Progress Update

Well. The free roam is finally finished - it took a bit longer than I had expected. Part of that was taking some time off renders to work on other tasks (primarily coding and writing), and some of it was that as I progressed through I kept adding to it. 

I've now passed 1k total renders, so that's a milestone for it all. I went over everything that's currently remaining yesterday. I'm currently finishing up one post-free roam scene. After that here's what remains: 20 more scenes total. 1 of those is a smaller free-roam, a couple are very tiny (maybe 5-10 renders total), and a couple are fairly large. Of those 20, about 7 more need to be fully written, the rest are done. 

Aside from the renders and the remaining writing, I need to handle music - which may be a bit more troublesome than I originally anticipated but I'll work on it slowly as everything else progresses. Coding needs to be finished - it's somewhere around 80% done in total. Just the music and gallery systems still need to be done, but those will be last. A lot of the in-game interfaces need to be cleaned up - many of them are bare bones, or using placeholder images/buttons that look terrible - they were just there to test the code.

In addition there's the wallpapers and special renders (1-4 days total for all of it, closer to the low end, so at least that'll be quick when I do work on it). I need to finish writing all the in-game bios, but that's only a few hours as well. Finally I need to design tutorials for everything, finish the main menu, and a few little bits of un-important housekeeping. 

All combined it's somewhere around another month of work at minimum, possibly as much as two, depending on how complex a few of the scenes I have left actually become. I anticipate somewhere in the middle of that timeline, so as I estimated earlier, it's looking like either a late august or early september release.

Now for the last bit - Next week, I'll be looking for ONE alpha tester. I'd like someone to be able to run through the game in it's current state. A few notes about this: 

#1 - my primary concern is bugs, graphical errors, and grammatical/spelling mistakes.

#2 - the game is most definitely in an un-finished state. What does this mean? No music (despite there being some in-game dialogue related to music, it's not actually added yet). Most of the interfaces aren't yet cleaned up. The story for the first release is not completed. I haven't actually added a main font yet. (Currently there is only one font set up, for the menu items and things like that. Stuff like dialogue will use a different one, but for the moment it's all using one single font). This makes some text look a bit off. 

Some buttons don't work yet (in particular things related to gallery/music aren't set up). Tutorials don't currently exists, and minigames can't currently be disabled. (That option will be added prior to release, but I haven't done so yet). 

#3 - A handful of the renders need to be touched up, or in a couple cases re-done. I usually mark everything that needs to be redone/fixed, and tackle them in one large batch after all the renders are finished. 

All in all it's in a pretty rough state currently, BUT the majority of the important code (Aka - the stuff I expect to break) is done, and given my progress and where we're currently at, it's a good time to test. 

If you're interested in testing a very rough, unfinished, early build send me a message. The pre-alpha (that's what I'm calling it) build will be ready some time next week. 

That's all for now. The important bit for me, is I'm definitely well past halfway at this point, and all of the more difficult/complex stuff is behind me. With the exception of two scenes left that I have planned, the majority will be relatively easy compared to the work I've done in the past week or so, and should fly by in comparison. So I'll get back to it now, and as always - have a great week!