UPDATE: Crisitunity


“Look on the bright side, Dad—did you that the Chinese use the same word for ‘crisis’ that they do for ‘opportunity?’” – Lisa

“Yes! Crisitunity!” – Homer


Well, we certainly do live in interesting times. The current pandemic looks like it’s going to hit a lot of industries pretty hard, and my day job is in one of those industries.

Things are still very much in flux right now, but it’s entirely likely that my full-time job may soon become a part-time job for the indeterminate future.

I always thought it would be interesting to try working on games like Interns as a part-time job, but my plan was to hold off until my crowd-funding income made it safe to do so (particularly since nearly half of my total income has been going to medical bills in the last couple years).

As it looks like I’m likely going to be losing the majority of my income anyway, it seems like I may as well take advantage of the new time being freed up to be more productive with my game-making hobby and see if it has any potential to keep me afloat.

Immediate Interns Plans

Sadly, the same “opportunity” that’s given me some time to work on the game has left me in a mental state where I’m not really inspired to write. (I’m in multiple high-risk categories with regards to this virus, and I have close family members in similar conditions, so my mind is a bit occupied.)

That said, I’ve been making solid progress in other areas. The wardrobe menu is in and I’ve been moving forward with revisiting all of the room code to clean and rebuild it.

The biggest change is that the player can now choose to change clothing and other choices between major blocks (so if you want to wear different perfume or clothes in the evening, you can). This ended up being a far bigger undertaking than I was expecting, as I realized that I need to know what the PC will be doing in the upcoming event, which isn’t always clear (such as going to the club vs the hut tub party).

I’m currently building and debugging an updated system for handling the various firsts—playing the scene for the first time wearing a work uniform, swimwear, casual clothes, etc. I had to do this mostly from scratch since the initial version wasn’t made to be aware of the PC’s days off.

Next up will be a more consolidated system for showing the CG of the PC wearing clothes, which I’m hoping will help me finally squash a lot of the bugs people have been hitting with some of the mirror images.

Other Things

I’ve gotten a lot of really good Python pointers from some helpful people, and it has a lot of potential for streamlining the handling of NPCs and game scenes. For the latter, it could mean a system that makes it a bit easier to add new scenes into the game and assign them to the event pickers and minimizing the opportunities for me to miss a variable, which typically results in bugs where the new scenes are inaccessible, or you’ll have one scene that repeats over and over.

I’m not entirely sure if I want to move forward with that now or save it for the next update, as it’ll mean rebuilding all of the event-picker code. I already need to do a revision to make things like the phone system work, but this would be more of a total rebuild requiring a lot more testing, so I’m a bit hesitant.

The biggest plus side to all of this is that I can have multiple full days in a row to tackle problems. With working mostly on weekends and evenings, there’s a lot of stop-and-start with long periods of time in between, forcing me to try to figure out what I was even doing in the last session before I can even start to move forward again. I can tell I’ve already reaped the benefits of this while tackling a big chunk of the wardrobe overhaul over the last few days.

In Summary

The TL;DR version: Corona-chan has taken away most of my income, is threatening to make my health condition worse than it already is, but has also given me much more time to focus on Interns. Here’s hoping I can benefit from the opportunity and avoid all of the looming bad things. 😨