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A (much needed) progress update
🕑 Added 2018-03-10 16:05:29 +0000 UTC[Abelius]: Hi there people,
First of all, I'm sorry about the lack of updates on my part in the last days.
I relocated my things to the co-working office in the past week, and since then I've been focusing on getting things done. This is indeed a really good place to work without distractions (my daughters making noise at home, mainly), but so much focusing on development has got me a little silent with you guys... :-P
Well, I can just say that I'm trying to make up for lost time now. As I suspected, time spent here is much more productive than in my house. It's Saturday afternoon here and the place is completely quiet. I'm the only person working in the weekend, even when the office is open 24/7...
So, before I plunge into Unity and Spine for the day, I wanted to take out of the way that little anxiety of not being communicative enough about my progress.
If you take a look here, you'll see the (almost) finished dialogue "tree" (more like a spaghetti bowl) for Cenvir.
Each node represents a dialogue line along with the scripting commands that make the "magic" happen. That could be a character speaking, blushing, putting a face after speaking, starting an animation, etc. That also allowing for event repetition and variations according to K's lust levels.
There's an epic work involved in that, because there are a lot of things happening in the background. Even speaking is a different animation that plays at the same time as the others, and not always gets along well with other components of the model... but I don't want to bore you to Hell. Let's just say that those are things that don't happen in other games with static renders and/or simpler models with no mesh deformation, clothing and sorting layering and animation curves.
The important thing here is that this kind of work is, by far, the most time-consuming activity in my to-do list, but I guess that just the fact of having a previously created template like this one will help me a lot in the future.
That said... yes, I should try to find a balance between detail and content.
Every time I estimate how much time it will take me to add something, I end up being too optimistic. And even after a year of working on the game, I'm still finding engine and model structure issues that need to be addressed before the game starts to grow to its intended size.
Thing is...: we're amateurs doing a harder than most amateur game. We're learning every day by finding multiple ways of how NOT doing things. And some of those past mistakes are easy to fix, while others are... well... :-P
Anyway, those are bridges to be crossed at a later time. My intention is that v0.2 and v0.3 end up being much more closely spaced out than v0.1 and v0.2, so I'll need to ignore less-than-ideal engine inner workings for the time being.
And as for when exactly v0.2 will be out to testers, I can't know it right now. I'll work my ass off the next weeks, because my daughters' holidays start on 23rd, so it would be a really good idea to have something before that date, so the rest of the month could be spent on bug fixing, even if I need to take my computer with me again.
But those are not closed plans. The only thing I don't want to do is to rush things up and vomit a broken mess.
Comments
I hope the release come this month, moreover, for the nexts updates, I think that in the trello the events should appear without names. I mean, Tj, Bj... Cause it spoil us about the content, and is not full content by the moment.
master8
also is there more then one job in the game and more sex sceans
master8
when will more versions come out?
dragongodXD
good to hear the new place is working out. i took a look at that dialogue tree and i feel your pain, networking all PLC machinery together at one computer look's simular. (haven't been here long but looking at becoming a patron soon!)\
Lev
This is exactly what Early Access games do. ARK: Survival Evolved succeed in EA, not because it was high quality game at that time. ARK provided regural content update with acceptable (more or less) quality, therefore it kept players hooked. They had new things to discover and test and since then the game has been growing. (Mind you ARK is a bugfest and should have kept attention to quality much more). I'm affraid Abelius if you kept so much attention to quality of content you produce, you would spent a lot of time polishing it, but you wouldn't offer significant content updates in exchange. 4 months has already passed since v0.1 and we have right to expect something more than, let's say, 1 new highly polished animation or 1 new job. (I don't know what's even planned for v0.2 exactly, because plans are pretty vague) Many EA projects died, because authors were not able to provide updates in regural periods and people started to lose interest more and more. Even though I keep my fingers crossed for your project, I wish you started posting content updates more often before I decide it's not worth my time. Good luck.
Bob Bob Bob
Some advice from someone with way too much time and experience in corporate software development: - Create user stories built around delivering value to the user as early as possible. Do not get caught in the trap of trying to get things perfect before releasing them. - Once initial value is delivered on a feature, THEN you can iterate on it to improve quality - Delivering usable value to the users early not only gives the users something more frequently, it also allows you to illicit feedback earlier in order to make sure you don't spend lots of time on something that isn't highly valued - don't be afraid to offer "beta" builds to get feedback and to allow backers to help you with finding bugs. You don't have an army of QA folks and I think us backers are aware of that and would likely be happy to help with QA especially if it means getting an "early taste".
I still prefer quality over quantity. The internet is full of "quantity" on this type of content. Although, if you guys decide to find a balance that does not compromise the experience we'd understand. We still love you guys and the content you make :)
Finally a Progress Update! Yay! ^•^
