- fixed the rakari egg spawning dead creatures bug -- it was related to the 'start' function not happening for any object anymore issue
- since i'm tired of searching for and fixing bugs, i just figured it's time to upload the game for eva and wynand (but just those two people). currently uploading the game. the full game is 321mb currently in a zip file

my plan now is to continue to work on dream mode -- finishing the second dream mode test level, finishing the ship functions in dream mode, starting the obj_proj particle-visuals system, porting more creatures from exploration mode to dream mode, and making the dream mode levels. this should take another couple of months. after i finish that stuff, the game will be 90-95% complete, and then i'll do more serious playtesting with a lot of people testing the game and giving me feedback, i'll adjust the game to that feedback, and then release it. so my aim is to release the game by fall, but definitely by winter

- tested the game a little further for bugs, found one with the sound function: it's supposed to create sound icons with the previous sound, instead they are always "nothing", containing no sound. investigating the cause...
- found it and fixed it. i can't believe this bug was in the game for so long without me noticing it...
- changed it so that a "nothing" sound icon can never be generated
- discovered a bug where birthing rakari eggs starts creatures out dead rather than alive (i don't think i intended it that way... but i can't really remember. i'll fix it tomorrow because i believe it's a bug.)

- again tried to reproduce the bug that slowed the game to like 1 fps during a death, but wasn't able to. as a precaution/guess, i made it so that global.shock (which is a temporary decrease in delta time) is always 1 when the player is in the .dyingnow stage
- discovered that the fix i made yesterday to prevent two overlapping music tracks didn't work, and *now* i fixed it
- made the camp mode music play when characters join (haven't yet tested for all the characters, but it seems to work for venus). the integration of the new music to the code is now complete, so that's one more task*

223

- adjusted the damage value of the player's gun a bit again, and continued testing the game for bugs
- discovered a bug related to the game freezing when the player dies, but wasn't able to reproduce it... so i'm not sure what's causing it yet, and am not able to fix it until i can make it happen on call
- fixed a bug related to overlapping music in camp mode

- made the color of the chargemeter (which is only used for the phoenix battle at the start of the game if i remember?) change depending on whether the player can or can't fire the gun at that point
- made the damage of that gun in the intro depend on difficulty level
- made the 'count' variable mechanics for that gun a little different, which fixed a bug it was having

- continued working on music arrangement
- created a soundcloud account and started uploading the songs so that i can show the rest of the devteam the work in progress and solicit suggestions

- continued working on the camp mode music system -- made some progress in keeping the music going between camp mode sessions, but still need to do some more stuff
- continued to work on the orchestration of the 6 new songs

- worked on the arrangement of the songs a bit more; yesterday while going over the music with me my father suggested ideas for the arrangement, so today i implemented some of his suggestions (they were mainly: use the harp more, and add pedals to everything)

- went through the songs with my father and corrected some notes; he also gave me some tips for instrumentation, pedal placement, and arrangement which i'll put into effect tomorrow. but now that the songs are all inputted, this counts as 6 tasks complete*

224

- finally finished all the music input (just need to get my father to listen to them and point out mistakes in the input)
- arranged the music a bit
- saved the music into preliminary .oggs which will be replaced after the arrangement is finished
- using those .oggs, started to code the music's use in the game -- it will play during camp mode discussions. i didn't finish coding this but made progress in it and got it started. i also want to adjust camp mode so that after a conversation is finished, it takes you back to the 'squareselect' menu and doesn't just close camp mode entirely... that'd make it feel a little better i think

- continued inputting music notes; finished the icks and spare songs. only the venus song remains. spare's song is 4:22 long, and icks's song is 5:46 long
- spent some time arranging the ikks and spare songs, adding a few instruments, adjusting stuff, etc.

tomorrow i should finish the venus song; after i get my father to check them over, this'll count as 6 tasks for the midi input (and another 6 tasks after we arrange them). the remaining task number has been going down superslow lately, but i expect it to speed up soon, as i'm currently still getting the harder / more time-consuming tasks over with

- continued inputting notes for the three remaining songs in musescore; i think i can be done with this part of it either tomorrow or the next day
- started the initial stages of arranging (adding instruments, mostly) the six songs

- made the movement sound from the ship only happen in exploration mode (to cut down on sound overflow in dream mode)
- found a bug in the gun in the intro (was too small due to the changes to it i made due to dream mode) and made some changes to fix it
- fixed bug in creature life display for the feni (i changed it so that a mammoth with 95% or less health has its health bar displayed, up from 75%, the number which applies to normal creatures)
- continued inputting music notes in musescore for my father's character theme songs

- continued working on note input

- continued working on music
- fixed the bug mentioned yesterday (figured out it was in a different group)

- worked on the music input some more for the themes for venus, spare, and icks. also read up a bit on orchestration in case i have to orchestrate these character themes myself (not sure if i can rely on long to do it, since he still hasn't finished orchestrating the one song by my father that i sent him years ago, 'the lake', so he might not have time for another six)
- found a bug related to music volume in a certain intro textbox, but haven't been able to fix it yet (but worked on it for a while)

- fixed a bug where 'sound icons' would appear even if the player doesn't have the sound function yet
- fixed a bug with lilypads not lighting up anymore
- fixed a bug with edit mode messing up the images for some decos and some decofloats (was related to the load image on use system)
- fixed a bug where sounds were not correctly stopping when you transitioned between rooms. i think it's related to my new room_mover / room change issue, where the create and destroy events are not triggered for objects anymore in some situations. i'll keep an eye out for future problems with the create/destroy scripts for the other objects, but for now this bug is fixed
- worked on the music a bit more (but not much, due to the bug-fixing above)

