10 pic bowling

Today is probably the last chance I will have to work on Redus until next weekend now as I'm back at work so I did some photoshopping and have all the sex pics ready for the second sex scene with Jenny (You get one or the other, not both in one playthrough). With the pics loaded into the game writing the scene shouldn't be too difficult and I will try to reduce the variety this time around as the shower scene had roughly four different paths with further minor variations based on your body configuration turning a six paragraph scene into roughly 25 paragraphs. This time I will try to keep to 2 paths where possible, less replayability but faster progress towards the next update.

Herpy Nude Year everyone!

The Halo 5 beta has been sucking up my free time but I did manage to get the date with Christie squared away.
As I had expected nothing sexual happens here but it does cement your relationship with her and I think the whole thing is rather sweet. At the end of the episode if you get a good ending I'm planning on adding an epilogue where you choose who (if anyone) you want to end up with. This decision would be carried on through the rest of the series if I continue with it and you can only choose those you romance during the game. Jenny will of course be the easiest as you have a lot of history together but I also want to have at least Christie, Sonia, Mark and Rebecca (Alexia is also a planned option right now but it I decide it is too much work I will let her go). Preston will not be an option and nor will Nigel, I may give Reg a shot just for the comedy factor. Ultimately the decision would not have a major impact but it will likely result in one or two character exclusive scenes further down the line.
I still need to tidy up some of the loose strings post-date to ensure I don't leave too many bugs in play but I will soon be moving on to writing one or two sex scenes. It's long past due now with Jenny being the only fuckable character and a limited number of masturbation scenes scattered throughout. If I don't add more soon I will keep putting them off.

Happy New Year and I hope you all go out and find/make some awesome games to pass the time while I slowly build 0.5 up to where 0.4 should have been.

I still can't believe she's gone

I've added a few more phone conversations with Christie and set everything up for her to invite you over to watch a movie. I will be clear now, this does not lead to sex. I may have a little experimental touching or something if I feel it fits but unlike Jenny she doesn't fully accept you as you are and it felt like I would be betraying her as a character if I tried to force something. I will be adding sex scenes for other characters soon but this is not one of them. I will try to make it funny, warm, touching etc. so that if you like her you get to spend that extra time together. So far I have enjoyed writing the lead up to it so I'm confident that what I end up with will be a positive event for myself and anyone who plays the game for more than five minutes.

I won't be doing any more before Christmas but I do have next week off work so I will try my best to get at least a couple of days dedicated to Redus, it's far past due at this point.

 Alright, with that I'm going to go back to playing Akabur's awesome Witch Trainer and mourning the end of The Legend of Korra. I really hope they decide to start working on a new Avatar show because this is one of the best universes around right now and there are few enough good western animations these days. So much feels.

 

Talk is tweak

No major work this weekend but I have been going through my archives of notepads and seeking out everything I've written on Redus and fixing parts of the game that conflict with the updated lore I have added to over the past year. There are still a few minor (and at least one major) plot issues that I would like to resolve for the next update, parts of the current story that don't quite make sense any more. The scope of the game has changed a lot since inception and some plot points were incorporated but never revised as most of the game was rewritten. I should get them patched up soon and hopefully get some new scenes written over Christmas. Still a long way off 0.5 but I doubt there will complaints about lack of obvious changes this time as there was with 0.4

Carry On Christie

As the title implies I've been working on Christie today, specifically on conversations over the phone. I've added some 300 lines of dialogue which will build up towards a new hidden event. There's a lot of work still to do before all of that is done but when it is I don't have any more content planned for Christie outside of accusing her of something at the end but that is a long way off yet and won't be very in depth. In other words Christie will soon be basically complete and will be the first character to be in that position. After her I want to get Mark done so that covers most of the bases, and then Jenny, because... Jenny. Yeah.
Halo has undoubtedly slowed my progress this week but I get two weeks off at Christmas and since it's been 7 years since I got a present that wasn't clothes or edible I'm sure I will plenty of free time then. Assuming I don't buy myself GTA V.
TTFN!

Sunday, Ruddy Sunday

Got a decent amount done today, more than I had expected. First off I added additional conditions to ensure that you can't get to the strip club or meet the fisherman before your transformation, as well as saving me from having to work on reactions for several characters it also avoids a few story conflicts. I meant to do this earlier but it slipped through the cracks.
Next I added reactions for Billy the Barman and Bob the Dock manager so that they acknowledge the fact you no longer look like the same person. I also fixed Langstrom's reaction where he was checking if you look female rather than if you have changed. This won't affect most players but did cause potential conflict, particularly in the future.
Finally I wrote 200 + lines of new dialogue with Christie which will lead up to taking your relationship further with her. I fully intend on having that complete in this version. I have two sex scenes planned for her but I haven't decided if I'm going to have both in the next update or to focus on someone else. I have two more planned for Jenny, one for Sonia and a few bonus scenes but obviously as each has lots of potential variations they take a while to write and ensure they are working correctly without being too generic.
Anyway, that's how I spent my Sunday. With Halo coming out in two days I doubt I will be spending much time on Redus over the next couple of weeks but who knows, I didn't expect to get much done this week either.

