It's the "Balls..." update...

A quick update before pledge renewal day.

We're close. Shockingly close.

There's been the usual animation fun of having to tweak and re-run certain ones (There should be a special hell for Daz asset designers who make assets that look good from afar and medium range and yet look like something out of Minecraft close up. A special hell. Probably involving Lego, nakedness and lubricant. And perhaps a hedgehog. Maybe two.)

Unfortunately I have hit a snag on Annie's strip pool module and, surprisingly, it's a gameplay issue.

The module itself works nicely enough (and more importantly looks rather fab if I say so myself) but there is the potential for...grind. And in the worse way possible, which kills the fun out of the whole thing quicker than finding yourself naked in a dark room with a pile of Lego and a couple of hedgehogs.

The problem is this. If Annie sinks her shot and you miss yours, you strip and move on to the next shot. If you hit your shot and she misses hers, she strips and move on to the next shot. If you both miss, you play the shot again (which makes sense) but if you both sink it...you play the shot again. So what's the difference between both missing and both sinking? The odds of both missing are pretty slim for a start, but more importantly there is an element of gameplay and tension still. The player can learn from their mistake and attempt to sink the shot this time around, hoping she misses. So slightly repetitive but still fun due to the tension element.

If you both sink it, then that element isn't there. The player will just do the same as last time again and again, and again until Annie misses. This is exactly as much fun as it sounds - and given she is pretty good I might as well have wrote a washing dishes module.

The "perfect" solution would be to add another couple of custom trick shots per level, but with the variety in clothes state etc this could involve a lot of work, very quickly and I just don't have the power to turn that number of animations around in a week or so. The testers, as you can imagine,  have been very helpful as usual and have come up with a number of solutions that I'm exploring.

I want to be careful on how I implement this however. It has to feel (and be) an actual challenge between the two of you and yet also be something I can turn around quickly. Equally, I don't want to compromise on the quality element of this module. This gameplay issue aside, it's a lot of fun and saucy as hell and I know a lot of you are looking forward to this. Compromising it at this stage would not only be letting you down but would also undermine all the work that has gone into it so far.

My thoughts at the moment are to put together a couple of extra shots that can be called down as needed. With some cunning camera angles and number crunching on probabilities I should still be able to attain what I want with out having to run another forty or so animation (back of a ciggie packet suggests I could get away with about ten).

But if all this is frustrating for me (and this sort of thing is), I know it's worse for you guys. You're throwing money in a hole on a promise with little to see (this does of course raise the question of part releases again as each main module -of which we have six- is easily a monthly release in itself let alone the main game, but we can discuss that in a couple of weeks). I'll see if I can find the time to pull out the combat gameplay from VR without breaking it and pop it up on here in a couple of days just so you can see the level I'm now pitching at. I think you'll be surprised at just how far I've come since the last release, especially given the power limitations I work with, and at least it will give you a comfort feel over just what to expect from the whole game.

My apologies also for not dealing with correspondence etc at the moment. You've every right to be cheesed off with me (I'm pretty cheesed off with myself as it is) and morale isn't exactly high right now so although I fully appreciate many of you will wish to quite rightly vent at me, I'd rather deal with that once the final work is done. Despite that, you'll note that I'll be damned if I'm going to compromise or ship anything shoddy. It would have been easy, very easy, to just go  "It'll be fine" with this issue. But the module is too good, the chapter is too good, to do that. The same care and attention that has been spent on all the other main modules needs to apply to this one as well.

Notty