the finer parts of chaos, chipped away

uggggggggggggggh hi

so it's been too long and there's a million reasons why updates haven't been consistent lately, from me going out of the country to my laptop being balls to coming back into a stressathon and fgjhlklklk
so not much has happened, and it's possible there won't be much new development to report for a while longer yet, 

tl;dr 

still working on story stuff,  and i actually don't want to update the scoreboard % for that until i finish because how to properly divide a scene, it's iffy. and also i had suddenly decided to add a handful of new maps and expand the episode's story a bit.

anyway i can't really talk about storystuff cuz spoilers, but speaking of spoilers, i'll give you pinkest screenshot from the new content of 18:

this is from the area i was eventing during march. that eventing is all done and it was a doozy, i ended up having to change the puzzle a handful of times and remove some elements from it because of the risk of lag and of  players getting stuck. so that feels bad. but we made it. that was the hardest thing in the episode so the rest is just a matter of finding the time and focus i've so desperately lacked lately to actually do it which is not a chance my home life has recently afforded me

but we've got some other past stuff i can share. i've been updating a few past things recently, such as the railnet puzzle. i was reviewing it last week and talking about the original concept for it-- that you would just ride the train under there through a collapsed wall to break out after connecting the track, rather than all this hand-wave "digital signal" junk. the reason i hadn't done that in the first place was because of not having  a good way to animate the train moving around corners on the rails (you'll notice even in the scrapyard, trains never turn corners) so it didn't work with the puzzle concept. however, since E17 we now have plenty of train and train-interior accessories, so i realized that i could return to this original concept by having the player stay inside the train while it moves. 
so the core railnet puzzle is the same but the context and outcome of it is now different-- much better, and as originally intended. i guess the player learns how to hijack trains from charlotte or something.

i also went back and touched up some other things recently, such as all of serra's graphics, and especially the mug. i'll post that here on before/after:

yikes, by the way. how did i ever allow that old one.

one last thing to post today since doing sidequests previously. this one goes out to all the folk still around from showdown and PO:

because showdown may be dead, but clarice never will be.

that's all i've got for today. hang tight through my inconsistency, everyone~