当你干完了一个项目，接下来该做的是……

After finishing a project, what should you do next...

Long time no see, everyone—this is Orscat. Hard to believe it’s already been a month since my last post.

Time to give you an update on the progress of porting the new engine.

Since most of the coding skills I learned in college have been returned to my teachers, I can only patch things up within Ren'Py’s template project. But thankfully, as of today, all the UI has been rebuilt. Next up is porting the performance scripts.

Back in my school days, I could write a SQL query, generate a view, sort it, paginate it, and output it to the front end in one smooth flow. Now, I can’t even figure out how to split a total of 48 CG images across 8 pages.

That said, Ren'Py’s language switching turned out to be surprisingly easy to implement. From now on, I won’t have to package and upload multiple versions for different languages.

After this port, I expect to solve the following issues in one go:

Integration of the achievement system

Game crashes in certain environments

Words being cut off mid-line in English

Easy in-game display of conditional text variations

Automatic saving

So, the ported version is still expected to launch within the year. Stay tuned, meow~

On top of that, over the past few weeks, I also took a road trip to Western Sichuan. Here are a few snapshots.

After I came back, I told my family that next year, once I finish my current project, I want to go to Qinghai to see the remains of the oil bases. Their sharp comment: “You novel writers really have a different taste in travel.”

My reply: “I actually love sitting out in the wilderness and writing scripts.”

Solo long-distance travel and camping are really great for thinking about all kinds of things. While on the road, a friend asked me if writing is fun.

My answer: “Not fun at all. It’s especially painful.”

I feel like writing is just like model-making: the only moments of great joy are at the beginning (when a new idea pops up / when unboxing a delivery) and at the end (when you send the finished piece to friends / when you take photos after completion). In between, it’s all painful, grinding away with patience to achieve a certain level of polish.

Anyway, the outline for the new work was already written on the road. The detailed outline is being developed in parallel with the porting of the witch project. The next work will be a psychological drama about a hundred bones.