0.5 Post-Mortem

Hey everyone!

At long last, an update is out. If you were reading the discord, you might have seen my lack of participation starting from May.

To cut it short, I was not in a good place. I had a lot of real-life pressure going on while I tried to force out the update. In addition to that, I fell into an ugly trap: With every piece of progress I made, I found new mistakes that I had to correct. With every correction, I found something to improve. With every improvement, I had to rewrite something else. With every rewrite, I found new mistakes.

After some time, I couldn’t even look at my text without thinking about how utterly terrible it is. So, I rewrote some more. And it got only worse from that point onwards.

For the last few weeks, I basically had to shut myself off and take a pause to not feel pressured on releasing something. That way I was able to continue working to get to a releasable state. At least I think so. I might as be throwing the biggest pile of crap at you; in that case I apologize, though I hope its not AS terrible as I led myself to believe at this point.

On another note, discord readers might have noticed that I had trouble with the intended fighting system for the small hero route. I found a bug and on dismantling it I realized that nothing worked the way it should. I tried to rework it various times, but I always encountered some problem I couldn’t solve. I’ve accepted that I’m just not a Javascript guy. I now went the easy way and went with a very… basic… version. Forgive me. Lesson taken: If something doesn’t work, just scrap it. The complicated stuff can go into languages I’m actually more capable of.

On another’s another note, chances are that there is an embarrassing amount of grammatical & spelling errors in this release. I would have loved to check for them, but the plain truth is: I can’t look at this text anymore. I have talked myself into such a bad state about the quality that I need some distance after completing this. If you find anything, please don’t hesitate to hit me up so I can fix it. Otherwise, I’m going to take a look at it in the next week when I finally had some distance to this mess. That is to say, I obviously checked for errors and I found it to be playable, but I’m sure to have missed quite a bit this time, especially after all those rewrites. If you happen to see a consistency error, HIT ME UP.

Lastly, the amount of content is on the lower side for the amount of time it took. I am aware of that. The last three to four months were anything but great, but I also tried a new way to create renders faster. Well, let me tell you – it absolutely backfired. Some renders have lighting errors, at least a third of them I had to touch up and manually repair, others I had to manually “semi-paperdoll” which didn’t work out well at all.

So, if there is anything to take away from this: I learned an incredible amount of things that should not be done.

Anything positive? YES! I mean, the update is out after all. It’s likely not as terrible as I make it out to be and I hope you are going to enjoy it nonetheless. Similarly, I already mentioned that I want to improve my schedule of posts. While this went the completely opposite direction with this update, I have found something I liked and I want to try myself at this. Maybe you are going to like it too? If not, something else to scrap! No worries about it influencing available time, though. In addition, through all these struggles I improved my render output a bit after all, so not all was in vain.

Well, enough of my crying. Thanks for reading!