Devlog Diary/Progress Update

Hello, everyone! Lena here, writing to you from the deep recesses of my Twine Port Cave! First off, I wanted to thank you all for your incredibly kind messages of support and encouragement, and your continued patience as I get everything up and running on such short notice. 🙏 I haven't had time to reply to you all individually, but I just wanted to take a moment to say that your messages and comments really bolstered me during a time when it would have been easy to feel overwhelmed and stressed! 💖

Secondly, it should give you an idea of how things are going when I tell you that I fully intended on writing this update yesterday, the first Monday of the month, to give you a guys an idea of where things are at and to maintain some semblance of normalcy around these parts. Why didn't I write this post yesterday, then? By chance, I stumbled across an insidious set of game-breaking bugs that launched me into a full-on panic and took me about 8 hours to fully resolve LOL. In the end, it boiled down to three things...

1) The difference between this:

 
And this:

Do you see the difference? Because I didn't at first. :) It turns out spaces really matter!

2) The difference between this and this:

Okay, this one is more obvious, but yeah, it turns out spaces really matter.

And the third thing is too complicated to get into right now, but it was just as laborious and finicky to hunt down as the first two, though much more concerning at first. The thing about Twine is that these are all relatively easy, if tedious, fixes (it's usually a matter of using Find and Replace, though not always), but actually figuring out what's wrong in the first place is the thing that consumes the most amount of time. When you're playing fast and loose with game development, especially with custom code, there is no real guidebook or forum to consult, and the system doesn't tell you exactly what's wrong, just that something is wrong, so it's a very painstaking process of mind-numbing trial and error to try and figure it out. And then a few hours of combing, often manually, through millions of lines of code to see if there are any other potential errors like that one, along with hunting down the bugs you've already found, lol.

Anyway, I started Monday extremely hopeful and excited to update you all about progress on my end of things, and then ended it feeling as if I'd been humbled by an immediate setback, LOL. But after several hours, everything on that front is resolved! ...For now!

Here begins the update I meant to write, before all that happened. Things are looking--tentatively, optimistically--good! I keep chanting to myself "progress over perfection" and resigning myself to the reality that this Twine debut is necessarily taking place earlier than I was expecting. Mostly, this means that I'll be presenting it to you guys with everything up to halfway through Chapter 8 (after the second trial of the Crystal Tournament) ported, then working on hacking away at the rest while you guys play around in the new sandbox. Also, I planned on making the itch.io page where the alpha build will be hosted all shiny and fancy with custom CSS, but that's not a priority right now; that can come later down the road when I get a chance to breathe! 🥹

Here's my remaining to-do list:

• Port 2 of Shery's interludes (1-2 days?)

• Port all 3 of Tallys's interludes (2-3 days?)

• Port all 5 of Trouble's interludes (2-4 days?)

• Port training the recruits sections, make sure their grading system works (2-3 days?)

• Implement remaining music (1 day)

• Review Chapter 8 code for errors (1-2 days?)

• Mobile fixes (1-2 days?)

• Bugtesting and testing itch.io upload (? days)

Barring any further catastrophes or nasty surprises, I generously estimate 2-3 weeks for this to be probationally ready to roll out to you guys! The mobile fixes and general bugtesting is where the real question marks lie, as I don't know what I don't know or what I'll encounter; it could be flawless and take no time at all, could have a hidden hydra rear its ugly head(s), so that's where I'm baking in a lot of potential time. Could go either way! Down the road, there are still a lot of things on my to-do list, including porting quests, addressing routes that are still unfinished, dolling up the itch.io page, tinkering with some QOL fixes I've been stewing on--but that will come way later, and I'll post a list of those intended items when the build is out to you.

As for things here on Patreon, I'm obviously still devoting all of my time and attention to this port, so things are still in a bit of a holding pattern this month. We have Chase's room concept art for the February goodie, the usual art polls and things, and then this massive update, which should almost certainly get to you before the end of the month. Regarding the short story: I have so many great ideas for it, I just haven't had the time to put pen to paper! Maybe if the Twine port comes out earlier than expected and you guys don't uncover loads of bugs, I'll have a few days to squeak out the next entry. It's a ton of fun to think about, though, and if I don't manage it this month, then certainly next month!

Regarding the Q&A, the other thing I had to put on hold while I scramble with all of this: it will make a return eventually, once the Twine version is officially out and I've finally cleared my plate of that big giant heap, and probably after the public demo of the Twine version comes out, too. When it comes back, it will probably move to either an every-other-month or a quarterly feature. I do enjoy doing it, but I've got to keep my priorities disciplined, especially as I try and finish my second book after the shift to Twine, and as planning for our wedding ramps up!

Other personal updates: I'm taking this Friday and Monday off as we do our annual anniversary trip. Last year we went to San Diego (where my fiance proposed!) and this year we're heading to Santa Fe. I've never been, so if anyone has any must-dos, please let me know! We planned this trip before the chaos with Dashingdon happened, but I definitely need it. Normally my personal style and vibe feels sort of something like this:

The past few weeks, I've been like this:

 Not an exaggeration! My fiance took a picture of me hunched over at my desk with my hood up exactly like this. It's been kind of fun but it's definitely a change LOL.

Anyway, that's all I've got for now! Thanks for everything, and see you guys on the other side!