27/12 Patreon devlog (Patreon)

Hey Guys!

Esh here, with our post-Christmas dev log and the last update of 2019!

It's been a really crazy year, hasn't it?

In the last half of 2018, I moved overseas to Australia where I've now been living for over a year. 2019 involved a lot of just adapting to Australia and getting used to how things are over here. 

The biggest part of 2019, of course, was Changeling's release back in January. It's been almost a year! Changeling has gone on to, at the very least, meet expectations when it comes to sales - something that ensures we're able to keep going and keep making games!

Releasing the game came with so many other new experiences - the joy (and sometimes frustration) of watching reviews come in and seeing people share their thoughts about the game...

Dealing with the dreaded "I don't like the art, but..." comments...

Meeting a ton of other developers - encountering some of the more unpleasant sides of the VN dev community while also meeting some incredible developers with their own amazing projects.

Meeting a lot of other really great people, watching our Discord server and Patreon community grow. 

We wrapped up Changeling's Kickstarter by finishing up all the rewards, something that felt monumental in the light of some severe drama regarding other dev teams. And we announced our new project, Gilded Shadows. 

We've participated in Steam sales, which has been a fun experience! And we released a new demo into the world and introduce everyone to the craziness that is Gilded Shadows!

It has been a crazy and busy year.  Heading into 2020, we are expecting it to be just as busy and bonkers, with our final public demo release coming up in January, then a Kickstarter in February. 

And then the long road to writing and developing GS.

Speaking of that, this week - being a holiday week - was less productive, as you can imagine.

Writing:

This week, my writing mostly consisted of making corrections based on beta tester feedback for Chapter Three.

So far, testers haven't found too many issues. Just some typos and one semi-significant continuity issue which has now been fixed.

Art:

None that I can recall.  I think I worked on some GUI stuff and that was it.

Coding: 

If I could insert a really irritated looking emoji here, I would.

I've been giving a lot of thought to the Gilded Shadows glossary. 

For the time being, it serves its purpose - which is to mainly give players a general idea of what the full feature will be like. But the current set up is really not very functional.

The index is not organised in any particular way for one thing - it's just an alphabetical list. It works okay with a glossary this size, but the finished glossary is going to be much, much bigger. Probably at least twice the size it is now. Which means that I need some organisation.

I'll probably need three layers of organisation - a main index with a few categories, then the pages for each category, then the articles themselves. This part isn't that hard to do.

But one thing that has been annoying me for a while is how much I've had to limit some articles due to space limitations. I really need a better solution for this.

Creating new pages based on the amount of content is possible but comes with some issues (we did something like this in Changeling, for the journal - where it created a new page of the content reached a certain length. It was really annoying to get it to work). For instance, I don't want to have to create a new page if there's *one* extra line in the entry. That's just annoying.

Pages also means having to do some sort of button based navigation which means more clicking, which is...annoying.

The logical choice, to me, is adding a scroll bar.

So I've been trying to learn about scroll bars in renpy and set one up.

It has not been going well. At all. I can't make it work. I can't even make their example code work in the Gilded Shadows project - but I did make it work in a completely different project. So I'm slowly trying to rebuild the GS wiki in this other project, piece by piece. This should help me figure out exactly when and where it breaks so I can identify the actual problem - and then fix it.

I kind of at least wanted to have the new index done for the release of the last part of the demo but I don't know if that will happen now since I'm having to tackle the problem of making the viewport (IE the scrollbar) work at all.

So yeah, coding wise I've been doing less actual productive coding and more trying to figure out why Renpy is being a huge, stupid jerk about scrollbars and viewports. =P

Demo:

Chapter Three went out to beta testers. I've not actually heard that much feedback from them beyond some typos that were posted. Which, of course, that's what we need to know so we can fix them. But I haven't heard much general feedback about the actual events in Chapter Three.

I know it's holiday time so it's possible people just haven't been able to play it. But I'm thinking to release Chapter Three to patrons soon regardless.

I've tried to create a special patreon Gilded Shadows project on Itch.io, which I can then connect to patreon and get a single link I can send out to everyone vs generating individual links myself (which is just a little time consuming).

So we'll see how well this works for getting early release content to you guys! Hopefully it will be a little more convenient for us going forward. OwO

At any rate, I'm hoping having separate beta testing and patreon access projects will be a little more convenient. OwO

Upcoming Week:

I'm not totally sure how this week is going to look for me as I have my wedding anniversary and New Years coming up. 

It's not bad to have so many things to celebrate in such a short amount of time, but it does make for busy times, lots of family time, and lots of interruptions. 

I tend to work even through holidays because I get bored during downtime and working keeps me occupied and, well, *not* bored.

So I'm sure I'll work on stuff and have more updates for you next week.

Hopefully I can finally, finally get back to art this week and work on some KS related artwork and wallpapers. I've been distracted from finishing those up for far too long! 

Anyway, sorry I didn't really have any images for you this week. Maybe by next time I'll have a brand new glossary design to show you guys! OwO Maaaaybe.

See you then! 

(Also, Monday - tomorrow for me - should be our monthly dev talk and I am I hoping I actually remember it this time! 8D LoL)

~Esh