November: Better living through automation

What is UP, internet?  Our youtube view count, that's what's up. 

If you somehow missed our trailer video , well, I pity you. But also, congratulations! You get to watch it for the first time! 

(Ten thousand other viewers can't be wrong!) 

Let's talk about what we did this month. 

1. Our background artist had to leave; we're hiring another background artist. 

Between exams and the holidays, november is a rough month for people to do side projects; we begrudge him not. And now we get to try out other artists! 

I shouldn't name names yet, but we're in talks with two people and their art is pretty gorgeous. I can't show you said art for the same reasons that I can't name names, but... soon, my pretties. Soon. 

2. Our silhouette characters are drawn and their scenes are written.

A whole bunch of micro-vignettes set in the FD universe; quick little scenes that would be right at home in the captions you know and love. 

(If you don't know the captions, reddit.com/r/futadomworld . If you don't love the captions, I'm sorry; I have no help for that.) 

3. Chloe

Do you recall how, some time ago, we agreed to create a side character in FDW as part of a Facebook promotional campaign?  Well, everyone's favorite ditzy, faux-innocent futa is now written, illustrated, and in our bar. 

So that's neat. 

4. We Hired *Another* Another Developer

For months now, the production-bottleneck has been the rate at which we can code written scenes into the game. So instead of trying to enter those all in ourselves, we're  writing scripts that turn written prose into Game Maker Studio code.

So we'll turn something like, 

“Ugh, and you just know all the stores are gonna play nonstop Goddess Day music until it finally gets here.” 

into, 

case 65:

   announce("Vicky");

   draw_text(x,y, "Ugh, and you just *know* all the stores are gonna play nonstop Goddess' Day music until it finally gets here.");

   break; 

and while that might look straightforward, we live and die by the edge cases. Any good visual novel/simgirl game has branching; that branching is a pain in the ass to code.

That said, we're frontloading our troubles. Once the script is finished, it should really, really speed things up--scenes that would have taken a week to code in will be done in a day.  So. Optimism! 

We don't have an official release date yet. A christmas miracle isn't out of the question yet, but...a betting man would hold out for Valentines Day. 

Sacha - on behalf of all the FutadomWorld Binding Sim team