Progress Report

So, before I report on the new game, the reward poll for the month has ended. The extra scene for Eros Academy won outright this time and thus will be this month's reward. I'm slightly disappointed by that, given that I have some of the next Elven Maid written already, but it's not a huge shock. They've regularly been tying, after all, so even a single person either not voting, voting differently, or voting for the first time can change things :-). I will reiterate real quick that you shouldn't expect to see the Eros update until fairly late in the month this time. That is entirely due to the first build of the new game being my primary focus this month.

And on that note, I'll move on to the progress report on Sexy Cosplay Cafe. I've hit a couple of annoying delays. One was the sort I honestly expected and planned to run into. Namely, art that I failed to account for. I went to some considerable lengths to me fairly organized about this new game, with actual development documentation and a outlined plan for at least the first few builds. However, being only a single person tackling a complex project, I expected to screw up somewhere in my planning. Delays caused by that sort of thing were something I planned and accounted for from the start. 

In this case, the specific bit of art I failed to account for....wasn't even a piece I actually failed to account for. It was merely that I had thought that I wasn't going to need it until a couple of builds in and had earmarked it for a later build as a result. Then, when I was doing to intro...I realized I'd done screwed up and I actually needed Alice's Office at the cafe in the first build. Not just for the intro, but as the primary place you'll go to in order to talk to her. It was always planned that Alice will be a source of various bits of information throughout the game, and at least one of those bits is needed for Mira's early storyline. Doh.  Since it's a part of the cafe, I refused to just use a placeholder for it. All the cafe art is intended to be original from the get-go.  Net result, I spent pretty much all of Thursday and a little Saturday creating the art for her office. Since it was/is a background piece intended to be seen fairly frequently, I had to make it to a decent standard as well, and the attached image is the result. It came out fairly good, I think.

The other two delays were less expected. I bet some of you wondered about that Thursday and Saturday bit...what was I doing on Friday then? Friday....I was desperately trying to get my desktop computer to boot. Thankfully, I'm 99% sure the issue I was having is entirely Software related. A corrupted Win7 OS file, I think. Unfortunately, while I did eventually get the computer to boot, I suspect it's now only a matter of time before I have to reinstall the OS entirely. Which sucks, since a few of the pieces of software I'm using for game-creation are going to be an absolute and utter nightmare to reinstall. Daz3D, in particular, I'm not even entirely sure how I got to function right the first time. It's not natively setup to use multiple drives, you see, and I needed it to be (since I use a relatively small SSD for my OS and program files, but not storage). So. Fuck. Lost a whole day and will probably lose at least one or two more sometime in the near future, at best.

The other delay was one of my main freelance contract companies (the most stable of them all, and thus the one I try to never say no to when they need something extra), asked me to take on another project. Right now, that's only in the early phases, but getting on boarded for it sucked up time that was supposed to be used for game development. Given that it is my single biggest and most important contract though, I couldn't exactly say no. I kinda need to eat and pay the electricity bill.

---------

All of that aside. I've actually made quite a bit of progress. Just not as much as I wanted. I have the intro totally done (aside from making a simple tutorial, which I intend to do) and I've also got most of the major systems that weren't in yet now in. Money, a status screen for information about the cafe and girls, etc. I can now tentatively given an estimate on release. Don't quote me on it, but I'm shooting for roughly the 20th. Not quite as soon as I'd wanted, but not too far off. Do keep in mind that it is a SUPER rough estimate at this point, though.