1.5 progress update

At the start of this sprint, our aim was to get the 1.5 early release out today.  As I warned last week, we're running behind schedule, and are unable to hit this target.

Situation

The reason is the new body shapes.  One of the features we've added in 1.5 is avatar rear view, allowing you to turn your avatar around to see her from behind, and a very popular user request related to this was "selectable ass sizes".  Before the sprint started, we thought we could do this with three slightly different pieces of buttock artwork, which would require small modifications to the rear view of each outfit.

Unfortunately, when we tried this during the sprint, it ended up looking weird.  We couldn't make a bigger or smaller bum look right without also changing the hips, thighs and waists.  So we ended up creating three different "body types" instead of three different butt layers.

We also produced new shoulder widths and individual bra sizes for each body type (so a skinny D cup agent has totally different boobs from a curvy agent with a D cup).

This all looks way better than it ever did before (see above), but we now have to do lots more work to put avatar clothes in the game.  For example, in the previous version there were three swimsuits:

In 1.5 there are eighteen:

Female Agent is going to look better than ever in 1.5, and it's going to support more customisation of your agent than ever before, but we need more time to get all the new avatar clothes drawn, edited, and coded into the game.  Right now about 33% of the clothes are done – 66% are remaining.

The plan

The sprint will be paused for a special project called The Female Agent Wardrobe Malfunction.  All my dev time will be focused on getting new clothes artwork into the game.  I'll report at the end of each day which outfits were added, and how many percentage points that represents.

Once the Wardrobe Malfunction is complete, we'll finish any critical remaining dev tasks from the Trello, then we'll launch the 1.5 early release.

I'm sorry for the delay.  I have meetings at my real job tomorrow, but I'm clear for the rest of the week, so the Wardrobe Malfunction starts on Wednesday.