Haven's Port - Progress Report

Alright, folks! Good news/bad news time. First off, the good news. That good news being that I've got all the assets captured and edited for the first 8 scenes of the new build. And, if all goes well, I expect to have the majority of them actually implemented by the time I crash tomorrow morning. So, yay for that, and also yay for that fact that this is a 31 day month so I still have time to hit my goals.

Less 'yay' is the reason you're only now getting the first progress report this month. I went to begin work on Chastity Quest on Monday of last week, only to discover that somehow, between last month and this month, the modded copy of Skyrim I'm using for Chastity Quest had decided to lag like crazy. I STILL have no idea what the fuck happened. I hadn't made any changes at all to the game yet, since I actually had everything prepped LAST month for the first round of this month's content. Nor had I made any real changes to my PC or OS since June. Which meant I've been UTTERLY aggravated to spend an ENTIRELY FREAKING WEEK trying to fix it. I've done just about freaking everything. Re-installs, driver rollbacks, moving the game from one HDD to an SSD and back, even undervolting my CPU in case temperature throttling was the source of the issue!

In the end, after a week of pulling my hair out and cursing with increasing inventiveness, I managed to mostly stabilize the game. Enough, at least, to do video capture if I'm very careful and extremely patient. At this point, I'm at a complete loss as to what else to do and am thus gritting my teeth and simply baring with it. My last suspicion is that the high-performance laptop I've been using for pretty much everything is simply starting to feel all the things I've put it through. It's only about 1.5 years old, so it shouldn't be, but...I've had a lot of trouble with it in the last few months. I really really want to build a proper gaming/rendering desktop...but I'm kinda on a tight budget, since, you know, deciding to give game development a serious go and letting most of my contract work die so I could focus on the games :-(.

Anyway, thanks to the fact that this is a 31 day month, there's a pretty good chance I'll still get everything I was hoping for it on this build. I was, if you remember my warning from earlier this month, shooting for a relatively small build this time (though still around 15-16 scenes). Let's just all cross our fingers and hope nothing else goes wrong, right?

*note* if you notice a small quality fall off to some of the assets...it's because I've had to make tweaks to make the game as stable as I could :-(. I've tried to keep it from overly impacting the visual quality...