DFTD - now with post!

Tweaked a few of the images which had developed jagged outlines, I doubt I found them all but it is usually an easy fix.
I've also cleared up a few more bugs, added a few entries to the library books and added room image display commands onto every piece of furniture in the game. It annoyed me how after you have examined something in your inventory or spoken to a character the image would usually stay there until you left or replaced the image with another. I didn't want to make the image disappear after examining an item as that would require an extra Click to Continue press on every object with an image and those things annoy me enough already, this way you can still examine everything as normal with no extra input but the pictures won't stay there blocking the room image forever either. Of course it did take a while to add the command (even with copy paste) onto every examine, inspect, use, open, close etc. trigger for every furniture object (well over 100, I'm not even going to bother counting). As a result I'm done for the day.

It's not going to be like this everyday you know!

Normally I wouldn't have time to do all of this during the week but I've been ill the last few days. With that tidbit I've done some more today. First of all I deleted every image from the game and added all of the updated versions (in case you wanted to know, the game is 29MB without images, I just thought that was pretty cool). After some initial problems with RAGS thinking that many of the pics were videos I believe I have them all working again along with a small number of new ones. When playing through to look for missing images as usual I noticed a long list of bugs, mistakes and a few lines of dialogue that I couldn't stand to see exist any longer. They have been sorted out and I have implemented the urinal in the mens room at the strip club, I honestly thought I had already written it but there is no evidence to suggest that is the case.
I may or may not be back at work tomorrow but I know that I will be busy this weekend so I don't know when I will get another chance to get some more done. I have a small number of major bugs to grapple with before I start adding more content and there is an awful lot to add.

Happy Shopper

And with that, every single image in the game (and a few not in yet), has been converted to the new format, I was surprised by how many artifacts were left on several of the partially transparent images, that should be mostly cleared up now as I trimmed each image before hand to ensure accurate boundaries. Inventory items are scaled to roughly 400x400 with a max height of 500 and a max width of 600, this should provide a decent sized boundary around each of them to ensure that no item takes up the whole window. Characters will use up more screen space than that as you would expect and some use more than I would like as better scaled source images were not always available (for example, if the original image cut off the top of the head and both shoulders, rather than try to recreate parts of their bodies, I had to stick with the aspect as given. There were a small number of images where I did end up adding artificial shoulders to alleviate this problem, especially when the source images are square).
I haven't put the pics into the game yet, that is my next task. I just hope I don't miss any, there are far too many images to replace one-by-one (128 pics at last count), so this will be a bulk task.

I'm a regular shutterbug! Well, not really.

That's the location pics done and I managed to get all of the character pictures done as well. All there is left is a handful of furniture images and the 30+ inventory images. Once they are done every image in the game should be 800x600, an improvement over my original stance which was to try to get one of the axis as close to 500 as I could get (hey, that was big on my old monitor). Of course the actual image quality won't be much better and in cases where the original was blown up anway, they will look a little worse, but the consistent dimensions certainly improve the interactions. (If you are wondering, I am not simply blowing up the images used previously, I am using the originals which are a detailed as I could find and scaling down). Some pics, especially the locations, will look a bit better but I don't want to try for any larger sizes as the sheer number of images already slow down the game considerably and compounding that problem too much would likely result in more crashes as RAGS seems to give up easily if there is something it doesn't like.

Not even worth a post really, more like a stump

I took a break from gaming today to get some more of those image adjustments done, I managed to do some 70 images. There are roughly 30 left to do before I can move onto objects and then I still have to do people so there are hundreds yet to do but the improvement is worth it. Mostly it is just a case of standardising the resolution (I'm trying for 800x600 where possible), for the characters and items I will also need to resize them with transparent space. I'm also re-visiting several of my edits that I did in GIMP to improve them. This is an example of how much better they look:

The main advantage to this will be that moving between rooms should look cleaner as the image box won't keep resizing, and the items won't be switching between small in the center and filling up the whole box.
I'm sure you would rather I was finishing up the plot or something instead, but every time I have played through the game the images have been my number one gripe and I want to fix that. I'm not sure what difference there will be to the file size in the end, I am also trying to standardise the file sizes, but as I am doing all optimisation outside of the built-in image tool this time it could go either way. The pics should look better though and that's the main thing.

And now a word from our sponsors

So, news.
Not much progress on Redus, between Borderlands, Civ BE, Sunset Overdrive, Star Citizen and soon Halo taking up my free time, not to mention Arrow, SHIELD, Korra, Castle and so on sapping those few leftover minutes each night, I am fully booked. So what's the news? Well, I got a raise, a new boss so I can now change my hours and I moved out recently. All of this means that when the gaming season dies down I will have more free time than I have had in months and the freedom and flexibility to work openly and even during the week if I want.
I know this hiatus has been annoying for those of you still interested in this project and I know it has been selfish of me, but it has been nice having a normal few months. My isolation after everything that happened damaged a lot of my relationships and I have had to work at making things right, but I think I'm finally getting there. I'm happy in my new place and based on how much effort I put into Redus the last time I felt like this, I predict a brighter future for the game. With any luck, this time next year it should be mostly finished (with a fully completable version well before then, fingers crossed).

