Fortnightly Progress - 8th August

• No Haven

Patreon alas done a patreon again but even more so than usual.

To quote the email I got:

An issue with a payment partner is causing a slightly higher-than-normal number of your patron payments to be declined by their banks. We've traced the increased declines back to payments system upgrades required by one of our processing partners. Patrons might see some payments declined while changes take effect.

If a patron reaches out to you about a decline, you can advise them to follow these steps:

1. Contact their card issuer to confirm the charge is valid and retry that card

2. If the retry does not work, try a different payment method. Patrons can edit their payments in their Settings, under Billing History:

We’re deeply sorry about these interruptions and appreciate your patience as we work to resolve them.

The way it sounded yesterday from the EroDev discord and others with Patreons on Twitter it honnestly sounded like the sky had fallen to the point I was terrified about coming on here at all to check the damage. Not helped that my mortgage went up again yesterday due to the base rate going up yet again, and I'd taken one unexpected major financial hit this month already. 

Thankfully, thankfully it was no where near as bad as I feared. I genuinely thought it might be a case that I couldn't even cover the outstanding commissions that are owed, let alone having anything left for my actual cost of y'know living. It's still not exactly ideal, and I'll talk about what I'm going to do about that some more in the Commissions section.

But first let's move onto something that is going genuinely great. Woo, let's go positivity!

• The No Haven Conversion / Picarto Streams

Got several streams done including some longer ones than the usual.

So I was thinking about what to do after fixing the issue with the Assignments with multiple text parts, and I decided 'sod it, let's try the Ever Forest'. Definitely had begun to bore doing the Great Plains ones over and over and over again for testing so decided to branch out. 

To my genuine complete and total mind bogglement the first two Assignments I tried just worked first time. 

Yes, really!

Got both Ample Distractions and Elven Household to start, fully work as expected, and got them to both finish correctly with one of their results. Even got a elf with (Exc) from Household so that was just pretty dang neat. 

Tried another, and that had the much more expected result of breaking straight away. On looking to see what the problem was I discovered that the bit that started that and many of the other Assignments just didn't exist. I remembered that back earlier in the conversion on dealing with that specific bit of the code went so badly resulting in entirely broken condition logic to the point of being unfixable that I just entirely deleted it with the view to come back to it when I was less stressed. 

Was tempted to just ditch it entirely and do something new to handle that bit. Instead I decided that this seemed like a good time to see how much I'd learned doing the conversion, and exported that chunk of the code out of the current RAGS version to see just how quickly I could convert it. 

Now I'd learned a lot from first doing WR where I made a ton of mistakes that I learned not to do again when doing NH. Thing is I also learned a bunch making even more mistakes doing NH, which is what I'm mostly dealing with now, and it turns out that this time I was able to convert like 95% of the code that had defeated me entirely last time in the space of like one and three quarter livestreams. This is insanely, insanely faster, and even more importantly I was able to do so while taking much better notes so I can recreate the steps again, and even more importantly this time I could entirely preserve the condition logic. 

Pretty sure I could even now put together some javascript in html to do all those steps for me automatically. So that'd be a case of press one button to take RAGS code and make it at least mostly Twine compatible in one go. That obviously could save a truly mental amount of time getting the version I took to start the Twine conversion up to date with the RAGS one with all the stuff I've added to that since which has been a lot. 

That's more something for the future after when all of you can play even this older version in Twine, but it's still a massively sweet morale boost for me in terms of looking ahead. 

• Commissions

Okay, so the commission polls.

Now I've been running the commissions as if I've been still at the $1,750 tier and above for ages now, and I've only managed to hit that once since last June over a year ago. I probably should have reduced these way before now. I didn't want to change things though, as even with the eye issues causing me to be in and out of hospital rather complicating matters, I've held myself entirely responsible for things going like they have, and so it felt like something that I should just grin and bear it. 

There was also my concern that reducing the commission polls would put a negative spin on how things were going and could result in more cancelled pledges which would make the situation even worse than it already was. 

So solution I've come up with for now, which I hope sounds like a reasonable course of action, is rather than doing the usual commission poll for this month, or not doing one at all, instead I'm going to do it as an Alternate one.  

You still get something to vote on for this month, and I can get a bit of a reprieve in terms of needing to spend as much with the current Patreon payment issues. Aim being that when the time for the next commission poll rolls around I can go back to what I was doing before even I'm not back at the $1,750 tier. The next update for RAGS should absolutely be out by before then too which hopefully should also help with that. 

Depending on when Patreon sends me the funding they have managed to process that'll be up Saturday, Sunday, or Monday.

July+August - Dominance Training : First part is done. There's actually been some progress on part two. This might actually be finished by the next one of these!

March+April - Barbrous Bargains : First two parts are now done with the different poses mentioned before. Last part has now been started.

May - Finest Flotsam : Well, I thought it was good. This is the worst any commission has done in terms of reception, and that includes both the map and the kobolds which were both ones I knew would be of more limited appeal. Made even less ideal is I did spend more on this one than usual, as I liked the pitch concept and I thought Opalescent would nail it, which as mentioned recently has been quite the pressing issue. I do still like it, Opal was lovely to work with as usual, and it's a great fit for the game. It's just unideal to not get the hoped for reception, y'know?

May+June - Whores for the Whore Makers : This is basically confirmed with an artist. Should be starting this week.

May+June - Clandestine Insinuations : I've reached out to an artist and I'm waiting to hear back from them. 

As for most recent commission poll as expected Diminuitive Domination crushed it. Think I've got an idea who to get to do this one. 

As always I hope that was worth the read, and even more than usual seriously thanks for your patience and support!