latest developer note:
"
A brief progress report for Part 7 (of the conclusion) and other stuff I've been working on for the game.
First, I was hoping to finish up the rest of Part 7 before the end of Aug, and that just isn't in the cards. I've done a bunch of art for it, but there is still more to make. I am slowly chipping away at it, but not as fast as I'd like (which should be some art everyday, but mostly it's been open everything up, looking at it, and saying "I don't want to do this today", before closing it all down).
I haven't started any posing (so characters just have the same neutral expression (or completely blank face)). It (usually) takes me about an hour~ish per 100 lines of dialogue. At the moment, my guess will be 3~4 days of work just to do posing, and I haven't found the drive for it (also, I usually wait for all the art to be ready, and I haven't finished that yet).
So, short version, I'll most likely be working on it next month too. But, as I don't expect an update from Ferdafs this month (or next month), most likely not an issue? If it did drop, I'm sure I could focus down and finish it, but without a deadline, it's been hard to want to devote time to it.
As a reminder, even if I did finish the Part 7 content, I'm still waiting for the release of 4.1 before I put anything out. So until that drops, it isn't a rush.
I also built a neat tool to help myself. When working on the project I maintain 3 versions of it: master, compressed, and patch. I don't re-compress the whole game each time, just the stuff that's changing. Usually, I do this by keeping them all in sync while I'm working on it. Make some new art? Copy that into the compress folder. At the end of the work day, compress, and copy that to Patch and compressed version of the game. I'm sure there's a better way to do it, but that's the way I do it.
However, I've been having issues across the last few updates where one or more art files get missed for whatever reason. Sometimes this shows up as an error, sometimes not, making them hard to find if I'm not replaying the whole game every release (which, I haven't played the whole game through in a long time now).
Thus, I built a new tool that does a compare and copy. It looks at names and dates, but not content (because the content is different) and checks to see if the compressed version has all the correct files. Any missing files, it copies from the master into my compress directory, so I can compress and copy them to patch and the compressed game. In short, it makes it MUCH easier to check for missing art files.
I also plan to run this step during my project build (right before upload) against the last released version of the game (to make sure all my files match up). Hopefully this will make missing art assets less likely.
Anyhow, thanks for being awesome!"