What a difference a downdate makes

Following up from last week, I've been looking at ways to get RAGs 2.4 working again and to my surprise, today it did! (No idea why)
Unfortunately Redus still wasn't working, but now that the designer was I tried loading a backup copy I'd made. Still no luck. Out of desperation I tried loading up the pre-bugfix copy of version 4 and for some bizarre, unknowable reason that did the trick. I've re-squashed those bugs and so for now at least I have a working, editable copy of the game, yipee hooray!

This is the first time I've had the game running on my new computer and the first thing I noticed was how different the images look, my old monitor has sub-hd resolution whilst my new one is currently at 1080p. I was not pleased by the change and some of the pictures are downright horrible compared to their acceptable appearance they had before. By coincidence I am currently in the middle of a 30 day free trial for the latest version of Adobe Photoshop so I can use this opportunity to both standardise and improve the images where possible, GIMP handles the basics fine but lacks the advanced tools and filters that make the difference.

So that's what's up this week. Progress is going to be slow over the next year but I want this next update to finally add at least one good ending and to introduce some more adult-oriented content to balance out the deepening story and care-free humour.

It isn't my fault for once!

Alright, finally decided to get some Redus done this weekend, started up RAGs, opened the game and... crash. Tried again and the file is unreadable.
No problem, I've had lot's of experience with RAGs crashing in the past so I have plenty of backup copies. Grab one and it is also unreadable.
Tried some other games and all of the had the same problem so it must be RAGs rather than my game.
Install a later version and try again with the same results.
Annoyed now, downloaded and installed version 3 and tried that, success! Hideous and irritating but it works and my game is back into the development zone right? Nope.
I already knew that version 3 uses html to define the text colour so that I was expecting, what I wasn't expecting is that none of my javascript works and when I go to the rags site to find out why the forums are inaccessible.
I finally get to some of the relevant topics through direct links only to find that there shouldn't be a problem with any of my code, no reason I could find anyway.
Then the designer went and crashed on me again.
I have now spent four hours trying to find ways around these issues and frankly I can't be bothered right now. Has anyone else had any problems with Javascript in RAGs 3? Any ideas why even basic commands such as [len(variable)]  have stopped working? Also the game is no longer showing the time in the status bar, just error 1 instead. Every time I press the test javascript button on any of my code the designer crashes so I can only test it by actually running the game.
For now I'm going to play Titanfall to cool off for a while.

Not much ado about nothing

Summer is almost over so here is a honest status report:

Between Star Citizen and Titanfall my free time is pretty much fully booked for the next few weeks and with Pokémon, Civilization: Beyond Earth, Borderlands The Pre Sequel, Super Smash Bros, Sunset Overdrive and Halo The Master Chief Collection all on the horizon (and I'm probably missing a few more) I expect it will stay that way for a long time. I bought a new PC around May and I still haven't even reinstalled RAGs so as you can imagine, Redus hasn't really been on my mind for a long time and with 45+ hour working weeks and upcoming driving lessons I can't imagine I'll be working on the next update any time soon. I'm not going to say that I will start up again in a few months or anything as I don't know anything for sure right now. Instead I'm going to install the designer now and if and when I get the urge to do a few hours here and there I will.
Regular updates are a thing of the past now, my time is just too valuable to me. When I get that creative drive back I will prioritise this above all other projects I have (and there are a lot, I have almost 20 notepads full of ideas, short stories and even a whole pad dedicated to a fantasy novel I was working on, in comparison Redus was about 40 pages and that was for 5 games). I expect it would take roughly 200 hours to finish this one so it isn't too far off in terms of actual hard graft but most of what is left is narrative which is far harder to write, especially the intimate scenes.

As always I will keep you posted as and when I make any progress, there may be a gap in late September where I could fit in some work but no promises. I stand by what I have said in the past, this project will never be abandoned, even if it never goes beyond the one game.

This is not an update! (No really)

I just wanted to check-in, I know it's been a while but I'm not ready to lose my freedom again just yet, I just wanted to let you all know that I haven't forgotten about you and per my promise I will come back to this at some point in the next few weeks/months. I'm not going to just leave it and disappear. So while I'm here, what's been going on? Well for one thing, nothing major has happened to me or my family since I last posted! That's a big deal for me. Also I have a new computer now so although I don't have RAGS installed at the moment it should run faster and more stable, also since it supports a higher resolution than my old one I can see what everyone else sees when they play my game which should both speed up design a little and improve the conversations slightly. Yippee hooray!
As always thanks for sticking around, there should be a nice juicy gameless gap coming up once I'm done with Tropico V and Fire Emblem Awakening so with any luck I might just be able to bring myself to get productive again.
I'll be back.

Where do we go now sweet child of mine?

