Saturday Update!

Hello everyone! We've made it another week! 🎉

I had another pretty productive week, but the results are mixed. I had some great successes and some disappointing failures.

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Let's rip the bandaid off and get to the bad news first: My translation mod system is a total bust. 😩 I'm sorry.

I thought I could generate a blank translation file, include it in the game files, and then create instructions for people on how to retrieve/copy it, fill it out in whatever tongue they want, and distribute it however they see fit. Then other people were supposed to be able to take those unofficial translations and plug them into the appropriate folder in their game and have a translation.

Unfortunately, this won't work. I can generate the blank template no problem, but what I didn't know is that within the template I generate, every single line of text is assigned a unique ID. If the game detects a single duplicate ID, the game will crash and be unlaunchable. So anyone with both the blank template and any unofficial translation, or anyone with more than one translation file, or even anyone who copies and pastes the wrong part of a line without realizing, will brick their game. Not to mention, any translation file that isn't perfectly set up [ all text within appropriate quotes, etc ] will also brick the game. Basically if anyone so much as breathes on this system wrong, their game will break.

It's just way too much margin for user error, I couldn't possibly provide tech support for such a fragile system. So I made the decision to cancel it, and I do apologize profusely.

In the future, I can look into working with people to create official translations if there's enough demand for it.

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I did get some stuff right though!

I wrote all of the walkthroughs in the unlock section. This was actually my biggest job, since it took 2.5 days LMAO I didn't think it would take so long, but it turns out that it takes a long time to go through the game choice by choice, while checking the game script. And writing the walkthrough. And sometimes getting to the very end and realizing I'm short some stat and I need to go back and fix everything 😂 But it's done now!

For anyone who hasn't seen this before- this is my new ending screen [ sorry for the blurring, you know how it is ]. Yours will look a little different since all my stuff is unlocked.

Players can spend 1 death token to see the name of an ending they don't have, 3 to get a hint, and 5 to get a full step-by-step walkthrough that lists each choice you need to make:

This way people don't need to look online for walkthroughs that may or may not exist- and they can feel like they earned it too! Of course, hardcore players can simply ignore this system if they want to figure out everything themselves.

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I also got the music gallery built! In contrast to the translation thing, this was a raging success. Not only was I able to code the experimental part of it, but it went pretty quickly and easily.

[ A video would have been nice but I don't want to put this on my youtube 😅 And Patreon won't let me upload videos directly because I've voluntarily marked my account as adult ¬_¬ ]

I'll just have to paint you a word picture. So as you can see, all the music is listed on there and that part works exactly like the list and mixer in TPOF [ I even reused the icons LMAO ], but on top of that, that logo in the background pulses and spins to match the tempo of whatever song is playing. It's pretty satisfying. I also included a little eye button in the lower right there so that you can hide the song lists, get stoned, and just watch the spinner spin.

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Speaking of music, I had enough time to create a new bar/intro song and also tweak a couple of my favourites to make them a bit better :D [ I've attached the stuff below ]

barmusic_LASTTRY.mp3 / Talking To Strangers:

This one is fully redone from scratch, and it's a loop [ which means there's no intro or outro, it's built to play smoothly over and over again ]

I'm happy with this! I really didn't think the last version suited the intro, but this one feels right. It's relatively upbeat and chill, though I followed the advice of a friend and switched several of the instruments from major key to minor for a few beats for a subtle 'something isn't right' vibe.

mainmenu3.mp3 / Malignant People Pleaser:

Despite the filename, this one is for the credits screen. I smoothed out the intro a bit, bringing in the main melody softer at first. I also dicked around with some of the balancing. Mostly pretty minor changes but I do feel like it was improved!

WordsAreSuchGrossMachineryv4.mp3 / Words Are Such Gross Machinery:

This one actually is the main menu song. I simplified the main melody on several instruments throughout the song. A lot of them were jumbled and complicated from previous versions and actually sounded terrible/cacophonous. Now the melody is pretty clear through the whole song [ it's the melody that sort of sings 'You kill me every tiiiimeee' haha ]. I also added two drumkits to the final phase of the song to amp it up.

I'm really happy with the music now! I know I'm a beginner and this stuff isn't like, professional grade or anything, but I really feel like I did my best and that's what this whole project is about!

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And that's all I got! I am shockingly VERY ahead of schedule this month now. My only remaining tasks on my mandatory to-do list are to create the Beta Tester guide/discord server, and to create the Steam page for the game. Once I'm done with those [ which I think I will be next week ], I can get a head start on bonus content like memelord mode :D

Hang in there guys! Stay safe! And see you next week ^o^