Progress update

Good morning, guys! ’Tis the season to be spooky, and our illustrator lovely Victoria has been fixing some scary glitches plaguing the various youth avatars.

These were caused by layering problems that weren’t visible in Illustrator, but only appeared in the game engine.  V was able to diagnose the cause and fix it by manually reorganising the layer structure in Illustrator.

This is the kind of problem that sounds trivially easy to fix, but in fact is a complex and time consuming pain in the ass.

The good news is the avatar (of all ages, including the interesting ones) looks tweaked and better than ever!  V has been working so hard on this and I can’t wait to show it to you.

Meanwhile, I’ve been working on story and scene edits for the next episode (and planning for the following one).  I can’t talk about it without spoilers, but I’m excited about the improvements I feel like I’m making.  I’ve always hated 95% of my writing (the other 5%, I'm absurdly proud of), but I really feel like even if the writing isn’t as great as I wish it were, the flags and choices we’re adding to these early scenes are going to pay off so much later.  🤞🏻😬🤞🏻

I’m adding some cool stuff in these scenes and edits, but it’s nearly good to go from a writing perspective.  The code improvements we’ve made (mainly character sheet & RPG stats, but also some under-the-hood “refactoring” which will slightly speed future scenes up) are significant.  I’m really frustrated it’s taking so long, but I’m also 100% convinced this is the best thing for the game.

Next steps

Lovely Victoria is finalising avatar tech fixes (which will need to be coded in).  I’m almost done with story edits (there are a few more things I wanna take a pass at).  There’s some new avatar art requirements Victoria will need some time to work through (this isn’t her fault, I’ve been specifying changes and new art requests while I've been editing and tinkering).

It might be the case that – for the first time ever, I think – my work on this episode is going to be finished before the art. 😮 (I say again, this isn’t V’s fault, it’s just that she’s been given a huge and complex tasking.)  If that does turn out to be the case, I’ll just start work on the next episode.

Okay, that’s it for this report.  We’ll keep pushing on and get the episode out to you as soon as everything is working.  ❤️‍🔥🦀