Some of you are probably itching to hear something from me by now so I'll keep this short and sweet. I'm extending my break. Having my weekends back recently has made a big difference to my health and demeanor. I'm feeling well and could go back to working on Redus right now but with so much left to catch up on I am going to go out and have some fun instead. I am not abandoning Redus and have no plans on doing so in the future, it will be completed at some point and once I start finding myself looking for things to occupy my time I will get straight back to it, but right now I am using every spare minute I have and making good use of them.
If I don't post again before autumn then I wish you all a good summer. I have set up notifications for my phone so as long as I am in a wi-fi area I will pick up any comments posted here without having to check the site every day as I did before so even if I'm not posting, I can be summoned back here within 12 hours (I can't access the internet at work for a whole bunch of reasons).
TTFN!

I think that went rather well, don't you Sebastian?

With the release of hotfix 0.4.0.1 or whatever I'm deciding to call it, it seems that there were fewer bugs reported than I had expected. Still under 1,000 downloads but plenty of interest nonetheless. I will be taking this weekend off and possibly next weekend as well so I can catch up with old friends whom I have neglected off late before I get to work on 0.5. I'll still be around to address any comments, queries or concerns and if any major bugs are reported I will release another fix but otherwise, see you all in a few weeks!

With this new shell softener, only the toughest bugs stand in our way!

Bugfix is live @ http://www.4shared.com/file/JvSmP-nJba/Redus_E1_-_A_Touch_of_Frost__0.html

Fixes include:
Spelling mistakes and missed words reported by Blubbif
The club should no longer be accessible pre-change
Cameron Clark (the Hall of Records receptionist/manager) has his reaction back! It turns out it was deleted during a crash last week and I must have restored to an earlier version than expected.
If you've spoken to Jenny post-change her phone conversation should reflect that, I had accidentally selected less than or equals rather than less than during a condition so it played the same message regardless.
If Jenny calls you back you should be able to talk about her findings later on in the week, I'm not 100% sure this one is fixed but there was a condition still active that was no longer relevant that would explain the erroneous behaviour

These bugs were reported but are not fixed yet:
The dock manager ignores your gender change, after looking through his conversations it will take much longer to write his reactions than I had hoped so I will push this back to 0.41
Kues reported an end-game bug, due to the complexity of the final scene and the lack of conclusive content the work required to find and fix this bug is excessive at this time, I will keep the report logged and will get to it once I get back to work on the endings. Expect this fix in 0.5

Any further reports of bugs or mistakes are appreciated and where I can I will release bugfix versions like this for the next few weeks if required, after that any reported issues will be fixed in future major(0.5) or minor(0.41) releases. Thanks to all for your help and continued support.

Well that was a disaster, here is a release then!

After six hours without a single download I've decided just to release 0.4 publicly, I had intended on getting some feedback before letting everyone at it but even with a higher than average pageview count today not a single copy was shifted. I could've held off for a couple of days to give more people the chance to get it early but if I'm going to get the number of testers required to make this work asap I have to look elsewhere. Sorry to anyone reading this when this is the first chance you've had to grab the test build but the numbers are just too low for this to be feasible. On the bright side, you still get to play 0.4 and with more players, the bugs will be squashed much faster.

Well, here it is. I hope you enjoy: http://www.4shared.com/file/NvqUjit7ce/Redus_E1_-_A_Touch_of_Frost__0.html

As this is the same copy as the test version it is still likely buggy and I won't have a huge amount of time to fix it during the week so please, be patient and report any bugs you find. End game content remains the same as in 0.3

Let's hope tomorrow goes better then.

I'm getting tired of apologizing for not getting as much done as I had expected but I'm going to anyway. Rather than give an excuse I'll just say that I only managed a couple of hours this weekend so I'm still not done with Cameron. I do have tomorrow off though so with any luck I should get some more done then, I definitely have some free time so it will just be a case of forcing myself to get on with it. It's been a few weeks since I made any major progress so it's getting harder to get back into the groove but I know that if I get my head down I will get there again.
All of that said I did make some progress with a whole new conversation and the groundwork set for the work I still have to do to finish him up.

Also. This is post 69. I tried to leave it but I couldn't resist.

There must have been a cat on the mat

My mouse has died on me, I can pick up a new one easily enough but it made working on Redus today a little tougher than usual. Still, I got a few hours of work done, mostly on minor characters to ensure that they at least acknowledge your change in appearance. I wanted to get more done but it's getting difficult to find enough free time to do even three hours per week these days, you guys know the score by now though. Progress may be slow but I have no intention of abandoning this project and one day it will be finished. The next update isn't that far off now and I will try to reduce the amount of new content in future updates to minimize the delay between them. I want to finish off Cameron next weekend and that should conclude the non-adult portion of the update.

Nothing much to report

but I would rather post something than leave you guys in the dark for too long. I've been very busy this weekend making up for last week as expected as well as mothers day here in the UK, I got a few hours in working on the guard and some pretty brutal bugs I found but no real progress to speak of I'm afraid. I know I say this a lot but next weekend I want to make a solid push towards the next checkpoint. Sorry to keep you all waiting but I need you to be patient for that little bit longer.

