October Update and Apology
I had been holding back an update like this as I've been trying to push out this demo more and more....But time and time again is teaching me about "Don't give out dates, don't try to judge how much work is left".
Let me better explain myself:
-Last month many of you knew I was eagerly hoping to get Vampire Lust out the door before October. A nice pre-halloween release of sorts. NPNG finished all of the art assists, and even some extra before my end was even done, so this falls not on the artist, but on my own abilities.
-In lue of how much was left, I at first didn't forsee much more. Some more NPC's to add towards the HUB, a few events in the forest to do timings with, and finish the map pathings for the extra explorables, some deliberately unaccessable in the demo build. THis is where things started to go wrong, as I clearly misjudged how much would spiral before me.
-The first big issue was the battle system breaking. A few people who got to see the stream, and those who watched after that, got to see this first hand. At first I figured this was just a gaff on my end, I overwritten some newer code with some older by sheer mistake. As such the AI wasn't quite working 'correctly', and it wasn't causing the right KO's among other odd faults. I said this would be an 'easy' fix...I was wrong.
-Turns out the sheer complexity of some of the foes was getting the betterment of the AI system I was using, and I was just witnessing the strings starting to unravel. Shown here is just a simple snippit of a lot of the 'background' work that goes into making the AI work correctly, lots of double checking, pre-processing, making sure the target's in the right status to do the next attack, and it's all 'order of operations' so the highest command (when it's valid) will be used over any others (By adjusting TP usage and earnage as well, attacks only goes off of the foe has the TP to make use of it). When I only had about 100 or so lines of this stuff, it was fine....It's when I started crossing with foes with well over 500 lines like this I feel the games ability to keep 'reading' stuff starts to screw up with the baseline script I was provided with...
-The last part is my own crying shame, as I had been kinda noted on it's touchy nature in ProjectQB, but trying to do map tile events, via varables instead of sitting an event on each tile (The slime and liquid latex areas are good examples of this in action) broke on me as well working here. In ProjectQB, the leader is always a given no matter what. Q-Bee is forever your 'leader' as far as the game cares to keep track of such stats. In Vampire Lust though, I started doing stuff based off of who would be in the front of the team, checking to make sure when a player had someone out, it would adjust events around this. Three girls, at least 2 different cases, and with one situation (A mud pit), a 3rd on where you entered it with the wrong person, tried to swap towards the 'correct' one, but because they where already muddy, you just had to work with what you already had. This in turn caused that to just backfire timing wise, and the script just would cause really weird odditys.
-Last 2-3 weeks as been me trying to debug both of these elements, and as such not making any real progress. Along with the extra stress of some IRL matters, among the month passing me by with people both eager to see this, and others quite free to be displeased with someone with the working speed of a mule when stuff like this -breaks-, the stress has been building up on a passive level, and it all kinda came ahead a few days ago where I ended up outright bluescreening my PC while working (One of the RAM chips I've had started to go faulty. It's been replaced thanks towards S'Zira though) and I kinda just broke down a bit myself.
It's hard for me at these times to admit that while yeah, I've got some level of skill, enough to pull off these games and the like, when I hit my own errors and faults, it's where things become slower then tar on progress as my ability to fix the higher end levels of issues is FAR more slower and tedious. When it's just events outright being faulty, that's normally one thing. Sit down, redo some timing and placement, that tends to fix that out. When it's on the script level though...I don't know how many people recalled last year when the battler script ended up breaking hard on me, and it took me well over 8 months to find the fault and at last fix it so that the game itself crashing on repeated battles wouldn't happen. 8 months of not really advancing on anything else. 8 months of slowly and near mindlessly testing stuff in the hopes that this time I found the flaw roosted in this Ruby stringed mess. I don't want to say this would take this long, but I've already screwed up 2 dates before hand, and I'm not going to give out a third when stuff like this is screwing up before me.
So my plan is to first...Just take a break. I need to clear my head, not banging it on this matter, and come back clear minded to better look at whats wrong and how. Then, I'll be taking the time to solve and fix these issues one by one, trying to give updates when they happen and I'm more successful getting all of this out the door. If this means people are figuring "You missed 2 deadlines, and now you're unsure of when it'll come out?" kills any trust that I had, sadly that's...just going to be how it is. I can't sit here and lie though, and digging myself deep to try to untangle this mess hasn't gotten me any closer with how fast the days have ticked by ether. So I'm biting the bullet, admitting m faults, and putting this out there for everyone to see and understand what's going on. I'm sorry for disappointing many of you, including those who keep supporting us. All I can say is that NPNG's at least going to keep working on art assists, given we already finalized what all we are going to do with the game material wise, so they'll still be updates in the WIP chatter of the Discord if nothing else.
