Progress Report

Okay! Past time I let you guys know what's going on. Sorry I've been a bit more radio silent than I usually am. As I mentioned early in the month, I had some friends coming into town for a couple of days near the end of the month. Having to be awake during the day to play tour guide, essentially completely opposite my normal schedule, took a lot more out of me than I honestly expected. Guess I'm not as young as I used to be, or some other such saying.

So. About the progress. Everything but the game release is now out for the month. So that's good. But the game release...is most definitely not going to be released today. I did warn everyone that such was a likely outcome, but it's hard to know how many of you actually, you know, read these progress reports. 

For good news, we have the fact that I've actually finished all the renders. Including all the animations. There will probably be one or two quickish still renders I'll realize I forgot as I'm working on scenes. But that's minor and expected. For all intents and purposes, rendering for Left Hand Magic Build 3 is complete. 

For the bad news...I've only just barely started on the programming. By the time I crash in a couple of hours, I fully expect to have 4/14 scenes done programming wise. And I'm also fully expecting to get 4 more of them done later today (the 30th). That will put us at 8/14 by the technical end of month. Unfortunately, those are the easy 8. I'd actually hoped to have those 8 done before rendering was even finished. Sadly, I really wasn't expecting to be kinda knocked on my ass for a couple of days by the fuckery I did with my sleep schedule. That cost me maybe 6-8 hours over the last few days that I normally would have put in. It felt rather horribly like recovering from Jet Lag. Bleck. Going to have to be more careful about that in the future, I've never before been that slow to bounce back from a day or two of being a daywalker before. Partially, I'm guessing, it's because while I'm doing better than I was at the start of April, I'm still a bit exhausted and run down.

Thankfully, I'm mostly over it at this point and have my nose back to the grindstone. Regrettably, the animated scenes are MUCH more complex from a code standpoint than...basically anything I've done in any of my other games to date. I'm fully expecting to only average 1.5 scenes per day with those, simply because the complexity is high. Partially, that's the fault of the gallery feature. Partially, it's simply the fact that Ren'py simply isn't made for what I'm doing with it. I, essentially, had to build my own extension on the Ren'py code in order to make the high-quality animations I was aiming for viable. It works, but I'm never going to pretend to be an elegant coder. Not in non-C based languages anyway. C/C++/C# are the languages I'm actually fully trained in. Python (which Renpy uses) is more than a bit alien and awkward for me. I still believe it was developed by some sort of misanthropic masochist. Who not only hated everyone else, but themselves as well.

Which means that each scene takes far more code from me than it probably should. A better python or Ren'py coder could probably compress what I'm doing into a set of functions. Though, then I probably wouldn't actually understand what those functions were doing. I sure as hell don't understand half of the poorly commented and poorly documented code that makes up the Ren'py engine. At least, having done everything myself, I actually fully (or almost fully) understand what I'm doing. Which minimizes bugs and lets me fix them fairly easily when they do crop up.

All of this is to say that my current projections for the release of Build 3 have said release being roughly on May 5th. Depending on how things go, it might be a day or so either way from that date. 

To my own surprise, I'm not really upset about that fact. The reason for that is that it actually means I've hit a sustainable build size and speed with both games. Essentially, I've been more-or-less on target for development time all year...it's just that I started the year with a full week of deficit from December. I haven't been getting farther and farther from on time releases...I've just been carrying forward that time deficit, unable to shake it off. This should mean that, when I do the planned hard-reset at the end of May to nix that deficit period, we should be able to get back to consistently on-time and on-target releases. Which will be a huge weight off my shoulders.