February is a Month of Miscalculations.

... but overall, things are okay! Mostly. But let's start with the things that went as planned.

1. Draft. The draft was finished on February 5, as I expected. Apparently, the fact that it took me a very long time to write it and therefore I didn't miscalculate with estimates. It has a total of... ready?… a total of 940 pages in it.

In the joy of it, I even allowed myself then one of two days off this month. Alas, then marches here...

Army of Miscalculations.

2. Proofreading, editing, and corrections. The idea of quickly proofreading a draft in 2-3 days and immediately starting to integrate it failed. With a bang. Because this time there are not 200, and not 300, but 900+ pages. Somehow such a "little thing" fell out of my planning horizon.

So proofreading, editing and corrections took about 10 days. It may seem like an unnecessary step, but, believe me, it only seems that way. Before integration into the game, the text must not have any snags and flaws. Otherwise, each of them will require much more time for corrections in the game itself.

3. Arts. The remaining arts left for finalization also brought an unexpected challenge. Most of the finished art was about the landscape, but I left the portraits for dessert. And that's where the problems popped up.

One of the ideas had to be canceled. And that's why I can tell you about it. The idea was to add some effects or accessories to Selene's existing outfits. Yes, that should have been one of the surprises of this update. But it won't. Not yet, anyway.

A little more detail. Now the game determines the portrait by the sequence number of the clothing variable. Just like that. I'm comfortable working with it. To be able to add or remove something to the existing set of clothes, the boolean algorithm must check two or more variables. But since I'm not a programmer, but a humanitarian fiddling with these Dark Arts of Machine Subjection, I somehow missed such a "small" detail that all these variables must be initialized initially. Aha, I can almost feel how pro programmers have already got the essence of the problem and are now giggling at me on the other side of the screen...

Long story short, for those who don't get it. Implementing such a system will break your saves in the game and require a new game. The other way (to not break your saves) is to manually write a bulky logical code every time Selene changes/removes her clothes. Which, in turn, would be torture for me, because it would be terribly inconvenient and would multiply the work, increasing the release time of all subsequent updates. So it's not worth it.

So I canceled the idea of this new system. And Selene lost one possible accessory. I also had to redo a couple of scenes, and I had to delete one completely from the draft. Because they were about that exact thing. Worse, I still had 20 unused new variations of all of Selene's portraits. Because I'm so "smart" that I made them first, and only then did to think how I would implement them in the context of the code.

On the good side. As of this writing, all artwork (including portraits) is 100% ready and even integrated into the game.

As for this system, where Selene's appearance will depend not on one but on two or more variables - just this morning, on a fresh brain, I had an idea how to do it elegantly without breaking your saves and without writing code manually in every such situation. Because I could... just make another section of base code and use it later. Like, up to a certain point the game will use, conditionally, algorithm_1 (with one clothing variable), and after that point algorithm_2 (with several variables initialized at once later and not at the game's beginning). Should work. Theoretically.

Nevertheless, trying to implement a surprise feature when working on such a big update was a definite mistake. There's a lot that could go wrong, and time isn't waiting... Besides, I don't know if it's such a good idea anymore. So I've left this idea for the future, maybe I'll think about it when working on 1.9. Because 1.8 is already too big to complicate my life even more by adding such features on the fly. As they say, better done than perfect.

And Selene will still be able to get her accessory. Just later, though. I left the plot hook for that in the draft. It's just that it will now become part of one of the possible clothing sets in the future. Or (if I do decide to implement the new system) will be a possible addition to almost any clothing set.

4. Translation. Toward the end of the month, I finally got around to doing what I had originally intended to do at the end of the first week of February. Namely: translation, integrating the text into the game, and testing scene by scene…

And then, aha, there was another miscalculation. And it was again related to the size of the update. How to explain this better... Well, let's say that on the draft already on page 2, there is a transition to page 85. All of which your Selene could miss, either by your choice or (under other circumstances) because of a check fail.

With previous updates, I was integrating 20-30 draft pages a day into the game, and then testing them. And such long transitions were often just not available there. In other words, I had a problem with how to integrate this 900-pages "fatso" (1.8) into the game without having to do testing every time such a long transition would be added (and there are more than a few of them in this update).

As a result, I decided to break the update into several uneven pieces, where each one ends with a sort of "bottle neck" with narrow choices. This way I can test the whole piece in the game at once. But the first such "bottle neck" happens on page 120 of the draft. Then another one after 100 pages. And another one after... almost 300 pages. There are a couple more.

Well, I'm going to do the integration into the game in these unequal pieces. Not scene after scene like I'm used to. That way I can test them meaningfully, which means I'll save a lot of time so that the update will eventually come out sooner.

Just yesterday I finished translating and making corrections (there are always corrections) to these first 120 pages. I'll double-check everything again today, and tomorrow I'll start integrating them into the game. The time has come. Although the month is almost over, yeah.

Bottom line.

I know I was going to proudly announce the % of the playable part of the game at the end Feb. And in this very end, I won't be able to do it until March. Great, just great…

Regardless, the development of the update has already reached the final straight line. Except... except this one's a bloody 900-page straight line. That's a big one, yeah. Oh, well. The update release is only getting closer anyway.