Remaster mission report

(aka "Just what the chuffing heck went wrong?")

First off it's worth noting that the time spent October onwards wasn't just on Chapter One (thank God!). Before I even started work on One the real work went into redesigning all of the locations and reskinning all of the characters. With over twenty characters and over forty locations this took, as you can image, some time. But I wanted to have everything nailed down from the start. Largely this went quite well but it did result in several further changes, especially when I started animation testing. Trisha, Babe, McGruder and some characters you don't even know about yet all had to be reworked, but I ended up with a solid base to move forward from.

As to Chapter One, I was steaming away quite nicely and my  lack of updates during November was really down to..."Still working on it" seeming a little bit bland as an update, especially as I was skipping along progress wise and most certainly had in mind it would be out at the end of that month. Indeed it went out to testing in  November and I'd started on the Chapter Two remaster...

Then it all started to go wrong.

The first sign of problems was that two of the new features added didn't work on the testers machine - only on mine. To this day I've no idea why other than (with it being a gallery and a music library which you would have thought would have been fairly standard) it's either a clash between renpy versions, something to do with drivers or a coding problem that is far too subtle for me to identify. But I couldn't release a version that -might- work. And then we started picking up continuity errors in the renders. A lot of them. 

My basic mistake here was rendering a scene, ticking it off as done and moving on. When I did a later scene I then had a tendency to tweak computer screens or add detail which (Duh...) I hadn't realised would be visible in long shot on the earlier renders. Frustrating and dumb in equal measure.

But hardly a crisis, just more work.

And then the third feature failed on me. This one hurt as this one, not only did I really want but I was also really proud of.  You'll have noticed that the text box for when characters speak is totally transparent which is fine 90% of the time. But only 90% of the time - so to cover the extra 10% I had built a transparency slider mechanic that you could run from the PDA so you could choose how the text box was presented. A range from completely black to totally clear. It was aces! (I really was proud of this!) and it worked too (which is a miracle given my coding knowledge) and it worked right up to the point where I opened it on the map screen by accident - and it crashed the game, leaving a huge black box permanently on the lower half of the screen...

I tried everything (hell I even tried to learn more Python!) but I'm damned if I can fix it. For now I've left the code in but deactivated and will see if I can get some help to fix.

OK. So problems they happen. Still not the end of the world. So on I go merrily fixing the renders I'd messed up - and I found that as I did I could make them look even better than they were.  That I could make them look better was both a good thing - and a bad thing. Good in that, well they'll look better. Bad in that...I couldn't -not- make them look better. It's my biggest weakness in that I'm sorta driven to make the best that I'm able to and so a lot of the "old" renders were quite passable, knowing that I could make them look better meant that wasn't an option for me.

I should probably add at this point that the Vanguard is an old model. Although it has a lot of really great plus points as a model, with it being made in the days of 3d delight and lower res screens, the skins and surfaces really are not up to today's expectations. For example this is what she looks like before any work by me...

A bit different to ...

She takes a lot of work to make her look as she does...(the Vanguard - not Sarah!)

Anyhoo, so in a matter of a week I'd gone from a chapter that I thought was finished with a host of new features to a broken mess that needed almost entirely re-rendering. Pride does indeed come before a fall.

At this point my morale went on holiday. To be honest I wish I could have joined it.

And so we come, dear reader, to what I call the "F*ck it" moment. December had popped it's head through the door, the last months work, hours and hours of work, had been a total waste of time and what is a tiny solo dev to do?

The  "F*ck it" moment had two clear paths open to me. One of them was singing it's siren song of just giving in. It wiggled its "Give them their money back" hips and jiggled its "No one likes your game anyway" boobies at me. She was looking fairly attractive I'll confess.

BUT. The other path had bigger boobies. Much bigger. 

This was the  "F*ck it" path of opportunity. 

So, yes, I had to re-render almost everything. So what? It would look great when finished. she sang as she did something that I didn't even think she had muscles to do -  and, yes, a load of stuff didn't work, but who really uses a gallery or wants a music library? Take those out and what could you add? She bent down low, shook her boobs of opportunity and whispered in my ear "Fembob..." (Fembob being my name for the fem MC option)

She was right.

Oh, I wasn't a happy bunny - don't get me wrong. I was as miserable as sin to be honest, but she was right. I'd be late but the game would look better and would have more gameplay, more options and more importantly would allow me to write again (God it felt -so- good to write again!). Handling the femmc and colour changes isn't even that difficult. The advantage of first person POV is that a lot of the scenes don't really change that much (except for *cough* those scenes and even those are remarkably easy to do  *has tested*) Even Kelly was easy to handle by keeping her body the same shape.

So what you're seeing now is significantly different to what went out in November. Sharper, funkier renders and more game play options. 

I should have absolutely kept you all in the loop. I know that.

But at the start I expected my next post to be "Here it is!" and once it all started to go wrong I honestly didn't know what to say or do. Other than crack on (once I'd choose the better boobies that is).

Thankfully, all the hard work is now behind me. So a short pause for me, and then onwards with Chapter Two - which will be considerably larger than the previous version (which was made in somewhat of a rush at the time). It will also, naturally, look -very- much better.

I've still some correspondence and  a host of messages to catch up on, and I shall, over the day next or so. 

Laters!