Progress Update

*bangs head on keyboard*

*throws keyboard out window*

*panics and runs out to get keyboard*

*bangs head on keyboard*

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Yeah, that's what my week working on the new game has felt like. On the plus side, I HAVE made significant progress. As seen in the image attached, the game is now fully populated by the girls, at the times and places they are supposed to be found at. Likewise, the UI is theoretically finished. 

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Buuuuttttt the reason that 'theoretically' was in italics is because I keep finding bugs in it. Don't let the relatively commonplace appearance of the buttons you see fool you, Renpy does not have a built-in means to handle an semi-advanced UI like this. Oh, it has a way to make buttons, but that's about the total extent of it. If you want to make, say, an inventory or relationship panel, you have to code it yourself by jumping through a bunch of hoops(essentially making a whole bunch of button and position/layering them manually or making an image map...which is more or less the same thing and less efficient).

Worse, I had to build the way time works in the game from scratch. Oh, there are a few versions of clocks and stuff out there, but nothing even remotely like what I actually needed. At least, not that I could find. The result is that I keep finding aforementioned bugs randomly throughout the UI I custom-built. In example, currently when you open the relationship window while there is a character is on screen...that character's sprite ends up sandwiched between the top of the bottom layer of the relationship panel -_-. Thankfully, I had the same problem with the inventory already and I fixed it. So that particular bug will be an easy, if mildly time consuming, fix.

But things like that have been cropping up every bloody time I go to work on the game. I expected to be halfway through injecting the game's events already. Instead, I'm only just injecting the very first batch of them today, do to getting bogged down by the bug quashing. On the bright side, the date I gave before (the 20th) had a bit of extra time built into the estimate. So it's possible I'll still finish by then. I took most of this weekend off from my regular contracts in an effort to get a lot done (hopefully, that often doesn't work out the way I think it will). One way or the other, expect an update sometime on Monday (or Tuesday early morning), with either the release or an updated timeline.