Now with updates on the go!

Well now that I can post on here from my phone I can let you guys know what is going on. I was away from my pc this weekend and will continue to be so until friday morning. Yes this is the family thing I mentioned previously. I should be free most of next weekend but since I'm losing nearly a week it's likely that I will be fairly busy catching up on stuff so although I will probably get some work done next weekend it won't be a lot. Still, with this out of the way I should be able to get back to normality soon enough.

The early post catches the reader

I'm going to be busy for the rest of today so I may as well post this now rather than later on.
I managed to complete Dr Payne this morning, that means that I now have more characters with reactions than I did before the instant TF changeover and am one step closer to releasing the update. I still have to:

• Finish off some implementation of a new lead, 
• Add a little more conversation content to Michelle, Jenny, the landlord, Cameron and the warehouse guard, 
• Fix a few long-standing bugs, 
• Finish a masturbation scene, 
• Finish a sex scene, 
• Tweak some of the hidden, unlockable content and add one or two more things
• And I was planning on working some more on at least one of the endings. 

Then I can get testing. There are lots of other things I wanted in this update but they will have to wait, I'm just too busy right now.

If I don't post anything next weekend it will most likely be because I'm not at home, if that's the case I will let you know as soon as I get back.

Time is a most curious thing

I was hoping to get some work done by now but it's just been one thing after another, nothing major just lots of small things like needing to go out to buy something or running some errand or another, just general life things. That said it looks like next weekend could be a much larger problem, that family issue is likely to occur within the next few days and when it does it will take up the whole weekend. There's nothing I can do to prevent that, I really wish there was.
I may be able to get some work done tomorrow although I do have a couple more errands to run before Monday so we'll have to see. If I can work I will do so for as long as possible but if not... life is very chaotic at the moment, I am honestly putting as much free time into this as possible and will continue to do so until the update is done, after that I will likely take a break as feedback flows in before deciding on my next move.

It is as I feared

I tried to make time for Redus but there was nothing I could do, I am also expecting that this same situation will arise again at some point in the next few weeks. As ever I will keep you all posted. This is not going to turn into a major issue that takes weeks to resolve or anything so there is no need to worry, at most I could lose another weekend or two but no more than that. I should be able to get some work done on Friday and I currently have no plans for next weekend either so I should be able to get a few hours done then.

A little heads up

It looks like I'm going to be busy all day on Friday, Saturday and Sunday this weekend. If I can I will do my best to squeeze in some RAGS time but it is looking unlikely. If I can't I will try to redouble my efforts next weekend to make up for it. Just wanted to keep you all posted.
Yesterday was the blog's quietest day yet, even when I was inactive for weeks I was getting more traffic. It's not an issue I'm just a little curious, if anything it's good news for those of you who do keep coming back. I intend to release a test build of 0.4 on here at some point before the actual release on TFGS. I will not announce the test release until the day it goes live and it will only be there for a couple of days at the most depending on the number of downloads, in other words, those of you who check this blog regularly will be rewarded with early access. I will go into in more detail at the time but it will likely happen at some point in the next 8 weeks.
That's it for now, if I don't post anything this weekend I'll see you all next weekend (probably), tatty-bye!

Just another working Sunday

Mark is done now. Just Preston to go before I can move onto other things, I have about thirty more things to add yet. I'm torn between wanting to get the update out ASAP and wanting to add as much content as I can. Most of the update is just rewrites and mechanic changes with almost no new story or explicit content. After such a long delay I don't want to release it only to have everyone complain about how they can't get any further than they could before but I certainly don't want to hold it back any longer than I have to. Still, I've put a lot of work into this update so it's happening one way or another.

Getting stuff done on Friday!

Quitting early today since I started much earlier than usual. Jenny is done. Almost. I have to add something but it isn't related to what I was doing with her today so I will leave that bit for now. Her reactions are done though, there's two different triggers for that with two different conversations. I've also brushed through her other content to remove any references to old variables and such. So that's the women done for now, for this update anyway. On either Sat or Sun I will take on Mark, I may or may not create reaction conversations for Preston at this point, we'll see. Then I can move onto to the next thing I need to sort out, but more on that as it develops!

What's this? A progress? How does it work?

I said I would get some work done this weekend and even if I missed a day I still think I did alright. Also there are lots of "I's" in that sentence. Both Sonia and Rebecca should be done now, I say should be because until they are tested and everything is read through there could be massive continuity errors but assuming there are not that's two characters done in a single day. I said those changes would prove invaluable to speeding up production, I even wrote all of the Rebecca reactions from scratch today and it still only took a few hours. I call that a win.
Jenny will take a little longer to do as she has more conversation branches than most if not all of the other characters in the game, she's next on the agenda. There's still a lot to do but I really feel like I'm making progress now. I'll see you all in a few days time.

