Status Update - April

Hi everyone,

I've been working the past few weeks on a new straw event where you finally get to play as a tiny having fun and running away from it while Dani tries to catch everyone with it. There were 2 main reasons why I didn't make this event originally, 1st was being so demotivated on how quickly the Dani release was pirated freely and getting abused for saying something about it on some nasty forums. And the other was that it would be amongst the hardest and most complicated things I've ever done in RPG Maker, and I wouldn't be content if it didn't do what I wanted.

I didn't want to make a lame boring straw that just sweeps back and forth randomly that you had to dodge. I wanted it to actively track and decide what to do, who to track, and make things like Dani's shadow move with the straw at all times. Essentially I'm giving it AI to do it's own thing, which obviously RPG Maker is not built for. I can do it but it means a lot of things are going on at once and if too many then your game will start to lag. Some of you will have seen some small previews of how it's been going in the discord server and I'll put a new one up in a moment.

I've been working all the way up to time of posting this. I promised to release something for April and have been working like crazy. I've been making a debug version of the event but where it would be up to a good standard for release. This debug version was to get something out on time as promised and also so people could give feedback/find major bugs or anything weird that I may have missed. But also without giving too much so when it's fully completed it would still be a nice surprise instead of feeling like you've played it already.

But due to the issues I've been coming across and fixing at the same time while I'm making the debug version of the event for release, it's now 5:30am and I've been up nearly 24 hours and I have to catch a flight in 3 hours. At a guess I'm going to need about 2 more weeks as I have to go back to NZ for another stupid private problem to sort out and will be out of country until about May 8th at the moment.

Anyone in the $5+ tiers in April as promised, will get a message from me (even if you unpledged as it's obviously not fair on you) with links to their copy of the next game update with this event when it's done. It should be more complete as the proper event and not just a debug version as debug would've only had up to 50 instead of the 200+ spawners I'm looking to add in.

The major bugs I've been coming across and why I don't want to release something broken are timing issues (tiny flies up outside of straw when caught/code won't stop and resume properly like other events due to how many things are going on at once so weird things start happening), and things like how the straw will try to track but then decides to go off the map because the tiny that was happily caught, and decided to despawn to negative coordinates. Because of that alone, since the map is so large as you're a micro, the straw would just go off the map for 20 seconds on average until it reached -1 in the corner and only then attempt to calculate what to do next.

I deeply apologize again for the delay, but I'm pretty sure most if not all those major issues will have been fixed by release. I've had to try new things and plugins to fix other issues and in heavy testing they've been working well so far and don't seem to have broken anything that I can tell so far.

If you've read this far, some of the feedback I would like to know:

• Would you prefer the straw to randomly chase after you directly (no escape/fair like Dani's POV event of it). Or only decide to come after you after a certain amount have been caught?

• The straw is BIG because you're micro. It's about 4x18 RPG Maker squares alone. Should I make it even taller and add part of Dani's hand to it? Because while it sounds good, it also means if you are at the top of the area and it's midway and below, your character will be hidden under her hand.

• Would you prefer to have the camera slightly more zoomed in than normal, as it emphasizes small size/can see the small scrapes handprints and footprints on the plate. But the trade off means you obviously won't see the straw till it's very close.

• Does anyone lag with Dani's POV of the straw event due to how many things spawn in it? Because this new event will have more spawned in and keep spawning in offscreen every time one is caught, till it reaches a certain number.

• The plan is to start let you choose which POV of the event you want to play in. So I was going to make cutscenes etc match but also be the same things Dani says in her event. It makes for more consistency and feeling like you're really in the moment. But for some people I'm not sure if they would rather have new things said by her instead.