some college student who's happy to do it for 500. I'd even offer to do it myself for free if the current book wasn't 90% about Korra and content I have zero interest in.
You'd think they would at least attempt to. DarkCookie for instance has an entire office working under him at this point (with a larger budget, but still). And FET has been officially in development for over 3 years now.
I mean if the coder is overworked and stressed as Mity says he is wouldn't it just make sense to use some of that money to hire more people to relieve that stress? Sure they've never said that's what they'll do but I don't get why you can't understand why people would think that
thing is, a coder is a very pillar role in a game, or any software development. even if he does bring someone else, it will take a LONG time to get up to par with the code, and because its an evolving code, it mean, his additions may make the OG coder job more demanding.
The more cynical among us would tell you that he should've fired his coder outright about 2 years ago, and replaced him with someone more competent.
The coder started the project. The artist is the "new" guy who joined a little into book 1 I'm 90% sure. Regardless, they should hire someone. FETs code is already a mess which probably doesn't help dev times. Hiring someone to work on it wouldn't be that bad, even if they were just working on a more clean seperate branch that slowly merged into the main game. The coder's writing isn't bad at all, I reckon they could save so much time by just leaving him to write. There's no shortage of python devs that could do Ren'Py, it's hardly rocket science.
You could also have a pretty clean division of labor by hiring people for different tasks, even with a project of this scope.
I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at. If you have the budget and the opportunity to hire a third person to work on your game, on an entirely separate task that doesn't require any "sixth sense" or stepping on anybody's toes, why wouldn't you?
