Pre release post (v0.5)

Alright, after way too many delays, it's finally here!

I'll be releasing the beta build in a few hours, so keep an eye out beta tier. Public build early access will follow a few days later as usual.

Alright, first of all I want to apologize for the silence since the last post. I grew up in an environment where trust was all that mattered, and thus I try to be someone trustworthy. However, with this update time and time again I would say something only for it not happen, and even though it would be due to things I couldn't have foreseen or things I hadn't accounted for, having what I say fall flat still damages the value of my word in a way, which personally puts me in great stress. 

Since the start of October after missing my aimed released dates a couple times, I started seeing a fair amount of doubt, and trust in me really starting to decrease, which is when lights turned red in my head. Once those lights went red I decided to just keep shut so as to not say something that would only fall in on itself, and just focus on finishing the update. The last thing I want is for trust in me to be lost, because in my mind if there is no trust in me then what's the point of anything, really.

Anyway, I hope you understand this, now, with that out of the way, let's talk development? 

Let's start with the fun part, what went wrong for the update to take another month? Well, it all starts with what seemed to be the last task for the update.

The last task for the update was to fix the Bathhouse soft-lock glitch, and in order to do so, the choice mechanic's script had to be rewritten from scratch due to it's old code being terrible at best. Anyhow, I rewrote the whole thing in a bit of a different way from what I had planned originally which basically broke everything related to that mechanic, but on the plus side, the mechanic is now significantly faster to implement and easier to use, and I also took the opportunity to add some extra functionality to it.

This new added functionality made it incredibly easy to trigger a bunch of stuff, like starting work stuff, service stuff, buying outfits, and it also opens the doors to add some more complex interactions with NPCs without having to clutter and weigh down the code with a thousand "if" statements. 

Anyway, this revamped mechanic was not compatible with the stuff that used it, so the majority of code for every work trigger, service trigger, and Mei's interactions had to be rewritten which took a while and a lot of testing,

While at it, I also scrapped the sleeping script and rebuilt it around the new and improved choice mechanic, this got rid of pretty much all of the issues with the sleeping script.

Now that's one of the problems, the other one was the prologue. Similar to the level up events added in v0.45, the prologue uses routines, and while it uses all of the advantages and neat features of a routine, it also faces the same glitches that the level up routines had.

Mainly button mashing breaking stuff at times, and the player being able to move and interact with stuff for a split second in certain transitions in the routines, which broke stuff as well. I wasn't planning on fixing this yet as it was likely to take a while to fix, but hey, if I'm messing around scraping and revamping scripts, I might as well work on a fix for the routine issues too. Went ahead and added stuff that got rid of pretty much all of the problems the routines faced, the only problem is that the fix had to be implemented to each interaction of each routine that needed the fix. Needless to say, testing and implementing the fix on a one by one basis for each interaction took a while.

Half of the doors in the game were using outdated code and became unusable due to the routine fix code, so they were brought to up to speed in the same fashion the other half of the doors were done in v0.4~ by giving each it's own script which made them compatible with the routine fix, and gives me more control over them. 

So essentially the plan went from rewriting the choice code, to rewriting the sleeping script, write a unique code for half of the doors in the game, rewriting the choice code and a good chunk of other player related scripts, rewriting a lot of the NPC's script, and code in the fix to every interaction of every routine that needed it. 

Anyhow, as stressful as it was to fix that much code as a last minute thing, those improvements got rid of a ton of glitches and bugs that I wasn't going to be able to fix otherwise, plus, in order to revamp and upgrade all of that code, I learned quite a bit of stuff that opens a bunch of doors for the future.

