No Step Back (Patreon)

Long overdue post, but you’ll see I guess isn’t the funnier post to write.

(80º devlog btw… that’s a lot of devlogs.)

TLDR: I’m on it.

Even if I commented what was going on by other means (a comment in the patreon and in discord), sorry for the lack of official news posted here, and also I'll make it public for all those interested, so let’s talk about the State of the Nation.

General Info about the update:

0.30 is around 450 renders, a bit less than usual because a lot of conversation happens on renders that were ready already on 0.21.
Beyond the general freeroam shennanigans, a mostly linear story with some choices, being the main event (the Feast, 213 renders by itself).

Dialogue lines: To be seen…

After the first release I’ll make and include a Count scene that is expected for this release. But as is a meanwhile scene it can wait after the main update is released.

Well, What happened?:

Coding should had been easy as -beyond coding the scenes, I only needed to copy most of the dialogue written during the three months I was rendering, plus classic improvisation time-. So I expected to finish before the end of february in the best case scenario.

Of course, that all went to shit when my OS SSD died (and wiped), and I lost more than 3 months of dialogue.

Not only the ones that I wrote during rendering (best moment to get inspired about the dialogue happening on the scenes), but the dialogue I wrote back in 0.21 when I put Grassmere on the game ('cause all the dialogue for future conversations was ready). Not only the dialogue I wrote for 0.30, but also the dialogue I wrote for 0.35 (Grassmere part 2). And the dialogue I wrote for 0.40. But well, at least those two are not immediate concerns. (Basically I lost 3 years of documents, Not only for BFL but lots of hobby projects and personal documents)

This was a blow I would' never expected specially having many backups about everything (a service I pay for a reason), but when I changed another HDD before the previous year, I changed where documents were stored and never fix that vulnerability.

I lost two weeks just getting a new SSD, resintalling the basics (still didn't finished with that as I use half hundred software programs between BFL and my other works and needs) and trying to recover the info (to no avail) from that SSD (Never to trust them again).

So what's going on:

How much time I would think more than 3 months of dialogue needs to be rewritten? Well. Probably the same amount of time, let's not fool ourselves (I fooled myself the first months). I can know what the people on the scene was talking about... but until wishfullthinking-to-reality technology is invented that has little use to get a finished product.

As time passed, I realized there was absolute no way to wing the loss, and only time will eventually fix the issue. So I informed via Discord about the issue.

For some weeks I was pondering if I could just cull content from the Grassmere part 1 update (0.30) and add the rest of secondary scene to part 2 (0.35), But, as I've been working on it, I noticed the story will not make good sense enough and that all events that I was to include they were the Minimal needed for a more climatic Main Event of the update.

So I've been rewriting just everything. Basically, the easiest scenes that would take just a pair of days to code tops, just pasting the dialogue and adding extra dialogue as the scene need, has gone up to nearly a week per scene (some).

And even the simplest of my releases would have at least 30 scenes including minor conversations... So yeah. Sometimes I’m lucky and I rewrite a minor conversation in 4 or 5 hours… But one cannot trust luck.

The general conundrum:

-It’s been years since I learned that I just have to duplicate the regular expected time to any release. There is only some magical moments in life when nothing gets in the middle and releases go fast (like 0.21)

-Coding scenes in my engine has been always slow. image fades, music, sounds, mini-anims here and there, variable checking, multiple dialogue branches... not a fail in design but a quality condition.

-There is always delays. Real life get in the middle of everything, specially being a single father. Even common paperwork is a hassle.

-Even if I dedicated much more time than I should to BFL taking in consideration revenue/time invested, I have to work on other shit too to eat (and I’m quite delayed on other work so I hope I can get back to rendering for 0.35 so I can have time to make work on other stuff).

-Well, adding everything up, it's been like entire months of work just dissapeared. So when it will be finished? The fuck I know. Is much more harder to predict when will the scenes I have left to code be finished without knowing how fast or slow I'll rewrite the dialogue while coding them.

The good side:

-But the good news, I finished coding the massive 213 renders main event of 0.30, and I really love how the rewrote has turn up. That’s a big win, but lots of little scenes (like supper repeats, freeroam convs) need to be finished yet. Also usually as I code the scenes I see that there is some more render (or 20) I can fit in the middle of anything to make it better or correct, so I’m not gonna stop doing that now. It’s always better Good and late than mediocre and fast.

-Very pleased in general with the new dialogue. I guess rethinking all of it allowed me to fine tune the quality of it. But well, as they say… “Let inspiration find you while you’re working”.

-I’m chill enough… Learned hard lessons the first years of development. This situation It’s been damn stressing of course. Also a reminder of how ephemeral computers and data are. I can't say I wasn't in shambles at first thinking if I'll ever be able to think that my data and all the works of my life are secure.

-I’m on it… even if it’s a crawl.

-I don’t need to buy gas to go to work.

Well. Let's keep on it!