There may be a day when I get some work done but it is not this day

I tried to get something done last night but I was shattered after one of the longest weeks of my life so all I managed to do was move the intro sequence into a timer to make it easier to edit in the future. The plan was to spend a good 5/6 hours on Redus today but apparently there is family coming to visit in the next hour or so, that's today gone. I'll try to get as much done on Sunday as I can, I plan on focusing on Sonia and if I get her done I will move onto Jenny or Rebecca.
I have booked next Friday off so I will try and get as much done next weekend as I can, no more adding new content or features, it's time to finish what I have and to start thinking about testing. I'm about 80% done as far as I can tell but it's writing left, no more research or images so if I get my head down I can make some real progress.
Expect an update tomorrow evening.

The proverbial spanner in the works

Just got a promotion! It's not all good news though, my hours are going up to 42 per week which means that Mon-Thurs I simply won't have the time to work on Redus and although I finish early on Fridays I will probably be too tired. Production will be shifting pretty much exclusively to weekends from now on, that could cause issues with the 5 day gap between modifications and that is assuming I work on it both days every weekend. I get more money but at a cost.
Don't get too worried, I've come back to this project after much bigger breaks than 5 days. I will try my best to keep production as fast as I can without burning myself out, I don't have any new games right now and there isn't much TV for a while so I have a reasonable amount of free time.

Good news everyone!

Thanks to everyone who informed me about the RAGS license, for those of you who, like me, were unaware the expiration does not prevent the continued use of the designer. I will be taking a few days off but I will get back on with it in the latter half of next week. Thanks for the continued support everyone!

An unexpected break

First of all today's summary; worked on Sonia, she's about half done now. I also went retro and rewrote loads of the generic "you found nothing" messages for inspecting rooms. Once Sonia is done I will be back to where I was before the single TF debate ended. Well, actually since I've done lots of small things as well I will be further along than that, plus since I have about 500% less work to do per character now things should go much more smoothly from here on out... Well except for one thing:

Monday is the one year anniversary of Redus. February 17th 2013 was the day I started working on it, back then it was little more than a demo of things RAGS could do with a very basic plot attached. It was called "What has science done?" and had just three rooms: The office, the street and the lab. Everything was built around this original game and the game file I am working on today is the same file I created back then. Why is any of this important? Well for one I think it is important to remember how we got to where we are today, to learn from our mistakes and experiences and there have been a hell of a lot of those in the past 12 months. I still haven't finished paying for that car accident even though I wasn't driving and I still think about what my sister would have said if she had ever found out how I spend my spare time. I'm still grateful that after so many months of rejection I finally have a job and I'm still grateful that my parents are letting me stay here until I have enough money to move out. There is something else that this anniversary means though.

On Monday morning my RAGS license runs out. My bank account is beyond empty and I don't get paid for another 6 weeks. I'm not going to ask for any money off you guys because this is my hobby, but it does mean that I'm not going to be able to work on Redus for a little while, not the whole 6 weeks, I should be able to get a little money before then but I doubt I can get any funds in the next week or two. As with all delays I ask for your continued patience and understanding.

Not to get anyone excited or anything, but I think I'm close to being able to release an update. It won't have all of the content I promised and there could be some pretty major bugs but I think I could have something playable around early April. No promises, but I think it is a very realistic goal. I'll let you guys know as soon as I renew my license, I'm busy all weekend so this is it until then.

Drive safely! Tim out.

Wasted

I have 2 game files for Redus that I update as I go, alternating between them. I do this because every time RAGS crashes it corrupts the file. I got a bit carried away between saves today and after 2 and a half hours I noticed I hadn't saved.
So I saved it and everything was fine.
Half an hour later I come to save again but forget to switch files.
Straight away RAGS dies on me and I lose three hours work. If I didn't use the two file system (and the regular backups I have on another drive) that would have been the entire update gone, so I would to thank my brain for having at least enough common sense to do that.
Fear not though, I was able to more or less recreate all of the changes I made, not perfectly but well enough. So what were those changes? Well aside from the usual slew of minor tweaks and additions I have completed Christie...again. She should be completely done now though, her reaction (and yes that's singular, gone are the large number of variants, I love this new one event setup), all of her questions have been modified to work with the new system, even the timers that she uses should all be working again. Since I managed to get it all done so fast I have high hopes for getting Sonia done quickly as well. As some of you know there were a couple of her reactions in 0.3 that you could stumble upon that were actually pretty deep. Well that is part of the single reaction. You aren't guaranteed to get that part as there are a few prerequisites but most of you should get it come the update. As much as I liked it being hidden away I think it is too big of a plot line for so many people to completely miss out on. Oh, and Christie isn't such a crazy bitch anymore. Because it used to be possible to change back and forth she would flip out every time you did but now you actually have to piss her off before she gets upset with you. Go figure!
Well that's all folks! I'll keep you posted.

Captain! Updates off the starboard bow!

That's the colours done, it turn out I had removed brown from the game so I had to recreate it. I've also linked the serums to the crate so they should all be accessible now although I have yet to test that. I then added a couple more unlockables that require golden stars, one item and one scene although the item can't actually be unlocked as yet since it is only available at a point in the game before you can go to the forest so I will have to change that. As usual I found some more tiny things here and there to tweak and fix. I'm sure I did something else but I can't remember so I'll just assume that's all for today. There were a lot of bugs with the 8 serums that I found so I'm sure I will find more, but at least they don't teleport anymore!