Finished adding the new NPC system that makes it so specific areas are more populated during certain times of the day (ex. PUB is fairly empty throughout the morning/noon/afternoon, but it becomes very active at dusk and night). However, this sparked another problem, lack of NPCs. The town originally had around 12 NPCs which is not a terrible number, but with the new NPC system, those 12 NPCs weren't be active at the same time, instead you would usually get around 5 NPCs active at a time, which made the town feel a bit empty NPC-wise, and this problem became a bit of a trend throughout all the POIs, so I had to spend a bit more time adding more NPCs throughout the game, mainly the Pool, Town, and the Bathhouse. The amount of NPCs added lessens the problem, but doesn't completely fix it, so I'll be adding a ton more NPCs in 0.6 to completely get rid of this problem.

Also played around with adding a bit of randomness to whether some NPCs will spawn or not. For the time being this is only available with a few town NPCs, but I'll be spreading this to the rest of the POIs in v0.6 once I add more NPCs, this little feature will make it so you don't always have the same exact batch of NPCs spawn in at a set time of the day.

The backgrounds for most events were completely done from scratch in order to match the new POI revamps.

Anyhow, that's about it for the last development log of this update. It might've taken forever to finish this update, but I'm personally really happy with it. 

Due to the time constrains of the unexpected bulk of work that was having to fix the whole game, there were a couple things that had to be sacrificed. Mainly the level 2 level up event, and in depth interactions with Sebas and Nube, all of this will be moved on to v0.6.

When playing this update I would advice you to not think of it as a content update, you'll be disappointed if you do so as the only added content was the prologue. This is an update that primes the game for all upcoming content.

While on the subject of advice, I would also advice you to only play the first day (aka. the prologue) and leave it at that to keep your save at the end of the first day, as there will be new content in v0.6 starting from the second day.

Noteworthy minor changes:

• NPCs changing throughout the day would only happen if the player left and went back into the POI, now they can change while the player is in the POI which enhances a bit the experience of the daycycle.
• Last minute change to the bushes added mid v0.5 development, the new ones have a bit of a more simplistic shape, but they are a bit heavier with a higher poly count.
• Hana can now work at the INN right after waking up without the need to leave and go back to the Inn
• Tweaked the dialogue of some interactions with Mei, I'll be tweaking them  further in v0.6.
• Something felt off about the workshop. Tweaked it a bit, still not entirely happy with it, so I'll be tweaking it further for v0.6.
• The exit bumps for some doors have made bigger to make it easier to exit POIs

Other minor changes and fixes, feel free to skim through these:

• Fixed some issues with the reflections of the Bathhouse water.,
• Fixed a couple events displaying the wrong images in some lines.
• The exit bumps for some doors have been made bigger to make it easier to exit POIs.
• Fixed an issue causing the dialogue to cut when it was displayed shortly after loading a scene.
• Updated some sprites that weren't using the right shader.
• Added dialogue to the Bathhouse owner when using the Bathhouse.
• Fixed issue causing the dialogue box to remain active after ending some interactions with the Bathhouse owner.
• Minor tweaks to the prologue in order to lessen the amount of POIs loaded mid prologue.
• Fixed an issue that would sometimes cause an event image from the last seen event to pop up when doing other interactions.
• Further tweaking to lighting stuff in order to minimize light bleeding.
• Fixed the swimsuit chat with Mei routines sometimes bugging the player, making them have to use the Pool again in order to clear it. .
• Game loading has been slightly tweaked and changed it's home script in order to fix some issues with button mashing.
• Fixed glitch making it so you could spam the dialogue with the work started at the bathhouse at level 4 while the screen was black.
• Fixed an issue allowing the player to move while the content clear message was being displayed.
• Fixed a glitch causing the dialogue of Hana requesting Mei to make her the WhiteSwimsuit to be skipped, again...
• Fixed chat with Mei after Pool 1 and 2  not being triggered at times, and being broken rather easily.
• Fixed level 1 level up routine issues that would interrupt the routine, making you have to start it all over.
• Fixed level 0 level up routine issues that would interrupt the routine, making you have to start it all over.
• Fixed the wardrobe malfunction status sometimes remaining after clearing the level 4 pool service events, which broke a lot of other interactions.
• Polished a bit the dialogue for the level 0 pool events.
• Minor dialogue tweaks due to some v0.6 plot points.
• Typos.