Sunday Update: One Week Away Edition

Update:

I've drastically re-done the game's economy to make everything tighter. It's something I've been putting off for a bit. So I would suggest many of you re-try the core game. This is especially true for those of you who want to help with the development of the game. Feedback about the changes I've made will help me continue to tweak them. At the end of the day I know that everyone is really here for the story and the art. The game mechanics are there to provide a structure and a flow to everything. I just feel that high corruption makes so much more money than low corruption that it really blows the prices out of the water. So I'm working on a tighter system where the gulf between the options is reduced. You will also be able to brew less brews but faster so that system doesn't live in the background. Once I get the bartending game in a really good spot it's going to stay that way and I likely won't come back to it unless lighting strikes me with a good idea for a pose I want. 

Most of my attention is on the waitress game now. That art order is going to be much larger than my previous orders and while I would love to think we can hammer that out in 5 weeks I seriously doubt it'll work out that way. We will see. My goal a year ago was to have all this done in the background before any of this ever got here, but as I go I'm learning how to manage a project of this scale as I go and I didn't get as much done in the background as I wanted. So here I am flying by the seat of my pants hoping to check all the boxes and get this all working. 

Rant:

I've never really appreciated how much can go wrong in the background of these projects. Someone gets sick, someone's internet goes down, someone has plumbing problems (never fun). For all of us, VA, Artist, and Dev this is a side project. So it's easy for life to get in the way. But I can assure you that all of us are stressing out over getting the next update out. Sometimes the success of this project is a monkey's paw. Let me be real for a second with the game's schedule. I want to keep a 5 week update schedule. I also don't want to die of an aneurysm. There is so much to stress out about that seems to have creeped up on me recently. Mostly when an update is just some story and some art then I'm happy. It's a real joy to write a scene, put the scene in, and see how it flows in the game. Recently, however, has been programing issues, mobile comparability, bugs that crop up in RPGMaker I have to spend hours researching. All the standard drawbacks you would expect of a dev who isn't a programmer. So to me the solution looks simple enough. Reduce the total complex mechanics I keep trying to put into the game and really focus more on story. The waitress update will still be pretty complicated, but the lounge? I might do something really fun and simple. Maybe just a game where you pose Catherine and pick moves. Something fun for the really high corruption the lounge will bring. I just don't have it in me to spend months building these mini-games only to find out RPGMaker can't do exactly what I want and then entering into a kind of bargaining phase with the game.