Saturday Update!

Hello again! It's been another very hectic week!

I've been burning the candle at both ends a bit haha ^^; Thursday and Friday I definitely overclocked a bit much. But It's very motivating to see everything finally come together and   I've just had a real bee in my bonnet about getting shit done.

I'm happy to report that the sound design is complete! I also did a final editing pass at the same time and caught a modest amount of bugs/typos/things I just wanted to change.

Some CGs and sprites needed very minor edits due to context issues. For example, one CG was the wrong time of day [ easy fix ], a sprite needed to lose a jacket, and one CG's background was so wrong that I actually just changed the code instead so it would fit LMAO it was much easier to change the context than the picture ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Although one CG was a major bitch and did take a couple hours to fix [ I went in wanting to fix the face because I did a terrible job, but then realized the CG's outfit and the previous sprites outfit were completely different.... so I had to redo a lot >_>;; ]

BUT I feel a lot better about the game's quality now.

And I actually finished the audio work on Thursday [ I refuse to say how late I worked LMAO ], so I spent Friday doing some odd jobs. I coded the mechanism for activating memelord mode [ which will be sadly disabled for the Beta testers, sorry! Bonus content will be made DURING beta testing ] which involved some fiddling with variables. Then I attempted to get my Steam developer account rolling but that ended up being several hours of misery :/ Basically they took my $130 and then said I had to complete a tax form [ several pages, online ] to activate my account. Long story short, the tax form cucked me. I kept imputting everything perfectly [ or so I think ] yet the submit button at the end remained disabled. No idea what's wrong because it's like 7 pages long.

I sent in a help ticket and they actually HAVE responded to me asking for more details, so the fight isn't over. Tomorrow I'll compile a manifesto and send it back to them. I'm going to keep trying.

Anyway, I gave up for the day on the tax form shit and switched back to game polishing. I redid the design of the Death Collection page because it was super cramped [ I had all three paths on one page and the text was pretty tiny ]. I split the paths up on tabs and fluffed it up with new styling. I had to learn a few new RenPy tricks but honestly anything was better than wrestling with the tax form LMAO [ I would show you but who really wants spoilers at this point? Y'all will see it soon enough ;) ]

SO long story short, if I can get my shit together with Steam, then everything's on schedule.

Next week I'll be going through a laundry list of last minute fixes and polishes, while getting Steam [ hopefully ] set up, and the Discord ready.

TO DO:

• Draw new auction background
• Draw new auction silhouette sprites
• Create splash graphic / warning page for when game is loading up
• Draw/code new main menu background
• Clean out Alpha Tester Discord and overhaul it for Beta Testers
• Create google spreadsheet for logging reported bugs
• Fully activate Steam developer account
• Create official Steam page for TPOF
• Generate access codes for closed Beta

As long as I can overcome the hiccup with the W-8BEN tax form from Hell, I should easily be able to get all this done next week. 

So the tentative Beta Release date [ IF STEAM STOPS FUCKING ME LMAO ] is 

March 21!

If things go really badly with Steam, it might get pushed back a bit while I scramble to try and get set up on itch.io instead. It would only be a matter of days though.

Anyway, thank you all very much for your support! STAY TUNED

And of course, stay safe and have a great weekend! <3