October 25th 2021: Progress Report

Hello everyone, anxious Rem here with this week's Progress Report!

There is a storm coming. Literally, not figuratively.

First up, the Progress Report. The Level 5 Defeat battle is pretty much almost finished, like maybe one more day of fixing this or that during debugging and playtesting, but the CG and all the variations are done and the code is tentatively done. So in the last week, Sachinama has been hard at work finishing up the CG, while I have been doing a combination of coding the battle as well as continuing to slowly port the game text to the new text system that I have been talking about in the past few weeks. Wrist status: Still painful, but I've been taking it easier this past week. Instead of working while having music in the background, I've been putting on old shows and movies that I've watched before on the background, so that I get distracted every now and then and give my wrist a break while doing repetitive click-dragging copy-and-pasting hundred of times a day.

Also, just a completely random aside since I've been seeing people kind of mention it here and there, there's going to be no Level 4 Edicts. I've mentioned this way, waaayyyy back, the last time was probably months back? and the first time I mentioned it might have been also a year ago? when I first talked about Level 3 Edicts. So to summarize, I design things for the end product in mind. Whether it's Passives, Side Jobs or Edicts. My vision is what the game looks like in the end, not for each Alpha Build. It pretty much shouldn't matter at this point because we're potentially months away from release and I shouldn't need to say this but... what everyone can see and play in v.9B is basically 98% of what the final version looks like. I designed and laid out the Edicts from the start to finish all the way to the final boss. And the final boss is accessible right away after beating Level 4 because Level 5 is only the final boss and no other rooms. All the Edicts unlocked in Level 2 and 3, are not meant to be completely enacted in a normal playthrough before Level 4. Through playing each Alpha Build, someone might be able to enact everything! But this is by far not how a normal playthrough is intended to be, because in the final product, there is no such thing as a Level forever staying in Anarchy, allowing the player unlimited time to purchase everything outside of Secretary Mode.

And also, as another aside, I've been receiving messages from supporters apologizing to me that they have to cancel their subscription because they need to save up money for the retail version. Don't be sorry! In fact, I've been encouraging everyone who needs to save up money to cancel their subscription, and I should be the one thanking you for supporting us! If you need to save up money for the full release, please, please do so. Don't feel guilty or whatever about it!

Anyway, back to the Progress Report! The asides have been even longer than the Progress Report so far! So the plan for this week is... isssss..............

Oh no. It's time for another aside, and for me to clarify what I meant by a storm is coming earlier in this post. So there is supposed to be a big storm, a big windy, watery storm coming tonight after midnight that is supposed to have a risk of causing floods and power outages. After a summer of weather related trauma, we got through all of September without a single incident, and almost, ALMOST got through October with nothing. Sigh, well... I hope tonight/tomorrow's storm and potential flooding isn't going to be so bad. If the storm ends up being bad then welp, Tuesday is going to be clean up day again. And I hope Tuesday doesn't need to be clean up day.

But regardless of what happens tonight with this storm, I've actually marked on my calendar a long time ago to take this Friday and potentially the weekend off for a break. Because an eroge that I have been looking forward to for months is coming out! Which is 魔王城Re：ビルド！ by Astronauts! This is basically going to be my first break in months, and I have been really looking forward to it! So please Mother Nature, even if you want to flood the city again or whatever, please don't destroy the power or Internet. Please... I just want to make eroges and play eroges...

So, the plan for this week before the weekend break is to work on the Level 5 boss fight details and stuff around it, maybe even start writing up some of the dialogue if I got the time. It's a busy busy time, and I can't believe October is almost over, but at the same time I'm freaking stroked that October is almost over so that I can take a break and play some eroge. With that all said, I hope everyone stays safe and dry, and see you all last week!

Tuesday night edit: Woohoo! The storm turned out to be nothing for us, awesome.