Monday transparency report

Hey guys!  It’s been a challenging but exciting week, especially over the last few days.

Scene editing 1.9/3 complete
I wanted to get the second main scene fully punched up before this report.  It’s not, but it nearly is, and I expect to be finished on it tomorrow.

I added two more nude scenes to the episode, punched up a key dialogue scene, and did some general editing and tightening up.  The exciting part is how good I feel about these scenes: they’re sexy, they’re branching, they’re psychological.  Also, in a first for Female Agent, opting out of them is possible without ending the game (and in two cases there are ‘middle ground’ paths that are sexy in different ways).  I’m so eager to get this out to you guys.

I’m sorry I couldn’t finish editing scene 2 this week: I worked on it all 7 days, with no days off.  On Discord over the weekend, Rob Stark said: “writing is like digging for gold! You have a lot of shitty ideas just like the mud you dig out, and then find a tiny piece of gold. And that’s not it; you have to keep on digging to get the story movin’.”  I hadn’t heard that analogy before but it’s true for me, it’s why I can’t exactly predict how long a writing task is going to take – I don’t know how much I’m going to have to dig to get to a bit of gold.

Art update
On Discord last Thursday PrettyShyGuy asked for an update on artwork progress.  

Our illustrator lovely Victoria has done new clothes for 16 scenes so far (they look gorgeous, of course).  My edits keep throwing up changes – for instance, the new nude scene I added last week required 9 new individual art assets to support, so those got added to her workload (and more will be coming from the new scenes I added this week).  But there are only 2-3 more actual scene outfits we need for the quick start release, she has absolutely finished the vast majority of the artwork required on this.

Why isn’t there a beta?
Several people have asked, here and on Discord, why there hasn’t been a beta release in ages.

The reason is we’ve changed so much in order to implement the Lifepath that the game hasn’t been playable in large chunks.  Testers have had to follow careful instructions on how to play it and which parts work and don’t work.  It just hasn’t been in the shape where we can put a beta out to a large audience and let them play with it.

However it’s nearly in a shape where we could put out a beta without the new avatar hairs and skin colours – we could revert to the old hairs and skin and it would at least be playable.  I’ll plan to do that and get a beta out to Operators+, and they can feed back while we’re fixing the hair & skin glitch I mentioned in the Jul 28 report.

Okay, that’s it for the report and today, my brain is mush.  I’ll get an early night so I can get straight back on it tomorrow.  🦀❤️‍🔥