To the update-mobile!

I've done one of the two self-exploration scenes now, it took longer than I had expected but then there are 8 different versions of it, the other one is a little shorter thankfully. I've also finished the body-part TF items, there are eight of those as well. I will tackle the colour ones soon, since they no longer cause immediate changes I will actually be removing their content rather than writing new for once so that will only take a few minutes. I may decide to keep some of the descriptions from those, they are more detailed than they were in 0.3 after I rewrote them so a lot of that has yet to be seen by anyone other than myself. It seems a waste to just throw it all away.
I know it doesn't sound like I've done a lot here but it took a good 4 hours which, when you're working full time, is a lot to be spending on such a short part of the game. I know you guys appreciate it though so it's worth it in the end.

Making updates, making bacon updates. Take some bacon and you put it in an update...

That's the warehouse done, hopefully. The forklift stuff is still in but you no longer need it to find the crate. I've also worked on fixing some of the fallout from the change. It turns out I still hadn't updated some of the strip club content for the instant TF setup so it was still checking for values that no longer exist. There's going to be a lot of little things that don't make sense now that there is a new TF trigger, it will take a while to find them all and even then I am bound to miss some. I've had to change a lot of Liara's conversation and also had to come up with a way of handling the chemicals once you find them at the warehouse. What I've come up with allows you to leave the warehouse with the chemicals in your inventory if you don't want to drink them straight away. I'll have to write in some conversations about those, asking people to run tests on them and so on so that it makes sense. This explanation also ensures that you can still carry and drink the solutions after your TF but they won't have any effect. The other options were to either remove them from your inventory after the event which would have felt overly convenient to be believable, or to force you to drink up whilst you were still at the warehouse which makes no sense. I know that I never got around to explaining the coloured vials properly before but it seems to be a much more obvious issue now. It won't take long to write a few questions to sort it out but I have other things to do right now.
Also the security guard has a slightly larger role now than he did before which is nice. He will have an even bigger one once I have written his reactions but I'll leave that for a future update me thinks.

Happy 50th post everybody!

I was expecting some backlash from the whole "screw the poll results, this is how I'm doing things" situation. I'm not sure if the fact that the only person to have commented on it hadn't even voted is a sign that everyone understands and is OK with it, or if it is a sign that nobody really cares either way. Ah well, as long as people enjoy the game who cares?
So, what have I been up to in the last 24 hours?
The initial TF event is pretty much done again, I want to add a little more tailored dialogue to it as it was written for a specific form. I've written branches for the different combinations of sex organs but there are still things that are brushed over. I had also written a "new body exploration" scene for the update that will now need a lot more options, it is a little graphic though as you might imagine so I will have to be the right frame of mind to get that done.
I have created some new variables and adjusted some event triggers, right now the TF event is not triggered but I can't do that until the new Warehouse content is written in. I have however changed the phone calls and made the Warehouse Event critical to ensure that you can't go anywhere else. Mostly I've been blocking off and removing redundant sequences, nothing major and most of them were new to 0.4 anyway so you won't miss them.
The TF event was previously a basic sequence of text and pauses, it is now an elaborate tree of body parts and gender identity but by making this one event much more complex, lots of other content will be greatly simplified. Just one reaction post-change per character with a few minor variations. I can't wait! I finally feel like I'm making progress.

Results are in and the winner is...

The results of the poll was interesting, it seems that people are happy with the game as planned. Unfortunately I am not and for those of you who haven't seen my post over at TFGS I am going against the public and choosing the hybrid option. It is too good an opportunity to pass up and so that is what I am going with.
I've had a week off now so I'm getting back on with it and have already begun implementing this new setup. It shouldn't take long to do, no more than a week I shouldn't have thought, and since there will be much less work to do once it is done I may even begin wrapping up this update. I still have Jenny, Rebecca and Mark to sort out before everything is as it was but they will require less work now and I can always skip them for now. I will get at least Jenny done and then tweak Christie and Sonia to comply with the hybrid setup. That will mostly involve blocking off some conditions that are no longer required rather than re-doing any work. If I don't post again tonight expect a progress update in the next couple of days. I have more free time than usual this week and thanks to my week off (mostly spent playing GTA V and XCOM: EW) I don't have the usual distractions. Toodlepipski!

Important News Ahead!

For those who have not yet done so, please head over to TFGS to vote in the poll as detailed here: http://www.tfgamessite.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=4086&start=240#p144808

The future direction of Redus will be determined by it's results. The poll ends next Monday.

And another afternoon's work is complete

A variety of small things done today including additions to the notepad, grammatical corrections, a few new image variations and a more visual representation of your golden star level. Unlocks are based on your level with each 5 stars representing 1 level. It will make more sense when you see it in action. For now there is only one level 1 reward in the game so it makes little difference right now. Not a very productive session but every little helps and trying to get something done on a near daily basis whilst working full time isn't easy. You'll have to bare with me.

