Weekly report 195
Hi everybody.
I hope you've had a good week. Here's a summary of what Chestnut and I have been doing:
Chestnut:
She worked on editing the art of the beginning of the content of Gomira, doing variations for the intro cutscenes, and also working on the sprite of Percy, the bard -- a friendly character introduced in 0.7. We liked his original design, but we thought he was a tad too good-looking, so Chestnut has been working on his design. Looking at her PC, I honestly think he's now too ugly, but the editing is not done, and I will have to test it in the game.
Pistachio:
I had, overall, a productive week. I added some of Chestnut's completed artworks (mostly cutscenes), reworked some text, and posed them. Right now, I'm working on the scenes that I left from before because they were more complicated (I still haven't touched the controversial part mentioned last week). Last night, while trying to pose a scene I had difficulty with, I found a major game-breaking bug, which I fixed.
What's next:
Chestnut will work on Percy's design, and I will test it in the game. Then we may go through the first half of Gomira's first quest to list necessary edits for her to focus on.
I want to try to finish these final couple of dialogues (and one event) from Gomira's last quest. I will then focus on the audio and the animations, adding all of the artwork and beginning the polish phase. I doubt I can do all of these in a week, but I'll do what I can.
That's all.
Have a wonderful weekend.
Cheers
Comments (11)
I wish I could make 7500$ a month to never finish my job. But woe is me I'm just a lowly electrical engineer making less than half of that while destroying my body working 80 hours a week in my surprisingly physical job.
We can talk about numbers: we pay close to about 40% of our income in taxes, and what remains should be divided into two because we're two people working on the game. But I agree with you overall that there are plenty of people whose work is much more beneficial to society than our job (or that of yours, for that matter) who get paid much, much less. I'm not saying, mind you, that electrical engineering or entertainment aren't important, but they're of a different magnitude of importance than the jobs some barely paid teachers and nurses I know do. I wish people would get paid according to what they contribute, but I don't write the rules. Now, on the topic of health, I think 80 hours a week is way too much, and I'm sorry you have to work that hard. I have had to do a lot of crunch and know how difficult it is (usually at 70 hours a week, though, and not for this update; for this one, our baby has taken all my crunch time, hence the longer dev-time). We're lucky that we don't have to do physical work, but there are still some health issues that come with working from home. Example? It's been over a year since we had a single weekend (not counting birthdays and Christmas), and it's been months that I've been sleeping only 3 to 4 hours a day. The stress, which I'm sure you're familiar with given that you work 80 hours a week, is no physical work, but it's no slouch either. For example, four of my teeth have broken during this update alone from grinding them during sleep (the longer we take to release, the more downward the health goes). On top of that, we're a husband and wife working on the game, and there are basically only two topics of conversation in our house: the kids and the job, and unless we're working on it actively, that can very much negatively impact our relationship, causing even more stress (today is valentine's day, for example, and we had a work-but-not-talk-about-work rule, which I already broke by showing your comment to my wife). I don't want to downplay the great things about my job, though. I'm lucky to be able to work from home and spend all my time with my wife and kids. On top of that, we live in one of the cheapest parts of Spain, so our income is more than enough to cover our needs and support our families, but I'm just saying that our job has its own challenges that can be taken for granted. Lastly, about "never finishing my job," which I admit hurts: we have released 5 updates with content that people have mostly enjoyed. This last release has taken us long (much longer than we had anticipated), but we're working on it, and we will absolutely finish it and have many more releases in the future. As an aside, you don't need to become a patron to send us messages or criticisms. We have a public discord page where we read and respond to all messages. But I apprecaite the support all the same.
RIP in peace Hot Percy, you were too hot for this world 😞
On the plus side, now he won't be inundated with advances from all the women who before wouldn't have been able to resist him. Wait, did I say plus side? Well, it will be a plus for the MC, at least: less competition
Back in September of 2022, I was intrigued by the idea that in v.8 that the focus would return to Holly. I wasn't a big fan of Gomira specifically nor of monster girls in general. In short, I continued my patronage not based on anticipation of v.7, but rather in hopes that v.7 would be delivered in a timely cycle and that the project would head in a direction more to my liking. Unfortunately, it seems that v.7 is mired in reworking assets that were completed a year ago and not focused on much brand new content. As with January of 2022, this January began with apologies about how challenging the previous year had been and requests that your patrons not ask for specific release dates. I am uncertain of the challenges that have confronted the Magic Nuts family over the past two years. I have observed, however, that your development was faster when you published detailed project plans in years past. Development projects that I have worked on in the past benefited from detailed milestones and the sharing of those milestones with the customers. It may feel like additional overhead, but it creates accountability not just between the development team and the customers but within the team as well. Barring greater transparency and specificity, I fear that this project that showed such wonderful progress initially will never be completed.
I tend to agree. It's hard (for me personally) to criticize the team due to them being wholesome and likeable, and it's also clear that this isn't any sort of scam situation, but time between updates has stretched out into something that is very surprising for me. I find myself in the same situation where I try to do the math of when the next content I'm invested in will be added and the answer seems to be years. To the devs: Don't take this as something personal though or get discouraged. Just hoping for a bit more consistency in the future.
I remember also pointing out that the bard was very pretty back when we first saw him. Could you elaborate on why you want to tone down his apperance?
I remember when I was posing his interactions with the MC, thinking that if I just saw this, I wouldn't be able to tell who's the protagonist since Percy's design is more elaborate and he's pretty good-looking. Now, if that added something to the game or was a feature we were using, that would be fine, but as it was, his design didn't contribute to the story and didn't match the small 'side-kick' role he has in this update. Given his personal backstory, Chestnut already needed to make a small change to his design, so I asked her to also tone down his good looks so that I can test it later and see if it works better or not.
Y'all, this is like a certain Valve game that shall remain nameless; every time you ask for a release date, Gaben pushes it back another five hundred years.
Thank you for the update!! Any idea when the next release will be out?
We do have an internal deadline, but I'm a bit behind, and I still haven't started the polish phase (which includes a lot of testing and looking for bugs), so I don't dare to give an estimate right now. What I can promise you is that we're working as many hours a day as we can (seven days a week) to try to wrap this update up and get back to quicker release schedules in the next update.