I was hoping to have made more progress by now, but having a clearer vision for all the mechanics I want in Redemption Harem than I did for Maids & Masters means there's a lot more to do to get the game to a playable state, and all of those things take time to implement, even if the implementation is relatively smooth.
And while the vast majority of things have gone pretty smoothly, there have been a few hiccups.
The first was with the crafting system. I wanted the "recipes" tab to show you your professions info as well as your learned recipes, if that wasn't obvious by the name. Something in the plugin is apparently broken, and regardless of whether you start the game with a recipe known or you learn it later on, it doesn't appear in the tab the way it should. I haven't been able to find any documentation about getting it working, nor have I been able to troubleshoot the issue to find a fix, so I've had to remove that. You'll still be able to see the information about the professions, but you won't be able to see your learned recipes unless you're in the middle of crafting them.
Next is the auto-discovery for your Journal. I know how to do it all manually, so if I can't get it working, it's not a big deal, but I really want you to be able to learn about enemies either by encountering them or by researching them, and the auto-discovery will save me a lot of work on that front. I haven't gotten as far as working on combat yet, so I haven't been encountering enemies yet anyway, but it's supposed to work for party members as well, and so far all it's done is stay empty and erroneously claim I have 100% of entries unlocked. So I have to figure that out still.
More recently, I ran into trouble with the video player plugin. It's the same one I used for Maids & Masters, but when I first started to add the re-rendered animations, the video refused to play despite the commands being correct. This I was able to troubleshoot to get working as intended, but it still made what would otherwise be copying and pasting a few lines of script into place take an entire day to get working.
There's also the quest log, which is supposed to allow for scrolling text. It does scroll, but I'm having an issue where it will "bounce" back to the top as soon as it tries to scroll anywhere, leaving the window to think it scrolled properly when you're still looking at the same text. I can work around this if I have to and just reduce text until it all fits on screen, but the preferred option is to get it working, which means I need to learn some javascript and do a bit of coding to get it working the way it should.
And this is all for the first 15 minutes of the game.
That might sound like a lot of negativity, but I want to assure you that's just because it's taken up a lot of time, and development is generally going really well. The crafting system, for example, worked almost perfectly on the first try and gives me a lot of options for future implementation. The visual style took way less time to reach than I was worried it would, and editing the videos for Asgina to make her properly transparent was significantly easier than I was anticipating. You'll have to be a supporter to see the images, but since the test build is unlikely to be ready this Friday, I'll be putting up a preview for that on Patreon and Subscribestar.
Another thing I was really apprehensive about but ended up working perfectly is the Condition system. I wanted to have each character's Condition be easy to view, especially if they're in your party, but I didn't have an easy way to display it without added a new custom menu screen. As a separate issue, using a zero-XP system means I needed to get rid of the level display in the menu, since that would be useless at best or cause confusion at worst. A happy coincidence is that I'm able to rename what "level" is called in the back end, so I simply renamed it to "condition." Now you can see your party's condition in the menu and I don't have to figure out how to rip that out of the menu. That was also an extremely easy transition to make; I was worried moving that number up and down would undo your earned stat boosts, but thanks to setting it up the way I did, that also worked perfectly on the first try. It does put a few limits on what I can do, since your condition now can't go below 1 or above 99, but I want to implement mechanics where getting below 10 or above 90 can have consequences anyway, so that all works out with relatively little friction.
There are lots of other little changes that I've been able to make, too, like updating the visuals for the text box (which is a small change, but it's something you'll be looking at for the entire game, so I'm happy it worked out), and adding name boxes (another relatively simple change, but one that's time consuming to implement). Name boxes do present another issue, as the plugin I use to let you hide the text box doesn't also hide the name box, so if I want to have that happen, I need to learn more code to get that working, which will take even more time, but my point is that development is going very well despite the amount of time it's taking to make it all happen.
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