aftermathteam
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General Progress Report
🕑 Added 2018-06-28 04:49:51 +0000 UTC Today was one of those days that completely blindsided me. In the big scheme of things, that's a good thing.I got a call this morning to tell me that someone (Turned out to be my family. Parents and a couple of others who wanted to be helpful) had paid off all but about $10 of my house (I literally went in this afternoon with a twenty and finished paying the house off, and got change back, . . . ). Just like that. To be quite honest, I'm still kind of processing this. Its a pretty big deal, it means that while we still have to pay taxes and insurance on our house, the half of our monthly payments which have gone toward our house loan are gone. It's not often that I'm left without the words to express myself, but this was one of those times. My family is awesome, and this is something I doubt I'll ever be able to properly thank them for.
What this means for you guys (Thought I was just talking about home life because I like to talk, didn't you?): I talked with my wife a little bit about this, and she gave me the green light to do this. I've made a promise to use some of the saved money to fix up the house (Got some rot around some windows, a small leak in the back room, things that need to get fixed sooner rather than later.), but the rest of it I hope to put toward projects again, ensuring that we have a little more wiggle room in the art budget moving forward. More art is good, right?
Now, on to the stuff you all actually care about:
-Spent a couple of hours writing for The Therapist this morning (Before the above derailed my day.) At present, one of the end scene for the event chain I have been working on is nearing completion. The other is about half done, perhaps a bit more than that.
-Heard back from one of the places where Inheritance has been pirated, . . . the short version of what they said was basically (Their response was a little less direct than this, and filled with pleasantries that made it come off more polite, but I think you'll get the idea): "We're a piracy site, we're going to do it no matter what. You should be grateful for the feedback our site generates for you." It's about what I was expecting from the site, but still a little sad. Oh well.
-Received another submission for Inheritance today. Still got to read it and see if it needs any revisions, but given the writer's work in the past I'm not expecting any hangups. This looks like it's toward the end of a short story arc that's being written. I'll be putting at least the first scene from this set into the game for the next build, if I can learn how to force scenes to trigger at certain times then I'll make an effort to get the whole thing into the game. Time will tell which happens for the next build.
-Tomorrow should be wide open with the exception of a couple of chores. I'll be getting started on writing first thing in the morning with the intent to work on projects for a minimum of 8 hours, likely it will be more than that. I foresee no problems finishing up the two end scenes for the event chain I've been working on. We'll see what happens from there.
And there you guys have it! Now you know about as much as I do!
Comments
Aftermath Team
Not sure why your other message isn't showing up here for me, but on the off chance other's can see it, I'll comment anyway. For the coding of the event chain, our coders have a program running in the background that tracks where people are, what they're doing, and all of that kind of stuff. It's some pretty advanced stuff that I wont even pretend that I understand. (This is how certain scenes only play at certain times of day, if certain people are present, those kinds of thing.) As a temporary solution until they can get the portion of the program in place that forces scenes to trigger at specific times, I figure I can run a single variable, set the value to 0, then count it up by one for each scene that plays out. I'm under the impression that the coders can even use that as a way of tracking which scene needs to trigger next. The problem with doing it randomly is that the scenes have to trigger on the same time, in a specific order. By laying it down to random chance makes it so they could potentially be missed.
Perversity
I can understand, I had something vaguely similar happen to me. I spent most of my life living in apartments, but when I got out of the military I had enough saved to buy my own property and home. It was a huge relief, granted my family is unable to do any help financially, but it was just a relief to know I had MY place, and I had 0 neighbors right next to me. )))) Ahh I see, I had taken a look at the code you use to see if Twine was something I could use for creating my stories, but I figured out that it would still be easier to work in Ren'Py even though I have to use a lot more art than Twine would use. I just didn't want to learn a whole new system. )))) As for the setup, the way you describe it, it sounds like you could set up the variables to disable the first scene then there could be a counter setup to count down the minutes that you think should go between the 2 scenes minimum. Then after the timer expires allow the scene to be found randomly in the places it would be found. That way there is the element of randomness (finding the first scene, then each scenes being random after a certain time frame.). I think it could work that way, just get it in the game then have someone work on the specific code to get it working. I know I've had to pay some programmers to help me with renpy in the past, and after they were done playing with their code helped me learn a lot more about how to do things. ))))
Aftermath Team
Yeah, it's a huge relief. My earnings through Patreon has made home life much more comfortable, for the first time in years we're not juggling bills to stay ahead of things which is wonderful. This is a big change on top of that, and one I'm still processing emotionally, as well as still assessing how exactly it changes things with our budget. Time will tell. For the scenes, the game tracks year, month, day, hour, and minute. Basically the scene chain has the first scene take place one day, then most of the rest takes place over the next day, with some scenes taking up upwards of a couple of hours time, but by no means filling the day. Then the last couple of scenes take place on the third day. I can set something up that will simply rail you through the scenes, but I'd much rather they feel like part of your daily routines (May set up the railed version just to get it into the game, then change how it plays once I get a little help with the code so it can be done right.)
Perversity
Good news about the house man, I bet that was a huge load off your shoulders. That kind of stuff is always good. Also about the scenes, iirc your game uses days right? If it does then just set a flag to check the day variable and cause the scene to happen when the player wakes up, goes to bed, or eats a meal where ever you want it to happen. If you don't want it to be limited by days then you can cause the first one to happen randomly, then set a variable that counts down, then when it hits 0 (have it decrease every day by 1), the next event happens. I prefer the random then count down method personally. Just hope the suggestion helps.
