Progress Tracker - Weekend Update

Hey guys!

Several of you have suggested using a progress tracker, and I finally found one! It's not that I didn't like the idea, it's that every time I tried to figure out how to make one, I was unhappy with what I found.

I posted one about a year ago, but when I went to update it, the website I used didn't save it, so I had to remake everything which took too long considering it was kinda crappy to begin with.

This will hopefully explain progress far better than I do with my typical "Currently finished with writing and now finishing up visuals" style of status updates.

To break down the categories...  

Writing is a big focus and often takes the longest, although I tend to lump in "editing" in there as well, which is why it isn't at 100% even though writing was mostly finished almost a month ago.

Character and clothing design are fairly quick, although they have been a bigger focus lately with the girls growing multiple times in each episode and needing to find outfits to fit their massive sizes. Plus, scenes like taking Jenn and Haley to the mall to try on outfits in the last episode and putting the girls all in fancy dresses this episode takes some planning.

Renders can be a bottleneck, as I need time and space to be able to work without too many prying eyes around. This was one of my issues in the past couple months with my in-laws staying over and not having my office to work in while the bathroom was being fixed. I usually do it late at night, and there are times when I'm simply too tired to make much progress. However, getting a new laptop so I can work anywhere has made things a lot easier.

Animations typically get done the same time as rendering, the difference being that the majority of animations tend to happen during the sexy scenes, which I often save for last. They tend to take the longest, with the most camera angles and movement. Thankfully, though, working with HS means the animations themselves are relatively quick, compared to other programs like Daz or Blender.

Coding can be a bitch because I don't necessarily know what I'm doing. I'm constantly caught between "it would be cool if I could do this thing..." and "I hope I don't mess up the entire game". When I took out the Discord sync, for example, it caused an error on a lot of people's games that wouldn't show up for me, so I couldn't figure out how to fix it. Thankfully, Fredricton3D took a look and added a few pieces of code to fix it, but it still took an embarrassingly long time on my end.

Play testing is when I'm going back and editing things. This can take a while, as I'm always trying to polish up things like pacing, timing, wording, and consistency. With as many variables as there are in the game, I'm constantly having to add between two and five alternate versions of scenes to keep all the storylines consistent.

Lastly, beta testing is when I put it out there for others to check. This is the last step before the final release. In the past, I'd release beta tests with entire scenes unfinished, but lately I've attempted not to release it until it's mostly finished and playable, including ran through spell check and that kind of thing. There are a lot of you in the testing tiers now, so I've been attempting not to release garbage as the first experience playing an episode.

I plan to update the tracker weekly and also keep it in the pinned Links and Resources post.

Visuals aren't everything though, so I'll also go over my progress in the Weekend Updates.

In game news, I'm disappointed I don't have the update ready for you yet, as I spent the past couple of weeks cranking hard to finish it.

Since my last post ten days ago, I had about a dozen small scenes and one big one to finish up. I figured I'd knock out the big scene first. It ended up taking four days working on visuals, then another three days coding it. A lot of the coding was for consistency, making sure all the storylines matched up and writing alternate versions of the scene accordingly.

It was driving me nuts trying to figure out how I spent around 80 hours working on one scene, not including writing, until I went back and counted it. It's at 22 pages, which probably makes it the biggest single scene I've attempted since Episode 8 with Laura's birthday party. So that made me feel a little better. Still, it's frustrating when something seems easy enough to finish within the week's time I predicted and yet it ends up taking more than twice that.

Still, after two months in February and March making very little progress, it was a great feeling to get back into feeling productive again in April. Less distractions, less problems. Sure, I was working slower for the past week as I fought off a cold that has me out of breath every time I go upstairs (not covid though, I checked), but slower work is still progress.

I hope this tool helps to give clearer expectations. My estimates have been awful lately, even when I feel like I'm being conservative. Based on the tracker, I estimate the game will be finished within the week. But I also said that last week, so we'll see what I can learn from it.

Thanks, everyone!