Hey guys - Dev here
A lot of stuff happened on the development side since our last monthly update in June. The dialogs for all story arcs are done and the current word count is at 30K. Together with all the other game texts (like item names, descriptions and dialog variants based on whether you save Waifus or Husbandos) we are a few hundred words short of an imperial 40K.
However, the best part of the writing process was that all of it was done about six weeks earlier than anticipated. And we spent this extra time implementing the dialogs and setting up the logic for 10 major story arcs. A lot of them can split into variants so that there are 20 endings overall.
During the remaining weeks, we set up an automatic test system and a fast mode to skip all waiting times and transitions. This system is needed for a game with so many story arcs and levels. The last time we manually tested all 30 levels, it took a week and we still missed problems that only occur when playing the game for a very long time. But with the automatic test we can speedrun a test in about two minutes and add a lot of stress test shenanigans like exploding the whole level and seeing if the game breaks somewhere. Yesterday we also created a test case for a New Game+ playthrough to go through all story arcs in one sitting. And surprise - we found a bunch of more errors that come up after hours of play.
What's Next?
As much as we love fixing bugs, there is also another thing that requires urgent attention. Let's take a look at exhibit A:
Behold! Stuff!
We have to make the game pretty and fix the damage from removing the legacy system for rendering the graphics. But let's talk about the graphics first. Next week we get some epic reinforcement by two interns. Both have told me they are interested in character art and we still need a lot of it. Time for exhibit B:
The game features... 21-ish characters, but we have only the manes for seven of them. But we need many more hair styles, including the variants in case you’d rather play Get your Tentacles off my Husbando. The big dialog graphics are not the only ones that are a feast for character artists. We also need many more in-game graphics for the characters.
It is kind of impressive that this little selection of graphics is enough to give the space ponehs all needed animations for gameplay. However, a waifu in the house currently looks like this:
I'd say we can't have this and so we will spend the next three months with nothing but art and that means we have a lot of opportunities to post screenshots again. And Marketing loves screenshots. The last updates lacked screenshots, because they all would have looked like this:
Legacy Code
We've mentioned that we caused a lot of damage by removing the legacy system for our graphics. If you compare the current screenshot of level two with how it looks like in the demo, you may wonder where that Bagger 288-ish machine in the background went.
I don't remember if I talked about our content management system in some past news, so I rather keep it brief: Early in development, every aspect of the game got specialized code and an equally specialized tool to work with it. But after some time, working on the game was as complex as German paperwork. So I did a full overhaul. All my tools got reworked into a node system and the game's content is based on an abstract data system. It turned out that this system is really good for modding and we even used it for our automated test system.
However, this came with a huge problem. I had to decide if I want to keep the legacy system, so I can make updates to the demo or builds for conventions, or I remove the system and lose that ability. I never really committed to either of these and that's the reason why the demo is years old and you aren't getting any playable updates. And a few weeks ago, when we began to implement the logic for the story arcs, we decided to destroy the legacy systems. There is still legacy code present, but pretty much none of it is currently used and we can work on the game without worrying about some awkward remnants from the past.
Alright. That's for this month's update. Have fun.