Hello once again,
As I'm sure you've realised by now, this update has turned into a bit of a nightmare, which is due to some bad decisions that I've made. The main problem is that as I fell behind on my release targets, I felt like I had to add more to the update to compensate for the delays, and so now instead of just working to finish the main quest content, I've got myself stuck in the middle of adding a new feature. It's the work which I've been doing on this new feature which has caused the painful delays over the past month.
This new feature is something which I'd been planning for a while, which is the ability to record and edit sex scenes within the game. The idea is that you can activate a video recorder, the scene is saved, and then you can edit and replay it. I wanted this feature as part of a small amount of content relating to a Dominion porn industry.
So, instead of just finishing off writing the main quest I've got myself stuck in the middle of adding this new feature.
Why is it taking so long?
I'll try not to get too technical, but if you're not interested in the details then the TL;DR is that there's a lot of messy rewriting of code to be done.
Now, for the detailed version. Basically, for the content of each sex action I write an unparsed version of it, which looks something like '[npc.Name] [npc.verb(smile)] at [npc2.name].', and that's then parsed by the game before being displayed to you as something like 'Rose smiles at you.'. As all of the game's sex actions are written in this unparsed version, I thought it would be simple to just grab the unparsed text, save that, and then re-parse it when displaying the recordings. This is necessary as I want the recordings to be able to be loaded from one game into another, and so if you load a recording from a different save (for this example, a save in which the player character was named Innoxia), you don't want the scene to be displayed to you as 'Rose smiles at you.' (as you're not Innoxia), but instead to be 'Rose smiles at Innoxia'. It's for that reason that I can't simply save the parsed text, and need the unparsed version.
So, I need the sex action text to be in a completely unparsed format so that I can display the correct parsing no matter what save it's loaded into. Unfortunately, as I set about making the recording framework, I discovered that the way in which I've implemented parsing of a lot of sex actions and utility methods is quite chaotic, with a lot of instances of the parsing being integrated into the code in silly ways. As such, I needed to fix all of these instances (over 600 of them) for it to work. Now, this refactoring turned into a horrible mess. The sex actions were easy to fix, but there's a lot of messy parsing going on in the orgasm code, and then handling positioning and item usage parsing, and basically I've got everything in a state of absolute chaos at the moment.
I know that this was a stupid thing to do, and I should have just focused on finishing the main quest content. I've put so much stress on myself during this that I'm feeling absolutely terrible. I'm doing my best to get it all working, but I can't say how long it's going to take. I'll try to pull myself together and get it finished as soon as possible.
Thank you for your patience, and I am very sorry about all of this. I do very much appreciate your support, but I completely understand if you don't want to continue supporting me after how terrible I've been with updates this year.
I'll make another post when I've got the game working again. Sorry again.
