v0.6 Final Progress Log

Time for a fun post.

Long story short, the update is complete and it's technically playable from start to finish.

All of the routine codes have been written and said routines have been connected and now the game is technically playable. However, for the time being I am saying "technically playable" because there are so, many, bugs. 

The good news is that all of the bugs thus far have been things that are very simple to fix. The only issue has been the sheer amount of bugs there are. However, because of the harmless nature of these bugs, there's no need to worry about them having any substantial impact on wrapping up the update from this point on.

Now, as for the long version.

Let's talk about the routines. This area was a mess. 

In v0.5 I tapped the waters for these kinds of hard coded events, and learned a good amount of stuff. However, the system was still very new and immature, so the functionality was still not entirely there, many things were too cumbersome to write, and in some situations the routines could also break rather easily.

With that said, for this update I wanted to add many events which required routines, but not only would they require a routine, the routines they needed were even more complex and needed even more functionality than the ones done for previous updates.

So, for these events to be possible, there was a lot of work to do.

There was a lot of figuring out a good work flow, figuring out a good way to go about implementing the new functionality, and most importantly, doing those things while avoiding past mistakes.

In the end I essentially tore down all of the related systems and built them back up

They are now so much easier and faster to write, they had a lot of functionality added to them, and they no longer break like they used to do when button mashing and such.

Thanks to those improvements, the plethora of routines that were written for the update were possible. Which brings me to the next point.

There were so, many, routines written for the update. All of the events for the new POI are controlled by a routine. All of the newly rewritten Inn events are also now controlled by a routine. Of course the level 2, 3 and 4 level up routines. Some of the level 5 and some of the rewritten events for the pool also use a routine. The routines written for triggering or activating some important stuff (Ex. The set of events which lead to unlocking the new POI). The post level up event routines (The new events that take place at the infirmary once Hana levels up.). And of course, all of the routines written to aid the main routines with new functionality.

There's even more, but those are the categories worth mentioning.

Now let's talk about bugs. As I mentioned in the beginning of the post, there are a lot of them. They are mostly harmless, and by that I mean that for the most part these bugs are simple oversights and things that weren't taken into account at first, and as such are only discovered when testing.

However, there's so many of them, and the thing here is that a lot of these aren't even from the things being added in v0.6. Roughly half of the bugs I've been encountering are actually bugs from previous versions.

Unfortunately the past few updates were released when I was very burned out and my patience for fixing bugs had been worn thin, and as such ended up not doing anywhere near as much bug fixing as I should have. However, this update has taken over a year to develop, and the update itself is the biggest one to date, lot's of fun things in here, and the last thing I would want is for them to be damaged by bugs. 

While fixing bugs isn't something that would usually take long. Here I'm essentially fixing the bugs from v0.3, v0.4, v0.45, and v0.5 that I didn't fix back then. So these past couple weeks have been mostly about fixing these past mistakes, on top of the bugs from the new v0.6 content.

For this same reason the plan from a few months ago of having an alpha testing group is still happening soon. I'll get done as much testing as possible as possible, so that ideally the update will be bug free even at the beta release.

Finally, let's talk release date. First of all I won't be here for the next week, so these time frames will start taking place in one week from now. Anyhow, there's 2 things to consider, the remaining missing sprites, and the remaining bugs. When it comes to the bugs, I'm done fixing the bulk of it, and a handful of days of doing testing on my own should be enough to find and fix most of the remaining bugs. Alpha testing will begin after that. Fixing the bugs of the alpha testing should last for about a week, which should be enough time for the remaining sprites to be finished. So, overall this is looking like an early May release.

I'll be back soon with more good news. I really appreciate the patience, and thank you for supporting the development of Hana's Exposure!