setting the course

Hey all! Time for an update again now that we've all settled into 2024.

As I've told you before, I started working on the new slave route epilogue for FET.  It'll be much more like a normal book route than the love route epilogue. The latter was meant to add some more group scenes, add more silly scenes like "Toph's tower of flesh" and tie up some story stuff.

I still wanted to give some characters the slave route treatment and because of the time frame in which the book 4 slave route took place I couldn't do that back then. The slave routes in general have always been the shorter ones so instead of what I did with the love route, it'll be a bit more of a story driven route.  At least more than dumping everyone on ember Island and have 'em go at it :)

When starting a new route it always feels like I'm blindly feeling my way through how I want to do things exactly... and this time was no exception!

It took me quite some time before things started to click in my head. Part of that is also me doing other stuff, like the gallery addition which is seductive to work on. That part goes slow(very slow actually), but still... that whole feeling of "adding another scene" makes whatever malnutritioned completionist feelings I have within me hungry for more. That wasn't doing anything for the new slave route epilogue though so I had to stop working on that again. At least until the new build is finished. I'm not the kind of person who easily switches between things on a day to day basis.

I've also been doing some more "cleaning" of scripts. Putting stuff together where it makes more logical or practical sense. That's not something the player will ever notice, just me. What you *might* notice in the upcoming build is me adding some higher res versions of "talking heads",  by which I mean the images next to the dialogue. 

Most of FET is still using  pretty low resolution images. It's not an easy matter of simply replacing everything with higher res stuff and  I only started using higher res images during book 4, but most of those "talking heads" were still using the same low res images. I didn't finish all of them, but a bunch should look better now if you're going to play FET on a bigger/full screen. 

Btw. I think I'll add the epilogue routes as another world screen option like books 1 to 4. If only while I'm working on them so it'll be easier for players to jump right in without a save file to test out the epilogues. I certainly started to dislike having to go through those myself during testing!

Anyway, I'm expecting to have the first build and start of the slave route epilogue ready this month, though I kinda have to make up for me not getting enough traction at the start of the month. Been doing a lot and my mouse hand started acting up again because of it! luckily switching to a different, more ergonomically shaped mouse(I have acquired a bunch of mice in my search for the holy grail among those) gave my hand the relief it needed. I like my other mouse still better so this is just to give certain muscles a break.

And that's it for semi on-topic stuff. If that wasn't enough babbling for you(are you sane?)  here's some entirely  off-topic babbling stuff below!

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I like to read and 99,9% of what I read is fantasy and science fiction books. Audio books can be nice too while working on FET or Titans IF it's work such as inking lines, or at least something which doesn't require much conscious attention.  I don't do too well dividing my attention between listening to what's being said or actually working on something. 

I'm not certain I mentioned this before, but sometimes you discover books you've read actually have a computer game equivalent. That happened to me years ago with "Betrayal at Krondor" which is an oooold rpg game. I only discovered it because I had read some of the fantasy books whose world the game takes place in. Sci-fi books are more prone to become outdated than fantasy books for obvious reason. But when I discovered a game existed of the books I had read I didn't immediately realize how old the games were!  Like... "you're going to be needing some highly specialized software to get them going"-old.  The "less then xx Mb"- kind of old(non cd version). You can find it on gog.com nowadays which makes things a lot easier.

I tried playing it and I came very close to saying fuck-this and forget all about it within five minutes because of the low resolution.  I'm not used to playing things which are that old.   Anyway, that particular time I was feeling headstrong all of a sudden and forced myself to give it a real chance by playing it for at least a couple of hours. The game was well beloved from what I could see and I liked the books so I thought: "there must be something there for me to discover/like".  Long story shot, In the end I finished it(I can't remember if I used cheats) and really liked it.

The reason I mention this is because the game had it's 30th(!) anniversay last year. Which I only discovered this week because of a recommended youtube video in which the developers were talking about it. It was very nice to see since I only had played the game relatively recently and could appreciate it for anything but the graphics, which must've been stellar at the time.

Since I was updating some resolution stuff myself and was recommended the video I thought it was funny to mention it here. If I wasn't busy I'd try and see if I could get it to work on Linux to play it again... buuuut I AM busy.

So I'll be leaving you again. Who knows, maybe I've made you curious about "Betrayal at krondor" if you happen to know about the books.

And that's it for me again today. Hope to see you before the end of this month again with an new FET build!