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!