Saturday Update! (Patreon)

Placeholders are complete! YKMET:Strade is now a fully functional game full of sketches!

 Well, "Fully Functional-ish". It still needs a lot of testing and tweaking, not to mention a lot of UI/framework stuff. And of course the art finalization LMAO

But still! It's playable!

Here's the last couple of placeholder previews:

 And that is the end of the placeholders!

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That's not the only work I did this week though. I also built the endings collection page and coded the Death Token system. For anyone who hasn't been around to hear about it- the Death Token system is my new system to allow players to buy hints and walkthroughs in-game for endings with tokens they earn by dying :D

The tokens will also be used for other stuff- like unlocking character bios and concept art, and some more fun stuff! I think it will be a really nice way for people to get to see all of the game even if they get super stumped- while still feeling like they earned it legitimately. Stubborn players don't have to use any tokens of course!

Getting an ending will automatically unlock the hint and walkthrough, just in case you need help getting it again.

Everything seen above is fully functional! Well, mostly. The hints are written but the walkthroughs aren't. I don't want to write those until closer to release in case the paths to endings change [ There's two phases of testing to go through, changes will be made ].

I'm also currently messing with some very experimental coding regarding the CG Gallery. Because there's like 500 sprites, my traditional kind of CG gallery seems kind of impossible. Or at the very least, people would have to put up with my personal choices on what to put in the gallery.

I'm instead experimenting with the possibility of allowing players to take screenshots and build their own gallery. However, it's proving to be pretty difficult to code. Renpy has a screenshot taking system built in, but actually displaying them in a gallery is shockingly difficult. If any of you guys are Renpy masters and know how to use "define config.screenshot_callback" then please comment about the syntax LMAO In theory it allows me to define a function to go off whenever a screenshot is taken, so I could populate a persistent list variable.... but I can't seem to get it working.

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ANYWAY.

I will be needing Alpha testers soon. That's pretty complicated, so I'll be making a separate Patreon post soon about it my requirements and asking for volunteers. I will only need 5-10 people and it will be very serious. This is definitely not the stage for people wanting to play the game early for fun- testing to the degree I need will very likely ruin your enjoyment of the final game, so please only volunteer if you're very serious about testing/editing. But for now, don't worry. I'll make the actual post about it soon!

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About my progress on learning music: I didn't really make any progress in learning this week ^^; I was too busy and tired. But I did purchase a small keyboard to help me work!

I managed to connect it to Ableton just fine, but then I realized.... I have no idea what I'm doing. So, I looked up some lessons for beginners and found a great 8.5 hour long Youtube video lesson [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iuRsiKtObw ] that claims to be for people who don't know anything about the program or music theory- and it's gonna walk me through making 3 songs step by step!

I'm gonna start my lessons on Sunday and do my best! I'm really really determined to learn how to do this... now that I've realized this could be another avenue to express myself, I'm really obsessed with being able to make something.

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Merch stuff: I did finally get a tracking number for my restock shipment with the Fox dakimakura pillows, but the tracking number doesn't have an exact delivery estimate yet. I'm assuming it will take around 15 days to travel so it seem we'll probably get the restock available around mid-April. Sorry it's so late!

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Lastlyyyy [ God these have gotten so long since I stopped using social media LMAO ] I updated my website and added some stuff. I added those test sprites to the YKMET:Strade page and added a pile of my old art to the my Artwork page. I plan to keep adding art on the second half of Fridays, it just takes a long time. I got the last 4 years in but I have so much art from 2015-2018 that's gonna take forever. I'll just keep chipping away at it!

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That's it for now! I'll probably make my Alpha Tester volunteer asking update early next week!

Thank you so much for your support, stay safe and have a great weekend!