Development Update

Greetings!

I've gotten a lot done on 0.7 this week, and I hope I don't regret saying this, but I think I'll have a full version up for testing sometime this coming weekend! I'll probably leave it up for a few days to catch any major bugs, and then release it proper.

Here's where we're at:

Development Status:

Planning ~ 100%

Features and Mechanics ~ 100%

Completed H-scene progression revamp.

Dungeon and Boss Fight ~ 100%

H-Scenes ~ 100%

H-scene dialogue is now complete.

Other Art (Character Design, Portraits) ~ 100%

Quests, Events, and Writing ~ 70%

To do: Write more dialogue.

Testing and Bugfixes ~ 75%

To do: fix currently identified bugs from test build; test release candidate.

I did a lot of writing in the earlier part of the week, and it was definitely fun getting back to it. The later part of the week was occupied with the H-scene progression revamp, which turned out to be a thornier problem than I'd originally reckoned.

The H-Scene Plugin

The basic problem I was trying to solve was that many H-scenes were hard to find - in some cases impossible to get if you missed them and then moved on - and that missing some scenes would lock you out of a bunch more. As I looked back over the logic for getting them, though, I saw some other problems. As the game has grown larger and more complex, it became increasingly difficult to keep track of all possible situations and party configurations, and this could - for instance - lead you to see an H-scene with someone who isn't in your party at the time or other things that don't make sense. And I could see the problem would only get worse.

RPG Maker MV isn't very good at dealing with this sort of complexity out of the box. You can handle all this through the eventing system, but it gets very cumbersome, difficult to read, and difficult to understand (and thus maintain).

I chose to address this in the same way I've addressed lots of other problems since learning how RMMV works under the hood - by writing another plugin. I don't want to go into all the details; I'll just say that people will be much less likely to get locked out of progression by missing a scene and it will be much easier for me to keep track of them and make sure you don't see one that doesn't make sense in the situation you're in. Any campsite can now give you the tent scenes, for starters, but the system is way more flexible than that, and gives me the tools I need to manage increasing complexity.

I had to change the way I track H-scene progression to implement this, but I wrote a function that converts information from current saves over to the new format. Don't worry, your saves are still good!

What Remains:

I still have dialogue to write for parts of the dungeon, including random conversation among the characters. Then there's stuff for a couple of quests - but some of that was already hidden in the game since 0.2! (Did you find it?) And, finally, there's fixing all the bugs that playtesters identified.

Which reminds me, thank you to all the playtesters! You guys really helped out!

Well, anyway, that's all for now. Hopefully you'll be able to play a test version of the full release by this time next week. I'm very excited to almost have this release out, and I want to thank you for your support!