Weekly Update/Preview Nov 13-20

For me, it's been a witchy week. That's only slightly out of season! Feels like a lot has happened but looking over the actual tweets I've put up I don't feel like there's a huge amount of insight to actually give about them. Still, here we are. Talkin' 'bout the stuff that has happened.

Beta 1 and 1.1 Release

Beta 1 was uhh... Frustrating. I'm trying not to dwell on it all that much, but it had bugs, it was broken, and I didn't handle it all that well. Too many attempts at quick patch/update versions that probably just left people confused about which version they even had downloaded. I'll need to take that as a lesson going forward. The game has kind of reached a point (probably quite a while ago) where actually thoroughly testing every single interaction for buggy weirdness isn't possible, and I should take that into account in various ways when determining when to release.

So that's some postmortem stuff to take away, which is good. A lot better than getting caught up in negatives like I did for... Most of the day after the release.

As for 1.1 though, it's pretty decent. There are a couple of bugs that I'm aware of that I hadn't caught before, but they aren't HUGE. I'm not thinking that a 1.2 is all that likely, though you'll have to tell me if any of these bugs seem so huge that they NEED corrected immediately:

• Sucker Punch can cause a game crash if used while under certain curses  (Pity for sure, probably Craven, maybe some others? Things that needs  to assess the condition of a monster being attacked).
• Coraline's buyable events have small bugs, with "Good Faith Offer" not checking the total value of tasks completed and "Other Knights 3" not being added to your research notes after viewing.
• The "Deeper Curse Embracing" NG+ option has a bug where it sets all  curses to be stuck at rank 2 forever rather than just embraced ones.
• I left in a signal that I was messing around with prior to release in order to reset animations on the ally tokens (the actual circles that represent each of the knights are internally called AllyTokens/CampAllyTokens, like a board game token). This signal causes them to attempt to call a non-existent associated function at the end of every animation, which doesn't actually break anything, but it might look scary  if you play the game through a command prompt and got console output for some reason.

There are a few other minor things here and there that I've found and fixed up internally already, but all in all 1.1 is very playable and so I don't feel terribly stressed about it. If anything I feel relatively happy on the turnaround time from the release of Beta 1 to Beta 1.1, which is more than I can say about Alpha 16 and 16.1 I guess.

Anyway, moving forward, I'm not sure exactly when/how Beta 2 is going to be scheduled. While work has begun, only having like 10 days left... Well, we'll see how things go.

Here's a butt

Fun fact, the 3D model for the Witch has literally always had no panties. That's basically canon to her character, even though it hasn't really come up at all. She's exceedingly, deliciously flat, and has no real reason to wear a bra, so why not skip out on the bottom as well?

But yeah, the winner of the poll was, by a rather generous margin, the Witch. I had a couple of scenarios that I expected in mind when I decided on how I was going to do this poll, and the Witch winning it was one of them. I don't know if it was the most likely one. I don't think I got that far into trying to forecast it in my head. As far as I saw it, one of these things would happen:

• People would take it as a waifu popularity contest and one of the main 3 knights would win.
• People would see Olivia as an option and jump on voting for her because she's new and people want to see the new girl.
• People would vote based on the general love of the Witch that I hear from all over the place.

And I didn't have a problem with any of these things, so now we've entered timeline number 3. The Witch is popular because she's interesting and fun. I don't like to brag about myself, but I do generally think that (when I can get myself to write) the stuff I write is good, and the Witch herself is a character I'm quite proud of. Even if she feels a bit wacky or mad, there is still an art to writing that kind of character. I don't have her *holds up spork* or whatever, there is a lot of free association going on that generally connects what she says and what I want her to convey, often looping through references or multiple jumps of logic. It's something of an exercise in wordplay that I do find satisfying to pull off, and appreciate that others enjoy it as well.

That said, I haven't actually attempted to do it during/with lewd situations yet. I vaguely recall some people expressing skepticism that it would even be possible. It may end up feeling odd, or maybe even difficult to pull off, which is part of why I made this (and some other) more lewd picture. It's a visual aid I guess. An eyeful of butt.

And I guess that flows into the other tweet, as this is also a visual thing.

Personality Conveyed

This is one of those things that I had wanted to implement with the chat messages in the first place,  but I didn't end up doing it. Maybe I thought it would take longer than it actually did, or maybe I didn't think it would be worth the time/effort. I don't actually recall.

Regardless, after adding it in now, it's another one of those little touches that actually really does help convey personality of the characters. That's pretty dang important, because I think my character writing is MUCH stronger than my setting/plot writing. Those other things are good enough for what they are, but... I dunno. I guess just in general when I look at any of the game's current characters, I feel generally happy with all of them, but when I look at the setting and how little of the plot has so far been conveyed, I feel more like "yeah it's serviceable".

So I guess I should get back to writing then.

... Soon.