Progress report 19

Hey hey, we're back!

Had a busy few days, and might as well write a report to share what's up.

Not much irl to write about. Had some work done at home, and I finally had some measurements taken with battling with the ants. Still a huge amount of holes to plug with a chalk gun, but progress. Important medical visit today too, so lets see what they say.

Game progress wise has been going well. I kinda hoped I'd be rounding it fully now for testing, but it's taking longer to properly polish everything for ep2 alpha. I've decided to truly try and polish as many things I can for ep2 test, so the last third (ep3) could be much smoother and a bit quicker, and if I do get some comments about anything UI/UX related, I have plenty of time to change, and not panic at the very last testing.

Renders done as shown on sneak peeks. Went through all of them and had quite a few things to fix/some even redo (in total 140 minor clips/changes). Started going through game testing and adding music/sounds/transitions, 15% done.

The last two weeks in general could be summarized as "painful learning". I hate how often I've been corrected, and schooled on how to do things, but it's necessary to improve. I learnt multiple new things about Photoshop, got a newer update running too. I got bullied when I talked with people proficient with it how I did things 🤣But, I can also do some things on my own better, like better blurred pics:

I used to "smudge" before, but that left weird aftermarks on bodies... The guy with glasses here had giga thicc ties with the old way I did things 😂😂
I've also taken a look at "effects" for text dialogue ingame, another thing I postponed for later. Not to worry, I'm not going to use some crazy effects constantly. Just had a few instances where it could either help in funny situations (like dots ... appearing slowly), and a few other situations I can't share now.
Then, I've decided to finally deal with something I've been avoiding for months (literally).
With the first bit of "coding" (the dialogue effects), I also took a look at the commissioned phone from Gary. God I hate being so dumb with renpy and coding... Anyone with remotely coding understanding does my work 10 times faster. Oh well.
After a lot of trial and error, both in trying to change some bits to my liking, but to also understand it, it's finally shaping into a nice look. The perfectionist in me is quite annoying for this. Still few things to change, maybe few extra features to add. But, as of right now, it does work, and you can see a random example how it could look here. Gary's stock messages and one extra long message to test here:

Overall, happy how it's going. Sure I'd love alpha testing of ep2 to start asap, but I'm even happier to finally polish some things that've been at the back of my work log for months. Big thanks to Gary, Pax, Messe and Cari for each of them letting me live in their dms to ask questions during last few weeks.

Love you all
Kat <3