Shhh! It's a secret!

That's some of the star-locked content done, if you have cashed in 5 or more golden stars you are given the user/pass combination to the archive if you hadn't already worked it out, as well as some additional dialogue. There will be many more rewards, most of which I will not announce, but that gives you an idea of the sort of thing I'm doing with it. Helping with the game whilst adding to the entertainment value. I may throw in a sex scene or TF item as a high-end reward later on but I probably won't tell you where they are or how to get them.

One does not simply walk into more done.

Finished the Examine Player action and reworked the sex scene with Jenny so that it doesn't check for variables that no longer exist. There isn't as much variation as there used to be but at least it works again.
I've also removed some of the furniture from around the office, it was a little too cluttered for my tastes, it still is but I don't want to remove too many puns from the game. Every time someone examines them I can hear their groan and it makes me smile.
I did some behind-the-scenes work as well to make testing some parts of the game a little easier on my end. Obviously those changes won't make it into the release but they will help to speed up production a little which is good for everyone.

Is 2am considered late or early?

So yeah, found myself doing a bit of work at 2am, tidying things up a bit. I squashed a pretty major bug with just four lines that my previous workaround had done using 40+. And I learned something about using RAGS which is always nice.
I cleaned up a few objects early on in the game so they interface a little better (stuff like the tome which you have to examine first and the forklift key which you use examine to pick up, not sure what I was thinking there tbh). I've also tweaked some of the passwords for the alleyway, a couple of them I hated and there were one or two glaring omissions.
Not a lot done but at least production is up as much as 25% in some areas, this is progress!

Colour coded for your convenience

Dr Langstrom now uses a darker text colour. Your welcome.
Also I had to change Nancy's text colour since it looked to similar to Mark's new one but that didn't take fecking hours.

That was not the most productive day in the world, that was just a tribute.

I think Sonia is finished. I said the other 2/3 wouldn't take as long didn't I? Obviously testing and multiple re-reads are required to ensure that I didn't make any major mistakes but otherwise I can finally move on.
And move on I did.
I've added the extra time slot, it should be at least 90% functional if not more. I ran a search to look for any events that rely on specific time slots and adjusted them accordingly but that doesn't mean some won't have slipped through. It's happened before and I'm sure it will again, but I already talked about that last time so let's continue.
I just wouldn't stop today, I missed a meal and put my own work back a bit but the will to work just kept flowing and I wasn't about to stop it. I worked on Jenny, big time. Remember a while back when I was converting Rebecca the Librarian to the same conversation setup as the lab team? It took several days right? I did the same to Jenny in a matter of hours. I haven't started her reaction stuff yet and that will take days, as will all of her sexy time stuff, but I went through the bulk of the conversations with her and shifted everything around. I had to rewrite a fair bit to make it fit the new setup, but I cleaned up so much that I was able to remove half of her previous code without actually losing anything. That's how bad the redundancies were when I started making this game. With Jenny all cleaned up it will not only make it easier for me to locate and deal with typos and bugs in her content, it will be a hell of a lot easier to add new conversation topics in the future. Since she was always my favourite character I have a feeling that I will end up adding a lot to her over the next few months. I totally crashed the mode today!

This just in: Something! Back to you in the studio.

I'm about a third of the way done with Sonia now, the big third though. A lot of the other two thirds can be taken from the first or at least based on it so they won't take as long. I did have to do some more work with some of the other conversations you have with her though and I get the feeling that I will have to re-read through all of her to ensure that the number of conflicting topics is minimized.

I have also decided to do something about the time frame for the game, it was always intended that there wasn't enough time to get everything done, that way the player is more likely to try again to see what else they can find and hopefully stumble onto entire sections of the game they never knew existed. The problem is that there is a lot more in the game than I had originally planned on and whilst I added morning 6 to give players an extra day, it still feels like a constant race against time. As such I will be adding a new time slot to each day:

Midday. 

This will still require a fair bit of work to incorporate but less than adding a new day would and will also help to break up the daily events such as the Warehouse and Housekey events. Not only that but it will mean you get 5 additional time slots rather than the 3 a new day would provide. Expect this to cause bugs when the release is finally ready as I am sure to miss some obscure time-based events that can be found throughout the game as well as some of the usual "You can't do that at this time of day" messages, but I will do my best and once they are all ironed out it will be a great boon for the game.

New for 2014: Smart phones with internet access!

Following a suggestion from Dorkulon at TFGS, I decided to move the research code over from the PC to a Timer so that I could access it from the Mobile Phone in your inventory. I was expecting a decent amount of tweaking required to get it running but I was pleasantly surprised to find only one thing had to be changed. Not only that, because of my over reliance on conditions, the entire code was contained in a single condition that I could just cut and paste. The only thing I had to change was the section on masturbation which I just added a check to, to avoid public relations issues for Sam :D. The whole process took less than half an hour and is sure to save a lot of time and effort for all involved!