Status update Episode 10

This week, I tested unlocking all collectibles and found areas to fix. It was mostly bugs related to unlocking 2D art and some gallery issues that I worked on.

After that, I extended some of the content in Jill's and Sage's branches to give them extra love and attention. Next week, I will continue doing that with Bella's and Josy & Maya's branches. The Others branch will receive similar treatment the week after that.

They are few and far between, but I still find bugs when I play. Some bugs have a big effect on gameplay - like skipping through an entire free-roam event without doing it properly, showing an empty map screen with no places to teleport during free-roams, or messing up the save/load screen after playing a mini-game.

I'm also finding repeated sentences and phrases in the dialogue - these can be hard to spot as I've written almost 30,000 lines of code/dialogue for this episode, counting only the main dialogue files. But the bugs have been easy to fix. At this point, the hard part is finding them, as I have to play differently than I'm used to and try to break the game. I'm sure beta testers will find even more of these issues.

I plan to add bios to the episode soon. I've reached a point where I feel confident there will be no major changes to the episode. I've been testing the new Stats app changes this week and am very happy with how they work. I use this app more than I thought, and the Party Planner tab, particularly, is very useful.

The updated ETA for the animation queue after this week is ~18-19 days. There haven't been any speedbumps in rendering this week. Mid-November is still a promising target for beta testing and proofreading.

The remaining weekly status updates for episode 10 won't be big, but I still want to touch base with you weekly until beta testing starts. There's no shortage of work on my end, and when I feel like I need a break from testing, I will start planning the development of episode 11.

I have already started by adding content to existing mini-games for episode 11. The mini-game work for episode 11 will be much easier and faster compared to episode 10, as the shells to new mini-games were completed during episode 10 development, and all I have to do now is add more content.

Creating all these new features, which will now be re-used with ease, was part of what made episode 10's development take extra time. In less than two days ' work, I've already knocked out six mini-game updates for episode 11. That's six mini-games that are good to go for v0.11.0 right now. That tells me it was worth the time and energy I spent coding the backbone for everything this year. Streamlining the mini-games for the rest of Season 3, with some use in Season 4, has done much for the game's future development.

Have a nice weekend.

Dr PinkCake