July (technically) Update

I did it again, but with good reason this time! Major life developments happened, but I still made progress on the game since the last update!

The big thing was that I bought a house at the end of April. Despite the crazy market, somehow we landed a pretty nice place. And, as it turns out, home ownership is...not simple. Moving aside, I'm suddenly finding myself engaged in hours of yardwork every week, plus I'm already launching into assorted home improvement projects (like installing lots of soundproofing around the home theater in the basement, or having to get my drain pipe snaked by a plumber after it flooded on my birthday). Sufficed to say, Unto the Breach took a backseat for the first couple months, but in July I finally found I had gotten enough done to allow for further development work in July. It's not a ton, but I think it's a decent chunk.

As I mentioned in the last report, I was working on Doramor Palace and its three floors. Since last time, I've finished the first floor, and the other two floors are about 2/3 to 3/4 done. Given all the important and/or plot-relevant parts are done, I'm gonna leave the rest for later and get back to the field maps to build out more content there.

Looks like a lovely work environment. Maybe that's why the quartermaster is always grumpy.

Aside from mapping work, I also got some story/quest material done! Ali's character quest is fully implemented, and Lucy's is about halfway done (I'm working on the final challenge which is, admittedly, a bit complex). I've been trying to get some additional lore articles written, and the next one is going through final revisions now.

And now for the progress charts!

The changes are all for Doramor City and the associated side quests. It felt good adding another 100% to the list, though obviously I still have quite a few to go, heh.

​Advancement on all three unfinished categories! That's what I like to see! Once Lucy's quest is done, I'll get to work on Conrad's, which should take maybe 5-10 hours of work to implement. Then there's only two side quests left in the city! One is mostly dialogue and searching oriented, the other actually involves combat.

​I'm going to skip the overworld chart this time, as nothing was done there. BUT! I can post the task list, because I made progress there!

It's nothing too dramatic, but I was able to fix the bug where sometimes the lighting system would fail to engage after a map transition. Turns out I included a step in my random weather common event that was permanently shutting it off, so a simple tweak to that and now it's all moody again! I also did some more minor code optimization that squeezes a few more frames out, but I still have a long ways to go on that.

That'll wrap it up for now, but I'm excited to finally be getting back into working on this again! If I can maintain a decent pace, Episode One MIGHT be ready for some kind of early access by the end of this year, but no promises on that yet. My real life obligations are still proving quite...overwhelming, but I have to hope things will lighten up soon, and this housework stuff ends at SOME point, right? ...Right?