Alpha 0.31 Release!

Hello there guys. This month was a true rollercoaster for me with this game.

It started so well, I even thought I would have time to add some new features such as continue researching for sound effects and how to add them to the game, but once I got to Day3.Json, things derailed way too fast.

In this alpha I dedicated myself to updating Wagner's routes for Day 1, 2, and 3.JSON, those days are highlighted as Day 2, Day 3, and Day 4 in the game. These updates were meant to be just a quick go through the routes, read them and add animations on them. Since I added the Zoom-in and Jump animations they would make a lot of sense in a lot of older routes.

However, reading through the routes, especially on Day3.Json, I found a LOT of issues, from Speakers missing to dialogues that were phrased weirdly or positioned out of order and even sections I had to re-write completely to make more sense out of everything. There was even an older dialogue in one route that should be deleted but for some reason, it wasn't, and then this dialogue was creating a paradox inside the route, it was quite hilarious when I read it, something like: 'I never heard of those things" followed by "Yes, I know about them, they are very expensive and not worthy" and I was like: "Wait, what the hell, do you know or NOT know about this?". Frankly, I just busted a laugh while working.

What did make me very angry is that every time I close a route, I check every single thing before, just to make sure some of these mistakes aren't happening. Of course, some of them will happen but there was a lot of them, that's when I remembered that Day 4 in-game was one of the days I was writing with the older Json Editor, which makes sense, that one had some serious bugs and issues, a lot of times it would just not save information correctly. 

Anyway, all of the routes are fixed (at least with the issues I found, I will have to go through every single day eventually to add the Sound Effects and once I do that I wanna literally read every single dialog and go through all of the days with a thin comb to make sure everything is working properly), and now you guys have the alpha with the biggest changelog I've ever done.

Every route said in the changelog are routes I added animations to, but every route that has some note below it, have more things I fixed, such as adding more sprites to sections that originally didn't have sprites for no reason, changing older animations, and expressions to new ones to fit better the dialogue, re-writing entire dialogues so the scene would be more consistent, and so on. Certain "issues" we only get with our text after a few months and we read it again and find it could be written in a better way. I guess that's just a sign I'm improving on my vocabulary? Who knows.

Anyway, those issues made me have to go through the last Json file really slow, and ironically that's the biggest day so far, with more than 89 routes just for Wagner, some routes with more than 130 dialogues. It seems like a small number but lemme say this: It's not. 

So, guys, I will be taking these few days up to day 5 of January off, I need to cool down. I don't even enjoy Christmas just to finish this.  Day 5 I will make the post for Tier 3 Patrons to vote on the next workload, around a week after that I will start working on what you guys decided, between day 5 and the end of the pool I'll keep doing my usual research on other visual novels (Yes, I constantly look around to see what other developers do with their UI designs and also animations, etc. I get a lot of ideas for the next Visual Novel but also I get a lot of feedback on what I should add to this one).

Anyway, I hope you all enjoy this new alpha, there are no new routes but there is a lot of new animations, some of the more... hot, scenes with Wagner now have more sprite showing and with better animations to convey when he's closer to you without a cutscene playing in the background (those are expensive!).

I hope you all have a nice day and a wonderful new year! 

And I also hope you all can stay here supporting this project, without your help I would never be able to be working on this game and creating this story which I love so much. Thank you guys.