Back End Work (Entendre)

This month has been less about writing and more about improving the base on which I'm building this game.

For starters, getting the Steam NextFest demo build ready. Valve's approved it, and I just need to get the voices for Cat, The Director, and The Producer in place and it'll be ready to go. NextFest hits in October so I'm well ahead of schedule there, but it took a bit of time to prep the actual demo itself -- taking the tutorial episode and making adaptations here and there to better reflect it as a demo rather than a first episode, trimming a few things down, putting in an end-of-demo slate to hype the game, etc.

Next, a rework of the gibberish and audience laughter systems. Before, they would look like this:

$ mood = "happy"
$ laugh = "loud"
juno confident "Gosh, our game is going to be so great!"

...which is three lines of code and when you're flipping back and forth between moods and laughs constantly, clutters things up a lot. So I did some research into RenPy tech and figured out how to wire it all into a single line of code:

juno confident @ mood_happy laugh_loud "Gosh, our game is going to be so great!"

There are some edge cases where a character isn't on screen (such as The Producer and The Director) but otherwise this works very nicely!

...problem is, I have to go back and revamp every episode I've done so far to use this new system. Which is time consuming. And that plus Unspecified Health Problems I've been facing recently means I haven't made a lot of progress towards the next monthly build.

I may still have "Just Say No" out the door at the end of July, if I get a burst of writing done, but the next build may just be adding art assets and tightening up this internal system. Fortunately I have a month of padding in my roadmap so it won't impact much to be a little behind. We're honestly very far into development at this point, with only three episodes left to write, and there's no hard release date yet -- although I'm aiming for January -- so I'm not concerned. But as Patreon backers, figured you'd wanna know.

More to come!