The dev development journal dated March 18th:
Greetings!
Earlier this week I'd put out a poll comparing a slightly revised version of the male elf model with the original one. Though the poll hasn't yet ended, it seems there's a fairly clear preference for the newer one, so that's the one I'll end up using. Or something very close to it.
My plan is still to release 0.5 before the end of the month, so I'm hard at work on H-scenes right now. My thinking is that I can work on other areas of the game during the week or so I expect it to take to render all that stuff. Related to that, I'm quite glad I upgraded my CPU during the computer rebuild - scenes start rendering noticeably faster now, and that time really adds up if you do a lot of test renders as you're making scenes (and I do).
I'm also having fun getting a bit more involved in the RPGM engine. Up to this point, the minigames and 0.3's boss battle were done mostly using RPGM's event system. While it's pretty powerful, if you're trying to do complicated things (like action sequences) it can get a bit awkward. I ended up copy-pasting events a lot, and doing other things that are just really ugly from a programming design perspective. I think there's still a subtle bug out there with the chicken game, and I think it's due to the fact that it's really hard to wrap your head around what's going on with the encounter using the event based system. I've been using JavaScript directly for most of my work on the boss battle up to this point, and thus far I really like it. I'm able to set things up in a very clear way, I'm able to do complex things in a more straightforward fashion, and there's far less repetition. In addition to being easier to write, this makes it so much easier to track down bugs. I've been a little bit cautious, since I'm still exploring which objects do what and what their methods are, but I expect I'll be able to do progressively more interesting things with the engine. And I'll probably go back and rewrite the chicken game at some point.
Well, back to it! Thank you for your support!