It's the "Painted Dove" update...

Hi all.

Before I start I need to apologise for my last update in which I alluded to some personal events in my life. In retrospect this was a lapse of judgement on my part. You're not here to hear about that sort of thing, no matter how discretely I touch upon it. I'm sorry. It won't happen again.

My apologies also for being a bit quiet this month. Although busy, I haven't been terribly chatty other than whomping a few things up on twitter (you know I have a twitter account, yes?). My comedy chops for writing has been a little lacking too and so I've been focussing more on technical matters that needed to be dealt with at some point and now seemed as good a time as ever.

So what have I done?

Compression

This is partly the reason for the delay in getting the final, final, final version of Chapter Four out. I've managed to squeeze the entire game, with all the bonus content, down to a rather decent 2.7GB. That's about 5GB smaller than the version that was released and, to my eye at least, without any reduction in image quality. This means that the first part of the game, Chapters one to Six, will be able to come in at under 5GB. I can then repeat that for the second part and so the whole thing becomes much more manageable and accessible for you guys with two games of 5GB each. I'll pass the final version to the testers and if it passes muster then I'll upload and drop messages to people etc.

The GUI update

I'll be polling on this sometime next week but I've also been exploring the GUI refresh options. I'm starting to get very keen on dumping the results screen at the end and have rolling achievements instead. I'll show you what I have in mind in due course as the mock ups are a little shabby but concept wise it seems to work. Opening up the obtainable achievements in each chapter not only will serve the same purpose as the current results screen but allows me much more scope in using the achievements to highlight key events, paths and items that may have been missed by the player as opposed to the few I can squeeze on to Becca's monitor.

Poker with Chris

I had a fall back in case I couldn't actually get Renpy to do a strip poker game, but whaddya know. I could. I currently have a rough if passable simulator for a game of poker. It needs some graphical polish and it's only five card draw (or stud poker to some of you) but it's poker, it works and...I'm rather pleased with it to be honest given Renpy isn't really designed for this sort of thing. The only thing I'm struggling with is to get the cards to display in the order of value. But this just requires me to do a bit of code bashing. Oh, and deciding where on the screen to display them. Lower middle of the screen seems a natural fit but booting them up to the top left keeps the screen clear for Chris (and her legs).

The dress up game challenge round two

A slightly easy one for me to knock out but since it has to be done at some point, it was nice to clear something off the board. Trisha has some corking dresses too.

Sparkly!

The Comsat mission

This is a new mission with Chris in Chapter Five and -can- get quite combat very heavy. Actually, I fib. There's no quite about it. If it ends up as a combat mission (and no, it doesn't have to - that's down to you), it's a bit of a beast. So much so it takes up the whole player day. Accordingly I needed a whole series of new machine pistol animations that I could drop in as needed. So I did, and that's those in the can too.

Test image prior to postwork

Script

There's been some more script work done and I'm around 20,000 words or about a third of the way there. I've been largely restricting myself to the more serious scenes but they are good. Two scenes in particular might be my best written work yet I feel. Your mileage may vary of course.

New locations

Six new locations for you in this chapter, and they've all been dressed and set up nicely. All six took a little bit of time. One due to the sheer size of it, and two others for the amount of background detail and things to notice. For those of you who like that sort of thing, one location in particular should make you rather content.

Chapter Six work

Why? Good question. There is a scene in Six that I had to make a call on in Chapter Five on whether it would happen or not, and it's a complex one. So much so I doubted I could actually pull it off. Buuuuut...it looks like I can and so it will be there in Chapter Five to trigger after all. It's bonkers complex. The only game I know off that has even tried something like was Saints Row... But it does appear feasible to do, so that's something to look forward to.

Scenes

Speaking of scenes, we have 38 or 40 scenes in Five. The two scene variance is that there are two scenes that I would like to do but might get dropped if production time takes too long. One of them should have actually been in Chapter Four (ping pong with Sarah - and a second chance to get a ping pong bat for those that need it) and although I would like to retrofit it, it's not entirely needed. The second one is a path that not many people will have gone down and so I'm having doubts on whether to include it or not. Neither are plot/story important. I'll see how I get on.

Maybe/ Maybe not...

Other bits and bobs

I'm still miles behind on correspondence etc. As fast as I answer some, I have more. Again, it's nice but I've a backlog that just isn't going so  I've taken this Friday off work to clear it all once and for all.

Close to the wire this month for an update I know, but I wasn't sure how much work I'd get done this month and wanted to be sure it was value for money. If I felt I hadn't done enough I'd have done my usual trick of refunding you guys. Long standing patreons know I'm pretty free and easy in giving you your money back if I haven't hit the marks.

Oh...the title of the post? Sarah's song. My comedy chops are back. So, a return to business as usual.

Speak soon (and a damned sight more frequently, I promise)

Notty