Progress Update - February 14th, 2023

Hey there, Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! Halftilt here with a quick update on where I’m at with Lustiest Lair and the Light-Space Love conversion into Unity for testing. I’m about 90% of the way there – so I’m expecting to put out a release soon for the testers. I’m not going to post an exact date, but just keep an eye out.

Once the test version is out, then we’ll have a very good idea of when the next “Official” Alpha release will be.

Other than that, I’ll give a bit of a background of the delays to be more transparent. I’ve mostly just kept my head down and focused on the work, while, admittedly, not giving a lot of updates in terms of posting here or on other sites.

Lustiest Lair

Work’s been slow on Lustiest Lair since I’ve been putting in a lot of time into Light-Space Love, forcing myself to get this release out. I do plan on putting more focus on Lustiest Lair once again once I’m finished with this release – this Unity conversion has, admittedly, consumed me to some degree.

In terms of art, Hestrir has mentioned he may do some art for me once again for Lustiest Lair for free – though the Russia/Ukraine situation hasn’t improved so sending money to them is still proving impossible. I do prefer to pay the artist’s I work with, so I’m taking my patience with that.

On the other hand, I may be reaching out to other artist’s (possibly the one that did the Lustiest Echo) to handle some artwork for Lustiest Lair in the meantime once I return to work in earnest on that project.

Unfortunately, this approach is much slower since the artist doesn’t work with Spine – instead I get the artist’s work cut into a Spine-friendly format by another artist I work with, then finally I take it to our animator (LawfulSock) to animate it so it can be imported into Darkest Dungeon – which means the process pretty much takes 3x as long as it does when going through Hestrir/StalinTheStallion directly – who I much rather prefer working with for Darkest Dungeon content anyway.

Light-Space Love

I’ve been working like crazy on this game – it’s a lot of fun, of course, and I want to make sure all of the details are working as it should, but of course you run into unexpected roadblocks (like any development project).

The biggest roadblock was underestimating the amount of time it would take to transfer all of the dialogue from Godot’s Dialogic into Unity YarnSpinner!

If you’re not into technical details, you can skip this next part!

Tech Details

Godot’s Dialogic is very “character-focused” when it comes to how the Dialogue Scenes are set up. Character’s are treated as an object which has their own set of custom sprites and all Dialogue or actions stem from that character (and the character has to be in the scene for them to work).

Yarn Spinner, on the other hand, characters are also treated as objects, but then they are referenced by different functions. If a character is in a scene, then they can be interacted with, instead of shaving actions that stem from the character itself – for example if I wanted to “Shake” a character or “Update their Sprite”, then the Dialogue Runner handles those functions instead of the character themself.

Nothing’s wrong with either approach, and sometimes I prefer the Yarn Spinner approach – especially since Yarn Spinner has a few additional features such as allowing a lot more customization in terms of setting up different dialogue options (I can hide or disable a dialogue option, instead of them just always being hidden; which I’ll be implementing in future releases)

Also, the formatting is much more friendly for localization (which if this project grows enough, I’d love to support localization in other languages, mostly looking at Spanish/Japanese as the two non-English languages).

Additionally, Yarn Spinner is much much much easier for a non-programmer to get into as reading the lines is straightforward and also Yarn Spinner is great for visualizations of how conversations flow and branch.

But either way, because of the way Yarn Spinner and Dialogic treat characters, a 1 to 1 translation was going to require a lot of refactoring. Which is mostly pretty much done at this point.

Non-Tech Stuff

I also couldn’t help myself, and while translating the dialogue into Yarn Spinner, I changed some of the scenes to better suit the vision I have for LSL. You’ll see a few more sex scenes in areas you may have already completed, additionally, some of the scenes that had “placeholder” sex scenes were implemented (such as the first encounter with Alliqua).

On TOP of that, I did end up cutting some dialogue that I felt didn’t fit or showed up too early in the game – such as the conversation with Sh'ggy'S'lyyn. He’s planned to be a much larger character further on in the storyline, and a potential romantic option – I plan on adding a library section to the station which’ll primarily be his spot.

Personal Stuff

I’ve also had some personal stuff going on as well – I’ve mentioned before that my spouse and I moved into a new apartment and we’ve mostly finished setting up our new home at this point! It’s got a lovely view and in a much better neighborhood – honestly couldn’t be happier with the move!

What I haven’t mentioned is that I’ve also been laid off from my previous job around the time we moved! My previous company is pretty much dissolving at this point and I’d been hit in the most recent round of layoffs. I figured it wasn’t relevant at the time and didn’t want to share any discouraging news – especially since I’m usually the type to only share any bad news once I’ve got a plan figured out on how to deal with it.

That being said, I’m in a much better spot now! I already had a bit of savings put aside and have had my spouse’s support throughout the entire process. Most importantly, though, the job search has been going fantastically! I’ve already got two offers for positions with much better pay and flexibility than my previous role! Fully remote too, which means more time to spend on personal projects instead of being in the office when I’ve got nothing to do!

Unfortunately, one does require a test and I do enjoy partaking a bit in the d*vil’s lettuce. But we’ll see how that situation plays out!

Either way, the job situation is probably the best news, personally, given that I have been funding these projects with my own income along with the support you’ve all given me, which has been a major help! 

And on that note, we’re getting pretty close to funding the artists’ I work with almost entirely through the subscriptions and support you’ve all given these projects – it really means a lot has enabled so much to get done!!!

Future Release Schedule

I’m hoping to ramp up the release schedule for Light-Space Love pretty significantly once the Unity Conversion is done. The plan is that the following releases will mostly require adding in missions, new dialogue and new maps.

Pretty much, instead of having to program in the systems from the ground up, I’ll mostly be plugging in dialogue trees, adding in new enemies for encounters, or adding in a dictionary with quest and map logic. I plan on only adding in new code to account for a new mini-game in every third or fourth release or fixing the odd bug here or there.

This also goes for Lustiest Lair, I won't be spending as much time planning and programming -- instead I can once again go back to focusing on writing, storyline and designing encounters. 

That’s About It

And that’s about it, really! Thank you so much for your patience and support! It really means a lot and it wouldn’t be possible without the encouragement and support, especially as life and work gets crazy!

Stay tuned for more updates!!!!