Status report: a small victory!

Hey kids, hope you're all doing well. Thought it was about time I checked in again and let you know how things are shaping up. I'd have posted sooner but I wanted something tangible to share and for the last however-many days I've been elbow deep in a puzzle - namely how to transfer the wardrobe system I had working in Twine (which uses Javascript) over to Ren'py (which uses Python). And BOY was that a real head fuck! 

You see, the way it works under the hood, for each item of clothing that the player tries on, there's a matching 'place 'tag - so for pants it'd be 'legs' and for a t-shirt it'd be 'torso'. All cool right. But what if you wanted to try on a dress? There'd have to be some signal to send behind the scenes to take those two items off the player and send them back to the wardrobe, otherwise the clothes woudl quickly stack up and look silly! And that's not to mention sending a second signal to make sure the paperdoll image changes accordingly too ...

I know, I know, it's all very boring and seems like such a tiny thing, but without that all working properly it'd be such a frustrating experience to play, trust me. Plus I want every aspect of the old version of the game to come along to this new version - and the dressup stuff is so dear to my heart, it's super important that all that good stuff is built into this new version. 

Well, guess what ... It's working!!!

Remember this guy: 

Yep, that's right, i've got the wardrobe and the dynamically-updating paperdoll all up and running now thanks to this ridiculosly unintelligible bit of code: 

Yeah, not exactly the riveting reading, is it? But all you need to know is that it works perfectly and this new version of Girl Games is gonna be buttery smooth to play! 

And speaking of the art - which has gotten a pretty mixed reception over on the TFGames forum - I was thinking about updating the main 'player' at some point soon. Either comissioning an artist or maybe having another pop at it myself. I know some folk think that the starting image shouldn't be quite so feminine ... 

So what's everyone's thoughts about this? (I'll start a poll in a moment so please vote there!)

And as for my timeline, it's still pretty much the same: get this Prologue version out asap - looking like maybe tonight if I'm lucky or tomorrow if not - and then work hard to get the next part out - maybe a couple weeks from now - and with that you'll get to play it for a full week before it goes live online! 

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