Progress Report #49 - New graphic artist and... Some bad news...

Hey lads!

Let's start with some good news. Thanks to all of your support, I could finally afford a 2nd graphic artist! Meet ThatsWhatSheSaid! Same as me and my other graphic artist, Peter, she lives in Poland and is working in the game industry as an indie game dev. I believe that this great new addition to the project will increase both - game quality and development speed. None of her work will appear in v0.22, but I can already sneakpeak some of the v0.23 stuff. So, there will be 2 new key features about her work. 

First, demanded for ages, support for skin colors! But we will got a step further, and you will be able to set whatever color you want, instead of the predefined colors. There's more! The very same color system will also be used by eyes, eyebrows, hairs and... clothes! So if you want to make Jane with red eyes and blue skin (for whatever reason), or make all of her clothes in the same color, then you can! It will be a lot of work, so I'll give a bit more info on the matter in the future progress reports. 

Second feature will be about 2 art styles for faces. You will be able to choose between more western/cartoonish or manga-ish art styles. On the pictures above you can see a quick, rough draft of the heads (still work in progress and far from finished!). Same as before, more detailed info will appear in the future, but I hope you are as excited as I am!

Ok, now let's get to the bad news and kill all the excitement. Last week I've spent on trying to fix the Android version and I failed hard. Without being able to reproduce the issue on any of my devices, I had to depend on few awesome lads from Discord, who could test it from time to time, and you can imagine how time consuming and inappropriate way of doing this it is, especially when I can test it only when some of them are online. By all means, I'm not whining about the testers! I'm really grateful that these few people agreed to waste their time in order to help me, but the issue happened in v0.17 where we added and changed so much stuff (it took 2 months to release an update instead of the usual 1 month) that I can't pinpoint the issue. That's why I'm leaving the Android version broken (I won't remove it from the download, because it still works for some people, but I'll add the in-game pop-up informing about the problem). At worst case I might have to buy a new phone just to try fixing the issue T_T But for now I give up, since I have an update to release and trying to fix it blindly won't get me anywhere. And as mentioned many times, It's my first time developing game for Android, so there's still a lot of stuff I don't know about it :( Well... Good side to this is that I optimized the game a bit and hopefully I didn't break anything this time...

I have a bit more of bad stuff. For the last few days my health is a bit worse (thank you, my kidneys!), but it's kinda funny how a man can get used to the pain and live with it, so I didn't touch any painkillers in a long, long time. And lastly, since I wasted a lot of time on fixing Android and hiring new artist, I won't have time to remake Kevin's Diner in v0.22. Background, trait and achievement system will appear normally in the game, and I'll try to put some event as well, if possible. Despite the team growing, I'm still doing most of the work alone, so fixing bugs, looking for people, getting rekt by sickness etc. all takes time I could spend on new content. That's how it works, sadly.

That's it for now. There will be probably one more progress report (if there's anything worth mentioning) before the release of the v0.22. We will see.

Cheers!