(Future Fragments) Update on progress + second stealth animation!

Hey, so here's the end of year (and end of the decade!) post with what we've been working on over the last month or two in terms of things done off of our checklist.

We did intend to get a lot more posts out this month and last month on Patreon, but a combination of the holidays and (it's a trope, I know, but it's the truth) sicknesses for a few people made the amount of content we could post to the Patreon be lesser than we expected.

To see the animation, go to the Discord over at https://discord.gg/puXrfSm and check out the #announcements-n-previews channel!

Going forward though, expect to see weekly posts on Patreon with music, map making streams, lore posts, more animations like the one above from the Stealth Section of The End, and more neat stuff as we keep pushing ahead during this demo hiatus.

(As a reminder, demos will start back up at the end of February.)

This list of things we've gotten done during the demo hiatus is going to be fairly lengthy, so apologies in advance!

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Triangulate's Stuff

• 4 out of the 5 Stealth Section sex animations are done; you can see one of them up above and another one from last month. We'll keep posting the rest monthly until demos come back!
• All Stealth Section animations for Talia herself are done (nude sprites).
• Artwork for the True Final Boss has begun.
• Doing visual designs for the mechanics/new features for the Fire/Ice levels (as in, figuring out what will and won't work visually).
• Extra backgrounds for The End have been started on.

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Frouge's Stuff

• The game's engine got updated overall; this was mainly to fix compatibility issues with controller support and graphics support for shaders, among a few other things.
• Multiple save slots have now been implemented, but these won't be actually usable until the full game's release.
• A lot of bug fixes and such for the v0.27F re-release coming in early January.
• Lots of new additions to the level editor which we'll go over in more detail when the likely final level editor edition comes out (until full game release), also in early January.
• One of our long-time supporters (who made custom maps you can play; check them out over at the Discord!), Jason Bill, found a severe bug within the Infected Rebel's pathfinding AI. This bug could lead to crashes of the game and affect other enemies as well, so Frouge spent a week or so fixing it up entirely.
• Fixed bugs with looping platforms and moving platforms in general, something that had plagued mapmaking for a while now.
• Improved performance in general for lower-quality computers.
• Programming has started on the True Final Boss.
• Set up the groundwork for the Japanese builds of the game, mainly for using censored sprites and text swapping and such.
  
  NOTE: To be clear, censored sprites are only for the Japanese version. The other versions will remain uncensored. Additionally, the Japanese version is happening long after launch, so it's not going to delay the full game's release.

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My Stuff

• All future databanks have now been categorized by the "type" of story and characters involved so as to not have a lot of the same "type" of databank in one level (ex. you don't want 30 databanks all about "soldiers" in one level).
• All databanks and cutscenes have now been "linked" together so that I know what databank will influence said cutscenes and vice versa, which honestly is the toughest part of doing the story for this game when it comes to planning.
• The rough draft for some cutscenes, areas, and databanks, as well as the Collections Menu has begun.
• Have been making YouTube videos for the soundtrack for the game, which you'll start to see go up in January.
• Setup the accounts for the Japanese sites, as well as going back and forth with Steam and other companies about getting the game on said sites.
• Coming up with the initial ideas/new mechanics for Fire and Ice levels as well as for the True Final Boss's attacks, songs, and such. (To be clear, I only come up with the initial ideas; all three of us as a team refine and finalize said ideas.)
• Recruiting people for stuff involving the True Final Boss.
• Endings for the game are nearly finished script-wise. We're waiting to do the visuals until the True Final Boss is done.

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Audio Stuff

• The "before" version of Part 4 of the True Final Boss music is done.
• I wish I had more to report here, but Fuyarinpa had a combination of other work he had to do as well as the holidays himself, plus a pretty severe hospital-level sickness that took him out of commission the last month or so. He's fine now though, so expect more music soon!
• Hired someone special (not that Fuyarinpa isn't special!) to add something only they could do for the True Final Boss.
• Also brought on SilkyMilk (the voice of Vie, Talia, and a number of databank roles) as Casting Director, which should help us a lot when it comes time to cast the nearly 100+ roles we'll need to get in there for all the new script/voicework.

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Other Stuff

• What took up the most time by far these last two months was just planning things out for future visuals/programming/writing. We didn't want to run in and have to redo anything, so we wanted to make sure we got things right.
• The True Final Boss in general is easily more of an undertaking than probably the past five bosses put together, with 5 battle phases and 2 interlude phases, multiple songs, and some really over the top attacks and fun mechanics that we think is going to be worth the effort, even though it's pushing all three of us to our limits.
• We've also solidified the new mechanics for the Ice and Fire levels, which I'll likely cover in a future post. We redid the mechanics for those levels (don't worry, it's not taking a whole load of extra art or anything) because when compared to the gameplay of the Electric, Earth, and The End levels, they're both just severely lacking.
• Going along with all of the planning, we've went back over what we need to get done and trimmed the fat on content so to speak; there are a number of features we decided to move over to Faye's game (the sequel to Future Fragments, starting up a few months after Future Fragments finishes). We're doing this both to improve the quality of Faye's game, as well as removing bloat and timesinks from Talia's game. Don't worry, we're not getting rid of any existing features in Talia's game.
• Additionally, we've formed a bugtesting group that will be going over all future demos and the full game itself, so you can be assured that we're covering all our bases with bugs from here on out.
• The Discord is also getting an overhaul too; while it isn't directly part of the game, there's a lot of things on there we've wanted to fix for a while, so come visit it sometime next week to see all the changes! I'll do a post about it here when we've changed things around.

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So that covers everything for the most part; we should be good to still get the game out by May 2020, so look forward to that!

As always too, feel free to come visit us at the Discord, over at https://discord.gg/puXrfSm !

Thanks again too, to all of you who've continued to support the game during this demo hiatus; it really means a lot that you have faith in the game and us, and we're going to do our best to live up to your expectations.

The true final boss battle is already shaping up to be pretty crazy, by the way... fans of a certain game where you can "cut anything" might enjoy what direction we're taking it in.