Let me better explain myself:
-Last month many of you knew I was eagerly hoping to get Vampire Lust out the door before October. A nice pre-halloween release of sorts. NPNG finished all of the art assists, and even some extra before my end was even done, so this falls not on the artist, but on my own abilities.
-In lue of how much was left, I at first didn't forsee much more. Some more NPC's to add towards the HUB, a few events in the forest to do timings with, and finish the map pathings for the extra explorables, some deliberately unaccessable in the demo build. THis is where things started to go wrong, as I clearly misjudged how much would spiral before me.
-The first big issue was the battle system breaking. A few people who got to see the stream, and those who watched after that, got to see this first hand. At first I figured this was just a gaff on my end, I overwritten some newer code with some older by sheer mistake. As such the AI wasn't quite working 'correctly', and it wasn't causing the right KO's among other odd faults. I said this would be an 'easy' fix...I was wrong.
-Turns out the sheer complexity of some of the foes was getting the betterment of the AI system I was using, and I was just witnessing the strings starting to unravel. Shown here is just a simple snippit of a lot of the 'background' work that goes into making the AI work correctly, lots of double checking, pre-processing, making sure the target's in the right status to do the next attack, and it's all 'order of operations' so the highest command (when it's valid) will be used over any others (By adjusting TP usage and earnage as well, attacks only goes off of the foe has the TP to make use of it). When I only had about 100 or so lines of this stuff, it was fine....It's when I started crossing with foes with well over 500 lines like this I feel the games ability to keep 'reading' stuff starts to screw up with the baseline script I was provided with...
-The last part is my own crying shame, as I had been kinda noted on it's touchy nature in ProjectQB, but trying to do map tile events, via varables instead of sitting an event on each tile (The slime and liquid latex areas are good examples of this in action) broke on me as well working here. In ProjectQB, the leader is always a given no matter what. Q-Bee is forever your 'leader' as far as the game cares to keep track of such stats. In Vampire Lust though, I started doing stuff based off of who would be in the front of the team, checking to make sure when a player had someone out, it would adjust events around this. Three girls, at least 2 different cases, and with one situation (A mud pit), a 3rd on where you entered it with the wrong person, tried to swap towards the 'correct' one, but because they where already muddy, you just had to work with what you already had. This in turn caused that to just backfire timing wise, and the script just would cause really weird odditys.
-Last 2-3 weeks as been me trying to debug both of these elements, and as such not making any real progress. Along with the extra stress of some IRL matters, among the month passing me by with people both eager to see this, and others quite free to be displeased with someone with the working speed of a mule when stuff like this -breaks-, the stress has been building up on a passive level, and it all kinda came ahead a few days ago where I ended up outright bluescreening my PC while working (One of the RAM chips I've had started to go faulty. It's been replaced thanks towards S'Zira though) and I kinda just broke down a bit myself.
It's hard for me at these times to admit that while yeah, I've got some level of skill, enough to pull off these games and the like, when I hit my own errors and faults, it's where things become slower then tar on progress as my ability to fix the higher end levels of issues is FAR more slower and tedious. When it's just events outright being faulty, that's normally one thing. Sit down, redo some timing and placement, that tends to fix that out. When it's on the script level though...I don't know how many people recalled last year when the battler script ended up breaking hard on me, and it took me well over 8 months to find the fault and at last fix it so that the game itself crashing on repeated battles wouldn't happen. 8 months of not really advancing on anything else. 8 months of slowly and near mindlessly testing stuff in the hopes that this time I found the flaw roosted in this Ruby stringed mess. I don't want to say this would take this long, but I've already screwed up 2 dates before hand, and I'm not going to give out a third when stuff like this is screwing up before me.
So my plan is to first...Just take a break. I need to clear my head, not banging it on this matter, and come back clear minded to better look at whats wrong and how. Then, I'll be taking the time to solve and fix these issues one by one, trying to give updates when they happen and I'm more successful getting all of this out the door. If this means people are figuring "You missed 2 deadlines, and now you're unsure of when it'll come out?" kills any trust that I had, sadly that's...just going to be how it is. I can't sit here and lie though, and digging myself deep to try to untangle this mess hasn't gotten me any closer with how fast the days have ticked by ether. So I'm biting the bullet, admitting m faults, and putting this out there for everyone to see and understand what's going on. I'm sorry for disappointing many of you, including those who keep supporting us. All I can say is that NPNG's at least going to keep working on art assists, given we already finalized what all we are going to do with the game material wise, so they'll still be updates in the WIP chatter of the Discord if nothing else.
