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!

Ooh ahh, just a little bit

Did about two hours or so today, worked on the new "Think" action for the player, adding some more generic stuff to it. At some point I plan to link it with the Notepad Leads, it won't provide answers but it may help to explain things. There are over 50 leads so far and some would combine with others so it would take a while to write all of the required thoughts. For now it is just used for banter and to unlock the forest. I have one lead (The suspicious scientist) set up to prove that it works. I don't want it to be something that unlocks important parts of the game so that you have to try it in every room, it will only ever be for minor hints or an excuse for me to throw in a pun or a joke here and there to liven the mood.

That is a little above average

650+ page views today and still climbing, just because of a post at TFGS. I guess there is still some interest in the game.
Busy day today so I couldn't get any more done on it even if I had felt like it, which I didn't probably the combination of Friday and rain. Even so, some of the ideas coming from the fans are giving me plenty to think about over the next few weeks. Hopefully that will be enough to draw me back into working on it. Any more ideas/suggestions are always welcome and very much appreciated, even if some of my feedback can seem a little harsh I am still endlessly grateful for it. Not only can it lead to great new ideas and getting me excited about the game again, it also shows that there are people out there who care about my work enough to give up a few minutes of their day to give me some useful feedback. These past two days may have marked a turning point in this whole sorry saga.

Okay this is getting silly, two days in a row? What? I don't expect this trend to continue but would be very happy if it did.
Finally got some work done on Sonia (and trust me she needs it!); I wanted to get something done with her reactions but I noticed a number of major issues with some of her other conversation topics, mostly regarding the change from slow to instant transformations. A lot of options were dependent on you being between major stages and so much tweaking, rewriting and the creation of entirely new options was required to compensate. That said I did get some of her reactions done, or at least several branches from one of her reaction trees. Still, it should look great when it's done. You would have to play the game a stupid number of times to find every branch so that should give the game a little re-playability.
I think I'll just add the reactions for a couple more characters for this version. I still have plenty of work to do before everything is working again but once I'm back to where I was new content will be so much easier to create. There is something like 85% fewer branches required for each character, sex scene or TF item. I know that at the moment it must seems like all this update is doing is recreating existing content and taking a long time to do so, but it will make a huge difference later on and actually, after playing through the current build a few times there is a surprising number of new features. If you are able to find them that is. One of the new characters is currently too well hidden but I will leave that as it is until a later version as it isn't in any way important right now. I may even just leave it like that as a super easter egg that only the luckiest or most dedicate of you will ever find.
We'll see... For now, I'm just happy that I have managed to get a good 8 hours or so done in two days. Here's hoping for more!

I actually did something! (Insert fanfare here)

I hadn't planned on it, I had no intention of doing so, but I had some spare time today and played through Redus. I noticed several things that were bugging me and so I opened up the editor and began fixing them. Before I knew it four hours had passed and although there is little in the way of new content I have actually done something productive in RAGS! Some of the bugs were present in older versions too, I just hadn't noticed them before (those were not so much bugs as poor design choices or curious, nonsensical behaviors), and some were specific to the current build. The thing that surprised me the most though was not that I did stuff but rather that I enjoyed doing it.

Don't get too excited though, this may have been a one-off and even if it isn't my work schedule is pretty full right now not to mention the ever-growing list of games and TV I promised to experience but this was a good day and progress, however small, was made. I just wanted to let you guys know, this is proof that Redus is not dead and work will continue on it. Yay.