Update: September 2019

Well, this has quickly become the update from hell for me—Much harder than I was anticipating.

In order to get most of the new content I’ve written into the game and address issues that have been cropping up, my immediate goals were:
• Do a better implementation of free days (they’re currently a mash-up of free mornings and free evenings)
• Add more intelligent handling of the schedule (right now, I have events triggered by dates I’ve entered manually)
• Move “the helicopter event” up and add follow-up events
• Add the nurse into the new clinic code (she was locked out entirely when Holly’s new content was added)
• Make it possible to visit the clinic if Holly didn’t witness your initial transformation
• Get at least one more mirror image done

I’ve got the first four done. The first two required a big overhaul of the main schedule system, though…

Schedule Overhaul

What I came up with still isn’t perfect, but it’s certainly a lot more flexible that what I had. I’m tempted to put it to the test by adding multiple schedule types to the game (default has you working most jobs for 2 days before switching, but I could have you working 5 days per job type right from the start now).

The new system fixes some additional problems as well, so job evaluation scenes and after-work events will play in the proper order. Also, the game can now check your schedule before assigning the beach party event to make sure it happens on a day when you’re actually scheduled to work.

Major Event Handling

#3—expanding the helicopter event—really illustrated something I needed to work on. The game still doesn’t have good handling for major events.

I had no easy way to check for a major event and prevent minor ones for being scheduled at the same time (what happens if you get the beach party that morning?). There’s an evening event that needs to go with it, so the same thing applies.

I spent a lot of time just struggling to get the new events into the game and, in the process, realized I’d just be making a bigger mess for “future me” if I didn’t address it.

I think I’ve got a reasonable solution in place now for some of it, as I’ve created a list of reserved days that I can have events check against before they can go into the pool of options. So, hopefully, that’ll be a flexible way of adding major game events in the future.

It seems I will still need to go back over the free and work event code to make sure that it’s keeping proper track of time during all this, since that’s needed for updating status effects, but that’ll be something I’ll need to save for another update.

The Clinic

Restoring the nurse’s scene to the clinic wasn’t terrible, as I could use Holly’s code as a template. However, I wanted the clinic to be accessible during the day, and I wanted the doctor and nurse to each have times where you’re more likely to encounter them.

I did a first pass on that, but it had some obvious problems. You could get locked out of chat and investigation events with Holly if she didn’t have a main conversation event available. Additionally, the fake “work shifts” I made for her and the nurse could result in both of them being out of the clinic at the same time, even when they both had scenes available.

Additionally, for some of the scenes I’ve written, I needed to add in a way to recognize and allow the PC to ask about “medical ailments” (or, at least, that’s what I’m calling them). Holly already has a section of code for allowing the PC to ask her about things, so I’ve expanded on this.

I did a second revamp of the schedule, fixing the work shift and missing main event problems and adding a similar “medical ailments” event to the nurse, and it looks to be working so far. The nurse will be mostly blocked at first unless the PC has a medical problem to ask about for now, since she only has one main scene otherwise.

I revamped the Nurse’s previous scene to work a bit better if Holly didn’t witness your initial transformation, and you no longer have to lie about having a health concern if one actually exists.

Graphics

I was working on a pair of images for the PC, but hair problems stopped me cold. I’ve detailed a lot of my process for making these images in the past, but the general idea is that I need to render multiple images that I use as masks to separate the parts of the image.

I ran into trouble where the hair was positioned incorrectly (in one case, disappearing inside of the PC’s body) and needed to be moved.

Unfortunately, it looks like I can’t save the position of the hair the way that I can with the model’s pose, ruining the whole method. It’s a frustrating setback. Seems I’m going to need to work out a better way to handle the hair.

Summary:

So the TL;DR version is: The stuff I’ve written has been WAY harder to put into the game than I expected, but it’s coming along. It’s required some really big back-end overhauls that I hope will make it a little easier to add these sorts of things in the future.

(Also, creating visuals for the customizable player character sucks sometimes…) 😦