winterfire
patreon
A new way to track progress
🕑 Added 2021-11-03 19:43:45 +0000 UTCLast month's poll is over and due to the results, I have added an extra way to view the game's progresses directly from Patreon.
This is a compact version of the progress report on discord, but displaying bar progress instead of a changelog.
Alongside the patreon posts (Plans, previews, and so on) you can still make a pretty good guess of what is getting added without having to read it.
Of course if you are still curious on knowing more about the project's progress but cannot access Discord, you are free to DM me and I will be happy to reply.
The image is pretty self explanatory for the most part: At the top you have a last change label that displays the date in which I made the most recent change, and on its right there is a percentage that displays how close the release is to be completed, it reaches 100% on release day.
At the bottom there is a planned release date that displays by when the release will be ready, and on its right there is the release number (R9 in this example).
The release number will always be the alpha (Tier 2 release), and the planned release might not always be accurate so you should rely on its percentage instead.
What is more confusing are instead the three bars and how the percentage is calculated, so let me give you a brief overview of each one of them:
Writing (current / total):
When I make a release, I quickly hurry to make drafts of the next release and in which point of the story I should stop in order to have a clear goal to reach.
Thanks to the drafts made in separate files, I know how many scenes I will have to write in total.
I always start from the writing, so at the beginning of the month you will probably see progress only on that field... Except this month in which I am focusing on changing, fixing and overhauling some existing systems.
Art (current / total):
Art includes the following things: UI, 3D (Dungeon floors and other playable areas), Character sprites and of course CGs.
All of them are pretty self explanatory, except for CGs: The total does not include the number of CGs, but rather the scenes; If a blowjob scene from Eina includes 6 CGs, I will count it as 1.
I always did this for some reason, and in this case it helps me with having a set total as I may decide that a scene needs more or less CGs and I do not want to edit the total every time.
Here is how the total of "Art" is calculated:
UI: It includes screens such as "Achievements", those are decided during the planning stage.
3D: Thanks to having a set goal in mind, I will know whose locations Bell will need to visit during a release, for instance Floor 10,11 and 12 will be added soon... That would be a +3.
Character Sprites and CGs: In the drafts, I always make small notes describing the speaker and CGs. I simply count those towards the art's total.
Gameplay (current / total):
Gameplay includes the following things: Minigames, Quests, Items, Spells, Skills, Locations, Monsters and Dungeon Events.
This is the hardest one to know the total for since, aside from a few of those things, I do not really plan for them ahead of time.
They are also the most common things I skip and postpone to future released if I am running out of time, so the total for this may vary.
If anything, the existence of this progress bar will make me try to plan those things ahead of time as well, but it is likely that the total on this will still change fairly often as I might decide to add an extra item or an extra monster.
Luckily adding a monster or an item is a fairly quick task, so having a slightly different total will not impact the progress rate as much.
What is not shown:
Things such as fixes, changes and testing progresses are not shown since the total is not something I can predict.
When it comes to fixes, if issues are reported during the planning stage, it is very likely that I will be making a patch instead (such as R7.1).
Changes, even important ones, are made on a whim and are often irrelevant (such as redesigning a sprite).
Testing happens when the progress reaches 100%, and there is no telling how long I will take to test it (and fix the issues I find, if any).
