Update on the Update (Cosplay Cafe)

So...I didn't update with a timeline on Monday, huh? There's a reason for that! Sort of. Mostly, that I didn't have a timeline on Monday. I effectively got nothing done on the weekend. Sunday was my birthday and all the peoples insisting that they call and talk to me or visit or whatever, which scraped much of that day. I underestimated how much of that was going to happen, badly, and ended up barely getting my day-job work done. 

On Saturday...technically I actually did get a fair bit done on Saturday. The problem is that it was a case of redoing stuff, not doing new stuff. I started off on Saturday getting to grips with where I was and what I needed to do...only to realize with a sinking pit of despair that I had actually lost something like 40-50% of my design documentation, as well as virtually ALL my notes on my code, when I had those hardware failures. 

I'm not sure if I ever really explain it, but what happened with those was that, during an attempt to repair the first problem (which I didn't know was a failing GPU yet, I thought it might just be a damaged OS, since I'd been having a lot of seemingly unrelated issues) so...I backed everything up to an external drive and wiped the OS. I was careful, I backup up almost everything I needed (except those stupid brush and pen settings for clip studio and photoshop -_-). I backed it all up to the backup drive which I had already stored backup copies to. Nice, logical solution....

The the $%^#$& backup drive died during the short period that I was setting up the new OS and reorganizing everything. No signs of it dying...just poof, dead. It was a high end Seagate External drive, too. 

When it died...I lost both the current working files of virtually all projects I was working on AND the backups I'd made. Since, you know, that was actually my backup drive. Fuck. The only reason all was not lost was that, frankly, I'm seriously paranoid, and I'd periodically backed up the files in a second backup on a third drive. Unfortunately, since those files were backups of backups, I didn't update them regularly. They only existed at all because I'm an Ex-IT guy with a long history of running face-first into Murphy's law. Which...is why I'm still finding stuff that wasn't in those secondary backups. 

Thankfully, the code and images themselves WERE in the backups. Unfortunately, apparently many of the design documents for Cosplay Cafe were not. Likewise, virtually none of the notes-to-self I'd made on what I was intending to do with the code were in that backup either. All of which means that I spent Saturday attempting to both recreate some of the design work I needed for Serena AND reverse engineering some of my own code that I lost my notes on. F^$#.

So. Long story short, I didn't know enough on Monday to give any kind of estimate. Thankfully, In the last couple of days I've gotten a lot done. I still can't give a solid estimate, but I'm currently shooting for releasing the new build on the 21st or 22nd. By the time I crash in a bit, I'll have all of Serena's casual chats coded, and I've already gotten the new location in and working. Plus, I've gotten all the art assets sorted into the code and added most of the stuff I needed to for Serena's relationship panel info. Hopefully, later today, I'll be able to get all her work chats, plus several of the rewards/punishments in. Then finish those on the 20th, plus adding in little bits like new chats for Mira at the new location. Then playtest and fix the inevitable bugs on the 21st. Then...either release or realize I've forgotten something critical and scramble to add whatever it is. The latter option being entirely too likely without the original documentation >_<. So...that's the plan at least. Who knows if that's how it will work out...