art update 35

Aaaaartt update 35!!!

Hey folks! Ready for some artsy talk? well, hold on for a sec because I wanna chat about some other stuff first.

For those of you who had the chance to play the latest update of FET, we hope you liked it. We've been using the days directly following it to keep tabs on any possible problems. The $5 tier crowd always manages to find some more stuff to fix and of course this time wasn't the exception.

However, it looks like nothing too crazy popped up....  well, except for the crabfighting section. Whatever you do, don't get rid of your very first crab. The one you got for free from the store. Getting rid of your "pikachu" is a baaad idea.  We've been fixing that and some other problems with the crabs and will upload as soon as we feel confident it won't create other worse problems. Which should be very soon.

Although I(artist) always help out with tracking down bugs and offer possible solutions, my strength lies not with bug fixing. That's also why I think the crabfighting has been janky from the start. The code for it was big, scary and nine out of ten times I had NO idea what was going on.  

Naturally it's hard to offer any serious help when you have no idea what's going on and thus the coder was pretty much on his own. Having also to do all the writing and coding for the rest of the game this naturally left him with little time to really dive into the crabfighting code.

I still mostly feel like a none bending Toph when looking at the crabfight code(blind), but I have been able to offer some more assistence lately and we've found the causes for some longer existing bugs and been fixing them. Hopefully we can kill most of the stuff with the next version of FET. 

Not everyone may care as much, but if it's in the game it shouldn't give you annoyances beyond the natural "Oh my god! Iroh.. why are your crabs are so goddamn strong!?" and "The beast is unbeatable!! Why did you even put it in there?!!? WHYYY!??"   

We'd like to try and finish the current route with the next build which I guess is another extra incentive to try and get the crabfighting as bugless as possible. We've got plenty to do if the next build will be the end of this route.....and I've been having a lot of damn fun drawing stuff for it! 

We're horrible at guessing , but we're pretty certain it will take us the rest of April and the entirety of May. We'd be very happy if we can get it done sooner and of course we'll do our best to make it so, but for sanity's sake don't expect the next build to arrive earlier than at the end of May.

Like usual I don't want to tell you too much about the scenes I'm drawing because I want them to be fresh and hopefully unexpected once you start playing, but this IS the art update so I'll do my best to give you some vague descriptions etc.    

As you've come to expect from a new book 3 update it will have a new part of the maze accessible. It will be the most important part of the entire maze. I think most of you can already guess what will be there. The problems we had last time getting the maze to play nice with the new additions shouldn't be able to catch us by surprise anymore. At the very least not to the extend it did before.  

I've been drawing new idles for this new part, new backgrounds, new naga stuff (ittybitty sized version) 

.....

new diseased bowling ball stuff, new fighting idles, a multiple girl scene, other scenes and all the crazy small knick knacks which pop up every day. The backgrounds are especially time consuming. Remember that first statue and it's background in the maze? It took me a lot of work and you didn't even get to see it for long. I don't think that's wasted effort since you need some of those more unique moments in the game. The fact you don't get to see it for long adds to the importance of the moment.

When it comes to new scenes I actually had most of a multiple girl scene ready, but half of it wasn't rocking my boat hard enough so with a big sigh of agitation, I scrapped it and started anew. Right now even half of it(and I'm not done yet) is bigger than an average scene, so I wouldn't be surprised if the coder will want to split it into two.

I'm also working on the art for a small minigame which you should be able to play. We haven't reached 100% agreement on it, but we can always drop it and see about using it later during  the love route.

I was also working on a simple crabfighting reward for the truly grizzled crab trainers among our players, but I've put that on the backburner for now. There's just too much other stuff to do and you can already get a reward by defeating Iroh's crabs.

 ps. you're a tough m*therf*cker if you managed to do that. For anyone who isn't as tough and still would like to see the scene, just finish our april 1st joke game. It's endscene is mostly the same.

Then there's the scene winner's scene etc etc. So yeah, I haven't felt bored yet and it doesn't look like I'll be very soon .... just the way I like it ;)