Incubus Update #14 - October

Sup. I really got in the swing of things this month. I'm pleased with my progress even though I didn't reach my (informal) goal, which was to have enough fixed up and working so I'd be ok with doing another 'alpha release'. 

The fact is that I got a lot done, I just forgot how many loose ends there were; maybe I was lying to myself before, being overly optimistic. I won't be able to work on it again for over a week but I think I'm on track to doing that release sometime before the end of the month. 

Mostly what remains for me to do is:

1) Clean up the loose ends in some scenarios. In some cases, this means blocking off those additional routes. I'd have ideas on additional routes you could take but I find that if I rush to implement these ideas, they just come off as half baked and don't really add anything. Best to implement them later when I have more time to focus on them.

2) Figure out which pieces of content are still inaccessible or difficult to access. I sometimes just put stuff in that worked but became harder to access because I changed how the event launcher worked, or whatever. (Incidentally previously I had so much trouble having one event launch into another one without weird bugs. I seem to have fixed that issue with a small amount of experimentation. No idea why I was so perplexed by this problem, maybe stepping away for a while let me see things differently?)

3) Fix some bugs. There's a few in there. One of the ones that's really funny - I might have mentioned it before, and I did fix it from happening sometimes but it still persists - is where when you go to bed, all the active characters (typically 'named NPCs' in the game that you've met or who's questline has started) spontaneously become pregnant. The weirdest thing about this bug is that they don't just get pregnant, but become pregnant with the exact same baby, the genetic mother of whom is not the person carrying it but rather the first person who becomes pregnant in the game (in the removed prologue). I just keep ignoring it because it's funny but I really got to sort it out. It even makes the male characters pregnant, and though I haven't checked it might even make the player pregnant too, lol. 

And so on.

I'm feeling really good about the project. When you dig through your old stuff you see so many ways to simplify, so much dumb crap you did that can be optimized or removed entirely. It's fun, and I'm glad I'm getting back into it. 

Game development is what I do with the time that most people tend to spend binge watching shows, or reading books or playing videogames or whatever else. I find as time progresses, I get bored increasingly easily and almost nothing holds my attention. Interactive things are better than passive things, and because I'm moderately skilled at a few aspects of Twine game design - Photoshop, programming, HTML - I can always switch modes when I start to get bored or frustrated with a given thing. 

I had a reason I wrote the previous paragraph, like I was working towards a point that I don't remember. I guess it's a good time to finish up here.