Wait, I'm not ready!
1.6 is nearly but not quite ready.
Situation
The problem is that parts of the scene worked fine when I was testing them separately, but now I'm testing them as one coherent play-through I keep spotting problems.
The plan
The new scene has two broad paths – a sex scene on the balcony and a sex scene in the bed. The balcony path is working pretty well, so here's my plan:
Release the scene with just the balcony path working to Patrons
Add in the bed path over the following days
Time estimate
It could be ready tomorrow? If not, shortly afterwards. I promise I'm working really hard on it. I feel like I'm the only guy still working like crazy during this lockdown thing! (Well, also some doctors and nurses I guess. In a way, they're heroes too.)
Lessons learned
Obviously this has taught me that testing a whole scene is better than just testing the individual parts and expecting them to work together. Also I've learned some very important insights about scene structure and pacing, which are going to be immediately useful in 1.7.
We'll get into all this stuff (and more) once this fucking version is ready to share with you, which will be very soon. Thanks to everyone who's keeping the faith with me, you guys are keeping me going. 😔
Comments (28)
Hi All, some of you may know me from occasionally being mentioned in the patreon posts as a coder. I am also one of the discord admins. Crush is alive and still working on the update. I am not here to defend his lack of updates, I just wanted to inform you.
Good to hear that! Wish all of you a good luck.
... been 10 days - anyone heard anything? (I don't get on the Discord channel)
I wonder what excuse Crush will be using this time.
Hey BL4DE, Kaite and vRay *waves*
A month ago Crush told us that his guess for the release of 1.6 would be sometime in March. 30 days and over 6000 dollars' patronage since then, there is now even doubts if 1.6 will ever be released in April. With that much time and funding Crush could have hired and taught another programmer to code none-essential chunks and check for bugs (which renders the argument that Crush is the only one that can code/debug untenable), instead all we are getting is 'soon', 'very soon', 'not yet' and now complete silence for over a week. Crush has been and still is in my opinion a great writer but I now seriously question if he is capable of delivering an increasingly complex project on time. I wish to see at least a small portion of Bangkok before patience runs out and seriously do I hope that Crush can shut me up with the realse of 1.6 in a few hours.
Wow. Really making Crush appreciate his community and excited to release huh?
@everyone above: I checked the discord, the admins on there say Crush is avoiding Discord and Patreon which I can understand would be rather demoralising for a developer trying to clear bugs and stuff on their game. On the other hand I'm also disgruntled at this constant "wait for it...wait for it...and....wait for it..." thing he has going on here. Just posted the above part as information on why crush isn't updating his patreon any further. Hopefully he releases it soon. Yesterday one of the discord admins said they'll be having a meeting with crush to address this and some other complaints after the new release, so hopefully we'll see some changes for the better. For all I know I'm being milked off my money, but it's just $1 for me every month so meh.
It's a pretty common antipattern for developers: you think people will be disappointed with your work so you ignore the reverse of the 80:20 rule (the last 20% will take 80% of the time) and push on. But now it's another day and you're still not there so you feel worse as you tell people "soon" as you ignore Hofstadter's law (it always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's law). Around the third time you do this, you're tired, under more pressure and, frankly, somewhat ashamed so you go comms dark because you just need that bit more time so you push on. How did any project get 10 years behind schedule? One day at a time. Going dark (not communicating) is never the answer. In the absence of information people naturally assume the worst. Tell people what you're doing to fix it. Share what's going on. You would be surprised how many people want you to succeed.
Excuse me, can't the respected author put together the structure of the whole story first, and then make changes in the details? For example, what kind of agent can blink and other functions, can't wait for the overall structure to become complete before slowly polishing? Now the situation is that the whole story is still at a very early stage, and the so-called agents have not even really started her journey. In version 1.6, can't you release the beta first and then slowly hotfix it? SORRY FOR MY ENGLISH.
Imagine it's been a week since this update.
Broke: Crush wanted to make a small project as a hobby, but it got out of proportion and is now crawling to death in development hell. Woke: Crush wanted to make a shitload of money by milking horny retards out of their. Bespoke: Crushstation has been dead for weeks after catching the Coronavirus and the other members of the team behind Female Agent are trying to milk as much money as possible before announcing Crush's death.
It probably wouldn't hurt to give another status update. You do great work and I know how it is when you are really close and you just want to get it out the door but it has been a week. Everything OK?
I believe in you, quality over quantity in this phase is the right call. That said, the future content must be way way quicker to implement (like x8 quicker), whatever the means, or this pj will be a fail.
t. Crushstation Internet Defense Force.
Crush: SOON Us: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Crush: Time estimate - It could be ready tomorrow? If not, shortly afterwards. 4 Days later...
Hope we can hear some good news sooner Crush.
For real, starting to feel like star citizen over here.
Ok, I won't say anything for today: it would be like shooting on the Red Cross.
lmao it would be funny to shoot it tho
Dude, you seriously need to find a better way to handle beta testing because right now this is wholly dependent on you, and you're only one guy, who is doing almost everything. I know how hard it can be, but you need to start to let go of a bit of this project so that it can move faster. Holding on so tight suffocates progress. I really like the game idea, the character generation, etc but the pace of meaningful, playable development has been glacial, and the last 2 months' updates don't lend much confidence that we're going to get to Bangkok in a playable way in 2020. Please consider leveraging your community more. You coordinate and direct, let everyone else find the problems and suggest fixes. It will still be your project.
From reading the reports it looks like he has the content ready, but isn't satisfied and decides to redo it. I think that he should release it and move on - and eventually rewrite material further down the road when he wants to polish the finished product.
Good luck! Excited to see the completed scene and have your talents unleashed on Bangkok ☺️
Please take it as a critics, don't mean to be rude. I liked the default story. You made a click -> read -> didn't like it -> go back -> choose another option....like with wet T-shirt competition. Simple as that. I know that you are trying to make something special and maybe challenging/"making more fun" for you, but what was important for me is your writing, your greatly described scenes and slow corrupting of the MC. Now we need to wait for a scene, which we already know how it ends (and all hope it won't to be too complicated now) to get to Bangkok and finaly read more of your skillful writing. I only hope that all making the 2 scenes perfect is realy that much of an improvement and at least you learned what you needed. Thank you for making the game
If the problems with the sex scene are related to story quality and not bugs, you can still release it and get input from the community. Maybe it's not that bad, and maybe it doesn't need to be perfect so it might be good enough even if you don't think so. It's just an optional scene before the agent gets to Bangkok after all. The lessons learned for scene structuring can be used for the new scenes.
just release the damn thing, you can patch it tomorrow you know? nobody on here will be mad ;P
Is the balcony route not fully functional right now? Does the first bulletpoint in the plan involve some extra work to release that route to patreons?