Progress Report

Hello Tango Fictioneers!

So here is an update on recent progress plus some bimbo Taylor art. For starters, I added a lot of the final html content to the script including Ryan, The Clarks, Julie, and Tim’s stories. As a byproduct of development, I’ve corralled all the dead ends into easily identifiable areas and have begun writing a lot more to fill in a lot of the blanks that are holding up various other scenes and, by extension, releases.

As I port the last couple routes over to Ren’Py it was also apparent my earlier estimates were optimistic. In June I thought I had a week of solid work to reach parity but that was now months and probably at least hundred hours of coding and editing ago. Transfigure’s finished script will clock in about a million words, making it a truly massive project. Moving it over and editing it line by line has been a large task but it has allowed me to polish the script and see the story from a different perspective. The good news is with that extra dev time it is clear I am almost done. I’ve narrowed down the final sections I need to add. The current script has about 30/40 existing endings (the demo has 4) and around 90%+ of the html’s content. The final game has about a hundred endings.

I wrote two new missing endings for the game and I’ve gone through and flagged a number of unreleased endings that need the smallest amount of work to get added. I’ve been trying to finish as many of these little dangling one-off loose ends and it has helped me get back in the groove of writing.

I also spent a bit of time touching up the Transfigure walkthrough. I will release it once the updates add up to something more substantial. It also contains increasing amounts of spoilers so I kind of want to release content before spoiling it for obvious reasons.

Now that the porting stage is coming to a close, my focus will shift to writing and art which will naturally overflow to a resumption of more active releases. I am really happy to complete this porting stage because not only was it a very daunting time sink but something necessary in order to finish the game. Now that it is essentially complete, all subsequent Ren’Py releases will be a lot easier since I’ve already refreshed myself and had time to think about the stories and create new assets. Plus a good chunk of future updates are already partially finished in advance, lowering the per release dev time. I know once I push the boulder downhill I will need to run in order to keep up. This is why I want to be as prepared as possible.

I’ve rewrote a lot of Transfigure’s upcoming promotional materials as well. The big milestone will be the launch of the demo coinciding with other releases to encourage traffic to check out the Steam page. Wishlists are developer mana so I hope I can collect a few before finishing the game.

On the 3D front I am also in the final stages of my prep work, finishing it up as I start on earlier scenes. Over the past two years or so I have gone through approximately 30,000 assets to identify ones that will help me make Transfigure quickly and make it look as appealing as possible. Since Transfigure has so many locations and topics I realized I could use most of them in some circumstances. After that point, it became a matter of quality and how closely it matches. That is a lot of pieces in this category alone to organize (it also helps me determine the priority of these assets) but I am confident all this investment will pay off.

Time is always in short supply even though it seems to be the only currency I can spend. I have a burst of seasonal work to do at my other job to get enough leeway to continue to develop games over the winter. I hope to take care of that over the next two weeks. After that, it should be, fucking finally, off to the races. 

It has been difficult trying to plan and time everything out when I am balancing so many factors but I’m finally nearing some major milestones. 

Thank you all for your extreme levels of patience. I am confident that the later chapters of Transfigure are worth the wait.