Mimes aside, I’m now done with almost the entire draft. (There are no mimes, I promise.)
I have a few things to draft still—primarily the NPC romance scenes in Chapter 10—and some tweaks and adjustments to make elsewhere, and then I’ll be flinging the whole big ~350,000-word mass of scene files at @jasonstevanhill and running for the hills. I mean waiting eagerly for edits and the beta. 
From the very first playable draft, my MC has been thoroughly breaking this game. I’ve clearly waited overlong to share about that, but trying to formulate how to even explain what’s been going on has been kinda daunting, if I’m honest. 
As for what happens: from broken pathing that resolves itself by giving a potent in-universe amnesiac feel of slipping between varied realities, to conversations being referenced that never actually happened, this a-hole MC of mine couldn’t bust this story over the rocky shores any harder if he tried.
I’ll have to reread to find these specific places where things start this nonsense he causes, but it is a very involved process. I’m willing to drop anything else I’m doing to clearly highlight all the weirdness, but I also understand if the timing is wrong altogether for waiting as long as I did to even say anything. 
Oh no! I thought I’d fixed those issues. 
The first playable draft had problems because I use gosub_scene to check values a few times, and I had a lot of temp variables (which get lost whenever you gosub_scene). I’ve since moved those to permanent variables, which I thought had fixed things… but maybe not??
I am planning to give the game a few playthroughs after I’m finished drafting, and I will definitely reach out to you after that! (I suspect you will probably have to start a new game to stop it being weird, though, because the variables the game will now reference didn’t exist on your first playthrough, and will never have been set properly.)
Sent the completed first draft of the game in to Jason late last night!
A month after my due date but I’ll take it. 
You can’t run away to Phil’ly in this one, but you can escape to the Moracen Isles, at least.
I’m planning to go to Philadelphia in June, and I’m telling everyone it’s to attend NarraScope, but you know what really brings me there!
I just saw that the beta has now been announced–if you have the time and capacity to beta test, I’d definitely love to have feedback from you about this game-breaking stuff that happened in the demo!
For anyone who does sign up for the beta, I’d especially be interested in hearing about:
As well as all the usual things from a beta test. Thanks in advance to anyone who does sign up–I really appreciate the time-consuming work that goes into participating in a beta!
You know I’m on it! I’m working on another project this weekend, but you can expect to see some feedback from me by the middle of next week.
Do you know the approximate word count?
Looking forward to it for sure!
Currently the game is 356k including code.
I’ve never signed up for the betas before because I don’t consider myself particularly good at feedback, but to make sure this one is better than just “robust enough to not throw error messages despite bugging out” then I’ll give the sign-up a shot.
Thank you!
Based on the first couple of beta comments I’ve received it looks like there is still some lingering bugginess. Dang!
I’ll have to spend some time digging around in the variables I use to track what route the players take, it looks like…
Thanks to everyone who’s sent in beta feedback so far!
I’m hoping to get a big update out later in the week that addresses the bugs and typos folks have found.
Gotta say, I’m really relieved that after looking into the “disappearing/reappearing NPC” thing again, now it’s just because I forgot to set variables sometimes and because I forgot what values I assigned variables to other times. (And, once, because I was lazy with copy-pasting into different branches and forgot to fix it. )
I was really concerned I’d have some huge ugly mess to untangle before I could even figure out what I needed to fix, and I’m glad that doesn’t seem to be the case! At least, so far…
But it definitely reinforces the “don’t let the player pick their party” advice for new authors… lol 
This is dreadfully relatable. May the cows start strolling again for you soon!
I read rolling, and that was a very weird image that’d be only slightly more painful than the fence-stuck one. 
Oh yeah, sure, but I was picturing them making cartwheels!
Based on veterinary TV shows I have watched, I believe cows should definitely not roll! lol
Maybe I’m misremembering and it was “we have to roll this cow onto its back” or something that was dangerous in some specific procedure! I dunno, having never had to raise or care for cows. 
Meanwhile look for my new-planned DLC for Spire, Surge, and Sea, tentatively titled COWS, CURES, AND CURSES
Yeah, if the cow was injured or sedated and had to be moved into a particular position, that takes an elaborate coordinated effort to do safely.
Careful, a lot of people don’t like DLC and will accuse you of trying to milk them. 
An udder shame! It may not be the bread and butter of a game, but a DLC can [idk I ran out of cow puns]
