- Jul 28, 2017
- 406
- 1,536
As always, thank you for your service. Do you know if there's been any discussions going on about switching engines to something that can reasonably handle all the various systems they've been adding? I've always wondered how they managed to get an engine primarily designed for linear VNs to do so many different things. It's probably waaaay too late in the current cycle to do something like that (and might trigger a general revolt on their Patreon), but the proposed dating system has to be looming over Stray's head like the Sword of Damocles.Right now the biggest bottleneck is Stray/Coding that said there are bottlenecks within bottlenecks. Case in point the posers and QA are all part time so they can only work on the game a few hours a day if they have any time at all.
They're also all over the world being from across the U.S., UK, Russia and New Zealand, so coordinating the team isn't easy with all the different time zones, work schedules and family lives.
Also the way the game's built as it was explained by one of the posers once that there's a lot of dovetailing wherein it goes pose> review> fix> coding> review> fix> back to posing and repeat.
So at any time you have a guy who works 3-5 hours a night handing off work to a QA tester who might not wake up for another 6 hours who's also part time, who will then either A: toss it back to the poser for fixing or B: toss it to the coder and hope he's not to busy unfucking the code to be able to work on it at which point when he's done it goes back and maybe the poser isn't now to busy working on his next task to be able to work on it again.
Now if you're thinking "Gee that production pipeline's fucked they should fix that.". Well unfortunately the only one who can fix it would rather doodle than lead his team, a man who fully believes that because this system has worked for years there is no reason to change it and yes this is how things have always been done. It was just far less noticeable because One: They always had less work. Two: The team wasn't as big and so the system never had its gaping flaws exposed.
The reason DC & Sploosh haven't been working much on upcoming stuff is that they know they need Stray to reel them in and remind them of what they can and can't do in the game which is a massive problem with them where they'll cook up insane plotlines and scenes only for Stray to point out they can't make it happen with what they have, in fact a large reason for the rebuild was the feature creep was straining the game to it's very limits it simply wasn't built to handle the rig system, achievements and pregnancy system. That last one apparently was a massive issue with the coder at the time it was added so fed up of trying to fit a square peg in a round hole that he just grabbed the metaphorical sledgehammer and brute forced it which as you can imagine causes all sorts of issues with the code later on.