Maids & Masters Strategy Guide Progress Update - Act 1 Complete!

And only a week behind schedule!

I can hope that came through with an appropriate amount of sarcasm, but given some of the estimates I've done on how long making this guide is going to take me and some of the issues I've had with it this past week, only being one week behind where I want to be actually does feel like something of an accomplishment.

Some of the formatting errors have been especially frustrating. I'm talking moving images by a single pixel or removing one line break - in some cases, even one space - either adding or removing an entire page from the PDF version of the guide. And I have no idea why the formatting changes at all from the editable document I'm working from, because in there, it all looks exactly how I want it to. Even when some pages have multiple lines of space before formatting should become an issue, lines are deciding to jump down to the next page all on their own, which throws things into complete chaos for the next page at minimum.

On top of that, despite having things set up so all my changes are saved in real time to prevent the loss of work, I still ran into an issue that resulted in me losing a couple hours of work. That and fighting with formatting errors is why this is going up so late in the day instead of early evening like most posts. I'm typing this as I go, so it'll probably end higher, but as of right now I've gone through 8 iterations of different adjustments trying to get things to look the same between the PDF and my working document.

All my whinging out of the way, it does feel good to have gotten through the entire first act of the game. For some stats, the guide is up to 148 pages containing 44,877 words, the file size of the PDF is just shy of 40 MB, and my play through that I'm doing alongside writing the guide to make sure I don't miss anything (and to make sure my suggested strategies and puzzle solutions actually work) is up to 62 hours. I'm also making sure to include straightforward instructions on how to solve puzzles quickly, not just explaining how the puzzle works and leaving you to put the pieces together like I tend to when people ask for help in most places.

And if you're a VIP or Producer, you'll be able to get your hands on the second "test build" of the guide within a few minutes of this post going up.