Hi folks,
Apologies for this, but I am officially pushing the release date of Season 2 from the end of July to the end of August. I don't take this decision lightly, but I'd rather call it now, rather than wait until mid-July to let people down.
I promise you that I have literally been working every available hour on Season 2, but it's just not enough. I'm currently working 12+ hours a day, seven days a week. I was hoping that I could keep the head down and continue at this rate for the next couple of months just to get Season 2 out, but I just can't do it anymore, so I need to reduce down to 6 days a week and maybe just do an 8 hour day on one of those days. I was working similar hours for Episode 25, didn't really take a break after that and jumped into season 2, but it's taking it's toll. I'll still be doing 60+ hour weeks, just not 80+ hour weeks. (The missus is pissed at me too! )
Cell is working crazy hours also and C3nt and our QC team has been a big help, but even at that, there is still a lot of work to do. I had hoped to salvage some of the art from older episodes, but after serious consideration, I've decided that it just wouldn't match up, so we are re-doing everything and that's another reason for the push.
I know based on polls / feedback you folks felt that some of the later scenes only needed tweaks, rather than full re-dos and initially I agreed with you, but the problem is that all of our artwork settings and approach are much better than the original game (even the later episodes of Season 2), so to salvage some of the original art, we would have to purposely reduce the quality of any new images for that scene just to match the originals. I tried it on one scene and it honestly looked shit, so we really do need to rework it all.
I lost another week's worth of work on coding (see the section below), so it would be silly of me to assume that there won't be one or two more shitty events that will happen between now and release, so I'm trying to account for that and that's another reason for the date push.
So, I'm hoping you folks bear with me... and I promise you that after season 2, you will never be waiting this long again for any release. Season 3 will be quicker (There is DEFINITELY a lot of salvagable art) and we will also get some epilogues in between. And any new games will be released in smaller, more frequent updates. Season 2 is literally the biggest amount of work required for any release, so release dates will improve once we get over this monster hurdle. I'm hoping most of you folks stick with me for the last leg of this Season 2 journey.
(Tip for any would-be developers out there: Don't quit your day job).
Next two paragraphs are about coding so skip if you have no interest.
*****Boring code / tech part********
In good news, the export / import function (to transfer saves from Season 1 to Season 2) has now been fully confirmed as working. I know I said I got it working during my last update, but I was wrong. It was working perfectly for me, but it crapped out (on the import part) when the QC folks tried it. This was a tricky problem to solve, because I couldn't reproduce their failure (because it worked for me). Without going into too much tech detail, it was only working on MY PC, because during my coding I had manually set up the required storage list for saving the data... but the code crapped out on first run (for anyone else) because when the code first checked for the list, it did not exist on their PC. It was an absolute nightmare to fix (as mentioned before coding isn't my strongest suit), but I eventually got it working and it has been confirmed by the QC team. Probably took an extra 75 hours to get it fixed AFTER I thought I had it working.
For anyone interested, copying over full save game data between two different games (e.g. Season 1 and season 2 have separate save directories) is NOT a good option... as RenPy saves LOT more than just variables in a game save, so even though it was possible to temporarily change save directories and load up a Season 1 save in Season 2, it would crap out for traceback errors and all sorts of other shit (unless I included a decent chunk of season 1 inside season 2 which I wanted to avoid). So the best approach for me was to use RenPy multipersistent data. And even then, it's tricky enough to set up a clean export / import system. But it's done and if anyone wants to see the code I cobbled together (It's not pretty but it somehow works).... let me know and I'll share my files
**** Boring code stuff over
Good news:
OK, onto some good news... The QC team have fully played and tested the first two chapters (there will be a total of six) and it looks like everything is working now (after lots of corrections). They will receive chapter 3 this weekend, so once all THOSE issues are sorted, then we will have HALF of season 2 fully tested and playable. Don't worry... this doesn't mean we haven't done any work on chapters 4-6 and we're only halfway through the development. We have LOTS done on Chapters 4 and 5, it's just noehere near playable, so not ready for the QC team yet.
Monthly 4K images:
Hopefully folks enjoyed the 4K images I posted last week. This week I'll do the second batch (the pregnant ones) so I hope to have them to everyone before the end of the week.
The winners were Jenna (of course), Monica (of course), but 3rd place was a very close call between Katie, Elaine, Jolina and Lily. I had to go to the weighting system (i.e. extra weighting based on patreon tier level of the voters) and Jolina came out on top.... So I'll get working on these...
Teasers:
After some bad news... hopefully a peek at some teasers will pick things up.
Thanks a lot folks. Please let me know of any questions or comments and I'll get back to everyone...