Progress Report 2021-07-20

Hi friends, 

I just wanted to do a quick progress report outside of my regular schedule. There are a lot of things happening right now in terms of getting this chapter finished. 

On the writing side, I have completed the last of the combat scenes and have moved on to the last scene with Zenaida and the MC leaving Rona. There are technically 4 versions of this scene (depending on your previous choices). I am hoping to get these done this week, though I am slowing down quite a bit since I'm pretty exhausted at this point. My new goal is to get the content finished by Saturday, and then finish editing, code it, and add it to the alpha build.  

In addition to finishing the content, I have a couple pages worth of edits and fixes to make, on top of all the bugs and typos the playtesting team has caught. Some of these are quick fixes, others will take a little more attention, but I do want the game to be as polished as possible before its public launch. 

I am also going to be doing another UI overhaul. I had originally only planned to add dark mode, but I found a new UI template yesterday and played around with it... and I really like the results. To the point where I think I want to finish this overhaul before the public build updates. 

The template is for SugarCube only and is created by cerberus. 

Since most of my assets are already created, it's mostly just tweaking things to my liking and cleaning up a lot of CSS. I am designing it as a dark mode first and then I will be flipping it around for a light mode that keeps the original UI's colours intact. Thankfully, the CSS is a lot cleaner this time, so it's not going to be as time consuming as creating a whole other mode would be for the old UI. 

I've got a pretty decent start on it already, but I am putting it aside for now to finish writing Chapter 1. My plan right now is to update the alpha build, and then add any UI changes while the last round of playtesting and bug fixing happens. While a new UI does add a lot of work to the end of July, there are a few reasons I want to go ahead with it:

• I've never been happy with the base SugarCube UI; while I've made a lot of changes to it, it has a particular look that bothers me that I've never been able to change
• I've always wanted the UI bar to be collapsible from either the top or the bottom
• A cleaner look overall
• With a change this large, it's better to do it during Chapter 1 than to wait until later in game development

Because of bug fixes and the impending UI change, you are not going to be able to keep your alpha build saves after all these changes are done. (I think there was one update last month where I prematurely said the alpha build was stable... whoops 😅). If you are playing new content right now, please just keep that in mind! I am sorry for the inconvenience. 💗