Phew. What a messy few weeks. You know it's a fun report if I talk about irl.
If you are here purely for progress, you can skip the next 3 paragraphs as those are about irl situations and problems.

First and foremost, what many might have wondered, yes. I am A-OK, the Covid is thankfully gone and I am now again healthy. It sure was a bitch, even after temperatures (body) subsided, the coughing wouldn't let go, to the point I was debating going to my crappy clinic for help. Thankfully, the itchy throat very slowly day by day lowered in intensity, and I even managed to recover some energy last few days as I felt drained after all of it. I did drink a huge amount of pills and other helpful medications. Overall, it took a total of 2 and a half weeks to actually be fully healthy again.

But hey, trouble comes in pairs! (or triplets actually). As I was at the end of recovery, bam. Laptop gone. I am, or was using an old one, Hp Envy 4, from 2012 (time flies). Don't panic, I don't render on that. That's just my laptop to work on small stuff and script in bed. I am decent with backups, so nothing of value was lost. But yeah, it was already quite broken, it has broken (literally) screws and can't be reopened, and the fan started hitting the inside on some metal, so I instantly shut it down before making even worse permanent damage. So... I had to buy a new one, and quite quickly as the market here is abysmal and things keep disappearing from the stores. That meant researching like crazy, as I knew absolutely nothing about any current model, if they are good or bad etc. Yup... Welcome my new laptop I guess, got a Lenovo now 😊 Also bought some drives for both my pc and that new laptop, as I was quickly running out of space due to HS2.

And lastly, well. Won't go too much into details, but I am paying making commissions to modders to port outfits so I can use them for Fates Collide (if you are on Discord and a patron, definitely check the discord channel. YOU can vote on which outfits will be ingame!). Anyway, after paying 100$ total (60$ for one outfit, 40$ for another) I definitely feel slightly scammed, as the quality wasn't great, and the 2nd time he even sent me a broken mod after I fully paid, and he knew it was broken. You could say some time was spent on this, absolutely wasting hours and hours just for someone trying to cheap out on me and arguing with them... Anyway, as you can see... Not the best of weeks. I tried working as much as I could on FC, but naturally all these took the toll on the progress.

ACTUAL PROGRESS REPORT:

Renders: We got some renders done woop. Now we are at roughly ~650 total ep3 renders, and 180 renders that reworked something for ep2.5 content. Definitely moving slowly, but we are moving. Excited for how people will like some parts 😁

Cleaning:

Actually, why was there a beta test chart? Didn't make much sense. It takes a few days anyway hah. Replaced with cleaning, as that's partially of what I meant to be in the last tab, plus it can show some actual progress that I can talk of. As I was sick and in bed for long periods of time, with the help of my new proofreaders (I have them now wohoo!) we've been fixing and patching up all the mistakes and some grammar issues. Ep1 has been proofread and big part of it I already implemented, and ep2 script will be shortly proofread and implemented too. Coding?: During these weeks and up close to my own old script, I did notice how some things weren't that good, and I even had some values aka choices that weren't even tracked (facepalm). I also used an improper way of handling values, as the old way made it very prone to possible restarts required after each release. The game didn't know, as I didn't specify, what a value was actually... Default. I thought my way of doing it told it to, but I was wrong, and the game actually didn't know what the default value, if something didn't happen, actually was. Thankfully Cari helped me with this. To not go too much into details, ep3 will have some behind the scenes quality improvements in how I actually coded it, also how I named my values and images for easier organization ("ep3_HotelRaiko1" sounds much better than "Raiko1" for an image, doesn't it?). I'll probably go more into detail on all this some other time, but tldr this bad coding, paired with some values that weren't tracked (you could say your save isn't optimal due to it) just tells me that one day, when I rework the images for episode 2 as I planned, I will also suggest players restart at that point. But that is neither today nor tomorrow.

That's all for now folks. The progress updates will be from now somewhere in the middle of the week just like this one (after 2 week space from the last one of course). See ya all in the next one, and stay healthy. Really. Kat <3