- wrote a very large summary of the story for the other team members, because they've expressed the view that they don't really know where the story is at right now
- talked to wynand and harlock a bit about doing some things for sd (nice that they are taking interest again)
- fixed a bug which caused effect surfaces not to be created sometimes, and not initialize properly -- i still have no idea what was causing that bug, it *shouldn't* exist, but it does. i managed to fix it by doing it an alternative way but i've no idea why the old way doesn't work, when it used to work.
- worked a little bit more on the music input (but not very much, since i was doing those other things in preparation of a dev team-only build that eva and wynand requested)
- noticed a few more bugs that i need to fix before sending them a build, and started working on fixing those (some i know how to fix because they're related to the preload image thing)

"the game is about a kind of "sentient lake" that a team of two characters (one human, one a kind of hybrid human/lake being for classic mixed-heritage fun) is sent out to explore and begin terraforming.  You end up trapped within the lake (which has islands, undersea caves, all kinds of weird crap) and attempt to return to your home base.  As the game goes on you acquire three additional characters, parts of the lake, in order to assist you"

-wynand's description of saturated dreamers, june 20 2007, after spending three days talking to each other about it, designing it together. and that is basically an amazingly accurate description of the game even today, although instead of terraforming it's poison purification, and instead of undersea caves there's dream sequences, and neotheo isn't technically "part of the lake" the way spare and icks are

- today i finished inputting theo's song, writing in the remaining 46 of its 58 measures
- today i *almost* finished inputting neo theo's song, writing in 14 more of its measures (5 measures remain to be inputted, i'll do them right now, but it's midnight so i have to write this report. i was hoping to do both of those by midnight, but whatever, a few minutes late on it is still okay)

so tonight i'm going to continue working on inputting these past midnight, and see how late i can stay up doing them, and definitely finish inputting neo theo. then tomorrow, i'll run in the morning (exercise), then work on the 3 remaining songs that will remain at that point, and hopefully finish one of them (they are all rather long, with 80+ measures remaining for each, so i may just do a little of each of them for a while). tomorrow i should reach the halfway point in inputting these songs, anyway (in measure count)

edit: finished the neotheo song at 12:43 am

at current tempos:
*neotheo song is 3:43 minutes
*theo song is 2:22 (it's also the fastest tempo)
*mercedes song (finished yesterday) is 3:10
can't wait to see the times for the remaining three songs, probably much longer than the above three

- continued inputting my father's sheet music into musescore; spent a lot of time on that today. specifically,
- i finished up the mercedes song (it was the shortest/simplest of them). i still need my father to go over it to see if the tempo is right or if i messed up on any notes, and i might want to add some more instruments to it (right now it's just piano) to give it more flavor, and add pedal/release pedal notation, but the song is in there. i won't count it as a task yet until my father looks it over (i'll make him do that for all of them at once, after i have all of them ready), but all of its 53 measures are inputted. despite being the shortest song of the six, it's 3 minutes 20 seconds when being played back by musescore (at its current tempos)
- started inputting the neotheo, theo, spare moment, and icks songs, just to get them all in
- the neotheo one gave me the most trouble, with its weird 3 1/2 time signature, so i spent the most time on that one, eventually figuring out how to represent that time signature in musescore, and inputting 22 measures of 41
- the theo song is relatively simple (like mercedes) although it's faster and has more accent marks to worry about. so far i've inputted about 12 measures of its 58 (actually 8 full, and 8 half (just the bass clef for those 8), so i'll average it at 12)
- spare moment's song is longer and complex, but the first 20 of its 99 measures have been inputted today, so i'm off to a good start...
- ick's song is strange and complex and long, and very time consuming to input due to a plethora of 16th note chords, but i managed the first 12 of its 163 measures today
- i didn't work on the venus song today, since that's the one i worked on in noteworthy and ported to musescore, but for reference, 96 of its 200 measures have been inputted (it's the longest song of the six i have to input, but the one i'm furthest along with, besides the one i finished today)

so total measures inputted: 53 + 22 + 12 + 20 + 12 + 96 = 215
total measures of the sheet music: 53 + 41 + 58 + 99 + 163 + 200 = 614

(53/53, 22/41, 12/58, 20/99, 12/163, 96/200)

so i'm basically 1/3 done with it now

i find i'm able to work longer hours on tedious, but relatively straightforward work, like today's. i think i totaled about 13 hours of work on it today (and that's not counting breaks, that's just 'on the clock' time when i was inputting notes into musescore, or researching music notation when i couldn't figure something out (i'm not a musician)). i wish programming or level design were as easy to spend 13 hours per day on! then SD would have been done by now

- installed, and tried out musescore, a free open source alternative to noteworthy composer. works great so far, i much prefer it
- started learning musescore (went through some tutorials)
- i ported the partially inputted "venus" song to musescore, using an app that converts nwc text format to xml, and tested it to see if it sounds correctly, but didn't work on it or continue it yet
- instead i started on the next song ("mercedes"), inputting about 4/5ths of it (it's a much shorter song than venus, and simpler, so it's quicker to input)
- i also got my father to answer a few questions about his music that i couldn't figure out, such as unclear notes, and he made the changes in the sheet music that i asked for

- continued typing up the sheet music into noteworthy composer; exactly half-done with typing up the "venus" song

- continued importing the sheet music into noteworthy composer. this will probably take a while, but i'm getting better at it, and went at a much faster pace today than yesterday, as i learn the hotkeys for flats, sharps, naturals, and so on

- looked for and downloaded a few more music beats from soundsnap (i have a legacy account so i get 5 free sounds per month from them)
- edited those and the ones i have previously been collecting in audacity (i installed the new version of audacity today, too) into 9 new .ogg songs for dream mode
- started typing up my father's SD songs in noteworthy composer (converting them from sheet music into midi). he wrote these for the game years ago (in 2008), i feel as if i shouldn't delay doing this task any longer