Weekly report 69

Hi everybody.

We're done with the editing, and everything looks and feels as intended. This does not mean that we will not be editing or improving things anymore -- those happen practically until we build distributions and upload the game -- but the aspects that we knew needed to be edited are polished and ready, and any other necessary changes we spot will be minor ones and done on the fly.

Two days ago, I found a rather major issue with the latest version of Ren'py that will cause us many headaches. I will explain the bug in detail in a postscript for those who are curious, but the tl;dr version is that while not game-breaking, it messes up the displayed sprites completely and has impacted the earlier content as well. I have submitted the bug to the creator of Ren'py, and he told me that the issue will be fixed in the future. For the moment, though, we plan to go through the game thoroughly and double-check all instances sprites are displayed to make sure they are shown correctly. 

As you can see in the progress tracker, there are many bugs to sort out, and we may always encounter new issues. But now that Chestnut is done with her part, she can help to test the game while I'm working on the known issues.

How long are we going to take to debug? The thing with debugging is that some issues that you think may take a long time to fix end up being very easy to fix, and also, issues that you assumed would take an hour may take a day or two to iron out. So I won't be surprised if everything is ready within a week; I would equally not be surprised if we take two weeks to prepare the update. But we are pulling extra hours, and I'm hopeful that we can have everything ready soon. I would have loved to use the 69th report to announce the update within a day or two (as a member suggested last week), but still, I can promise you with 100% certainty that we will have a September release.

Two reminders: 

 -if you're a Best Friend or a Close Friend patron (or have ever been one) and want your avatar included in the game, please make it here, and message us the digits representing your avatar together with the name you'd like to be shown with it.

- I will be issuing the refunds for September in the next two days. The refunds will be for those who joined in the last days of August and have remained a patron this month, and those who want a refund for September because we're in our 6th month of development. You'll receive a message of confirmation after it's done.  

Anyway, that's all. 

We're getting there, folks, and even though I'm usually negative about our updates, seeing everything that could have been done differently or improved if we had no time constraints, I think 0.5 looks and feels good and believe that if you liked our previous updates, you will probably like this one too. 

Have a great weekend

Cheers

P.S. 

The bug:

We use layered images to display our sprites every time a line of text is shown. For example:

show lana msmile eneuc bup

The above line displays Lana with a smiling mouth (msmile), looking at the camera (eneuc), and with raised eyebrows (bup).

Now in the previous version of Ren'py, you would not be penalized if you accidentally called the same attribute twice, but doing so in the new one causes the ren'py to ignore all other attributes you called to be shown and reverts back to each group's default attribute (in other words, no raised eyebrows or eyes looking at the camera).

So:

show lana msmile msmile eneuc bup

In this case, since I wrote msmile twice, the written eyebrows and eyes attributes are ignored, and their default version is shown. 

Given that this was not an issue earlier, I never gave it much attention, and hence there are hundreds of lines from previous updates that have double attributes and have been impacted by this.