Teamwork is a decision

Hey guys, quick update!  If you're keeping an eye on our new task list, you'll have noticed a few items turning green.

I've been focusing on team organisation tasks since Wednesday.  Here's a quick round-up:

Dark mode avatar bugs
In the new Dark Mode, jarring white shapes appear behind some clothing items.

We had a choice of how to fix this: 

• A quick & dirty way that would solve the problem – but cause problems in the future – or
• Spending more time on a solution that would be permanent

We decided to go for the quick and dirty fix, thus ensuring that we'll have to fix this again and again in the future.  Hahaha, just kidding!  Hyneman and I worked together to design a solution that we think we'll only have to implement once.  Our great walrus is working on it now.

Hero Headers
Lara did great work designing and coding a new type of page header (based on an original idea from Reila over on F95).

The original plan was for me to select, process and upload the Hero Header images.  After a long period in which I totally failed to do that, Lara volunteered to do it herself.

Now you may think, dear reader, that her earnest offer would shame me into manning up and doing the right thing.  But I've been letting women down for 25 years* so I didn't take the hint.  Shame doesn't work on me!

So, this week I've been working with Lara to set her up with access to the software and server settings she needs to do it without waiting for me.  She'll have to do more work, but she'll find me less disappointing, so it's a win-win solution.

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* Longer if you include schoolteachers

Art processing
One thing the attack on our image server taught us all is that Female Agent sucks without Victoria's great artwork.  She's actually drawn a lot more art than has made it into the game yet – the reason is that coding it into the game is a PITA task that requires an unusual combination of Illustrator and coding skills.  I did it for a while, then Tommygun took over for a bit, but this has always been a weak area for us.

This week I set aside time to train our new freelance team member Jeff in how the master Illustrator file is organised, and how to export individual art assets from that file into Female Agent.  As a first test project, Jeff uploaded a handgun that your agent will now take with her if she's deployed to Syria!

This will be active in the next release.  I'm excited because the agent looks way more badass in that scene now.  And this is just Jeff starting to figure out the system!  Expect moar art improvements soon.

Moar stuff
We've also been working on story design for 1.7, some bug fixing, and also Lara added a cool new QOL feature allowing you to name your save files instead of just accepting the system defaults.

Coming soon
We're planning to get back to a more structured work schedule soon – but we need a bit more time figuring out what the shape of that will be.  In the meantime we're still working on tasks!  More info will follow soon.