Monday 2nd: Released the game on Early Access. Was pretty today, very nervous about the release. Maly's friend Nahir encountered a bug where McCthulu wouldn't show up. I was so worried that this would happen to everyone, but luckily we were able to get McCthulu to appear in the same build most of the time. So, it is a bug, but it's not one that's going to break the game for everyone. Sorted the UI for Spells (no thumbnails yet). Tuesday 3rd: Fixed a bug where I accidentally asked for the 'Human' component in the Skullverizer, when it should be asking for a head. The way most clients are met is via the export box script. To make sure it only happens once, I ask if the Quantity of Blood/Skin/Skulls is == 1. The problem is making it work for people who have already exported some Skulls. So I have to think of something more clever. Someone reported a bug with the Grinder. For some reason it was putting things in the wrong container. Fixed easily. Fixed Eyebrows not matching. Fixed the 'Dead' bool not applying on load. Made it so the Wall Flipper can't summon dead Humans. Made a build and uploaded it to Steam because someone reported a bug I really didn't like. Added Arkanos and his Buildings to the Shop so I can generate some Mana and test these spells. Made a cheat to add Mana. Going through each Spell and testing it for the first time. All Mood effecting Spells work fine. Rend also works fine with a few fixes. Spent a bit of time sorting out a bunch of bugs and improvements. Now to test the Cupid's Shotgun spell, which makes 2 Humans mate each other. Spell works. This leads me on to testing the mating, which is a real scary project to tackle. So the first bug with this is that saving 'Current Mate' causes the game to crash. 'MakeHumanSave' saves the Human's Current Mate, as well as Baby, Mother and Father. These are all made by using 'MakeHumanSave' to attach a HumanSave to this HumanSave. So we have a loop which crashes the application. My first thought is to make an identical version of 'MakeHumanSave' which does not attempt to write any of the relationships. I spent some time thinking about whether this could cause problems, or if there's a more elegant solution. In the end, I'm going with this. It won't ever come up for Baby, because a Baby will never itself have a baby. Mothers and Fathers are already rendered as HumanSaves (as opposed to 'Human' components). So I just made a function called 'SaveMate' which is an exact copy of 'MakeHumanSave' but does not attempt to create a new mate. Fixing more bugs with pregnancy and mating. I mistyped 'haircolour' for 'hairstyle' at one point in the script and it took me a long time to figure out which line was causing trouble. Lots more debugging to fix mating. Got a lot of hours in today. Finally got the whole process of conception to birth working. Next I just need to get Babies to act like Babies. Wednesday 4th: Ok so we've finally made it to the milestone of making mating work. After dealing with the conception to pregnancy process with confidence, it's not so scary anymore. Going through my list and re-organizing. I want to push on with Mating and keep adding content with Placeholders, but I think I had best buy and use another month of Maya. First, got a list of tricky little things that don't fit into any particular update. I'll do those first and log them as I go. This includes a rather big one which is a big refinement on the canvas selecter. Ordering things in terms of updates, as now we're in Early Access I want to keep a regular flow of content. Also drafting all the way through the planned content so I can try and make it all in Maya. 1. Random bits. 2. Maya. (all known objects that can be done in a month) 3. Necronomicon: Do the remaining things to complete the first set of Spells, Clothing, Buildings and new Client for the Necronomicon update, make a trailer and release. 4. Mating. Thoroughly test and fix mating, adding several new objects to the game to make this happen including Pacifiers, Delivery Machines, etc. 5. Drugs. Just need to test it properly and make sure it all works. 6. Cooking. Sort out the entire industry of Cooking. This will be fairly time consuming but pretty straight forward and the biggest challenge will be balancing. 7. Genetics. Machines and Items to modify the way a child inherits from its parents. 8. Mining. This will be needed for Genetics so they'll be built in tandem. - This should cover all the basics of the gameplay. Then it's time to test and fix thoroughly as I improve on the cosmetic side of the game. 9. Voices. 10. UI. 11. Improved 3d objects. 12. The Paintbrush. A way to access alternate versions of each building for different looks and slightly different effects. For example, an astroturf floor or a Forest that looks like a Supermarket. - Testing fixing, and polishing the game. 13. Expand on gameplay content where necessary. 14. Finish the story. 15. Start wrapping up for full release/Start ramping up for stretch goals and further polish and cosmetic improvements (I need help from the players for this timeline). Wrote the dialogue for Whiskers, a new character who will be the source of all things genetics and sci fi movies. Really had fun writing his dialogue. Giving my brain a quick break and then coming back to try and get all the random bits out of the way. Made the 'Faded Old Hair' variant. Ok the first thing I want to knock off this list, which will make some of the other things easier, is basically re-doing all the Canvas selecting stuff. I have to give this some thought. In the end, it seems at the moment it's enough to just remove the snapping on the Selecter and Deleter canvas selections. Feels much better to use now. In doing so, I found a crucial bug where floors wouldn't delete properly, so I'm going to get a build out now since I think it's fairly stable (locking off Arkanos and Spells for now). Fixed a bunch of fairly major bugs over several builds uploaded. Makes me really stressed to have such big bugs but I suppose it's bound to happen. Thursday 5th: Fixed an issue with the Steam build. Took a while but in the end it was just a matter of getting the latest Steamworks.NET. I was going to do some restructuring of the building folders and things like that but actually I think that can wait until maybe a UI overhaul or something. The last little annoying thing that I ought to do is to make it so Human heads retain their cosmetics even after they are severed from the Human. This is quite tricky and time consuming. First big hurdle is in copying over the hairstyle. I could copy and paste my hair updating code from the Human and repurpose it, but that code is itself already really messy and I don't want to add more spaghetti. Instead, I'm thinking of better ways to do hair. I'm thinking Hairstyle should really be a list of hairstyles, with their position in the list corresponding to the length of the hair. Then instead of this big line of spaghetti code I have, I can do something like 'newHair = Instantiate (Hairstyle[Hair], Haircontainer);'. At the moment it writes a different script for each length of hair, and again for each case of 'Straight/Frizzy'. That was a fun puzzle and I've tidied up the code nicely, while making cosmetic changes to severed heads persist through saving and loading, as well as the added detail of head shape also being effected now. Added left handed camera controls per someone's request. Updated quest and tutorial to match.