Well, it finally happened. After several weeks of good progress on writing new events, I finally hit a writing wall again. It happens. Thankfully, the progress I had during all the previous weeks outweighs any shortcomings I had this week. I know that a lot of you tell us to take our time and not rush things, but the issue with creative blocks is often not that you don't have time, strength or will to do something. It is that you actually want to do the thing, but it just is not coming to you. But I have been long enough in the creative business to know that it all comes in cycles, so I will be back to writing soon enough. I still believe that I will be able to finish the second Trial by the January update.

In the meantime, there was a lot of work that needed to be done on the game that required very little creative input from me. Translations needed to be done for all the events that I had done before — those that were piling up — and there was also more work on the coding side.

Some small improvements and fixes I did myself, but the major one was the rework of the code for the dressing room. With help from some fans who are much more familiar with programming than I am, the code was reworked and simplified. It is much cleaner now and easier to support. It did require some upfront work to move the current dressing room to the new code, but it is so much easier to maintain now. I managed to add the new outfit for Aisling in mere seconds. After spending a couple of hours actually preparing the sprites... But that's Aisling for you. She's always trouble.

Or maybe it was Shady Two's evil ploy to make me hit my head against the monitor, trying to figure out how to fit the reworks for Aisling's new pose into the current framework for her sprite. Maybe there's a little bit of Aisling in Shady Character Two, causing trouble for herself and me as collateral damage.

Hopefully, the new background for Violet's table and the new artwork for Gwen's intro scene will be much less work to add to the game. They usually are, but who knows — maybe Aisling will find a way to make things difficult there too.

I better wrap this blog entry before she figures something out. I'll see you next week.

Shady Character One, out!