Art update 40 (Patreon)

Once again, don't let the title deceive you, this is just me opening my mouth and seeing what comes out.

First of all, the last few weeks I'm starting to see the coder/writer slowly return to his former state of enthusiasm and energy levels. This means he is starting to "bother me" with extra requests and ideas once more, throwing a wrench into my schedule.... and I love it. 

Seriously, I like it a lot better when he's making unreasonable requests and coming up with new ideas than just following along a preset path while having low energy levels. I guess I won't have to  stop sending him art and force him to take a break after all. Well, for now. Let's see how things progress over time.

Besides being happy having to deal with the coder's growing wish-list I've also learned an important lesson. Again. This is the number one lesson I keep forgetting and have to relearn each damn month.  I don't expect that will ever change. 

Basically I need to focus on what I'm doing and try to make it as good as I can. Instead I've been drawing while thinking about the other stuff I haven't finished yet and how much time I have for scene X and when I should start with scene Y etc. I end up working faster because I'm trying to finished the list as fast as possible and end up with art I'm not happy with (and end up having to redo.)  So basically, stressing myself out when there's really no need to.

Part of it is me giving in to a bad habit, the other part is wanting to give you guys a good bit of new content for each build. And like I said before, I'm a stubborn but slow drawer. In the end I've been reworking some things and finally started to get back into a good mindset again.

And just to be clear, since we released the latest early acces build on the 14th of this month we're 100% aiming to get the new one finished on the 14th or earlier. There was a time when we could pride ourselves in a more or less steady monthly release(with exceptions) and we'd really like to make that a habit again.

So redoing a few scenes took me some time, but I ended up with something I like instead of a "well this has to do for now". Personally I'd love to take a month for each scene and load it up with all sorts of extra options, but we have a story to progress in and a shit-ton of characters to give attention.

The new maze parts are getting some new content too so despite me being able to use the art I made during the slave route there's still enough to keep me busy filling up the new tunnels.

Right now I'm busy working on a Smellerbee scene. This one won't make it in the next build so anyone hoping to see her soon, sorry! We have some nice stuff and surprises for the next build, but not a full blown new scene with her yet.

A personal concern of mine, which I haven't talked much about with the coder, is the constantly increasing amount of files we work with. I'm not talking about the fact I need to properly name my files (or they disappear forever in the black hole which is my hdd). No, it's the fact the game is taking a bit longer to load with each new build. 

The sofware we use apparently loads everything in one go at the beginning so naturally as the game grows, so do the loading times.

Our originally planned game had a fraction of the files we already have right now, but I'm starting to wonder what'll happen once we finish book 3. There's a lot of girls we can include in book 4 and I'm afraid it'll end up taking really long to load. That's not just annoying from the player's standpoint, but whenever the coder wants to test some changes he made it takes the game a while to load, increasingly slowing down the process of testing and adjusting.

If you ask me we'd probably be better off doing book 4 as a standalone while developing it and only add it to the main game once we've finished it at the very end.  

What do you think? Is loading the game already taking longer than you'd like or is it something you've barely noticed?

Well, I don't really have much else to mention right now besides we're doing our best to get you a worthwhile new build for FET(and on time!)

Oh and the gameplay video for "cyberpunk 2077" looks sick as fuck! Honestly,  I'm easily impressed but even if I weren't it still would look great.

That's all for now!