Did you know..?
The last time I posted here, the world was arguably slightly less on fire than it is now. It’s been a wild ride, but it’s time for some updates!
Personally, life has gone on pretty much the same as normal for me (I’m essentially a hermit, so social distancing is my way of life), so that’s an upside. The downside is that life still kicked dirt in my eyes anyway by killing my hard drive.
No big deal; I back up my stuff on an external drive and in the cloud too, so it’s just a case of reinstalling my programs so I can get back to work, right? Yeah, no. About 98% of my stuff was backed up and successfully reinstalled, sure, but it turns out that the backup method that was covering a particular group of folders stopped working at some point. Do you want to take a wild, crazy guess as to what was included in that last 2% was that didn’t get backed up? Go on, guess; I’ll wait…
If you said “the RanGen WIP folder”, then we have ourselves some winners.
I had been working on a revamp of the Species Gen, and a revamp of the revamped Plot Gen. I’d made a lot of progress on the former, and had made some major changes and was about to move on to the next phase of development for the latter when the crash happened. So I lost several months of progress, and I still forlornly look at the dead drive and wonder if there’s any other way I could try to salvage that lost data, but alas, that costs more time and money. It might be a lost cause anyway.
All that was left to do was to move forward.
So I did! As I mentioned, I still have older backups; ones that didn’t have the new-fangled stuff I had added in. So, I basically had to start from scratch with them and scoop out a bunch of old code so that I could get them back to their revamped state where I left off, to the best of my memory. Then from there, I could FINALLY get back to actually working on the updates.
It’s been a long, gruelling, frustrating process, especially in the case of the Plot Gen, which was starting to come along nicely. I also lost an accompanying file that had a detailed breakdown of what I wanted to do, which provided an additional kick in the teeth. But, the silver lining was that a brief snapshot of that breakdown I had made was and saved elsewhere, thank goodness for that. It’s not enough for me to rebuild it exactly, but it was enough to allow me to start heading in that direction again as I build something new. This is the 3rd incarnation now.
Buuuuut, fast forward to now, and the Plot Gen still has a ways to go but is coming along nicely again now. And the Species Gen? It’s ready to go! Almost. It just needs a bit of spit and polish and it’ll be ready by the end of the week. Then you can enjoy the new and improved slew of horrifying monstrosities.
Oh, but, is that all I’ve been doing these past few months? Just worked on scraping together the Plot and Species Generators? Certainly not! You probably noticed me lurking in the comments sections as usual, but I also revamped the Journey Gen too! Added some tasty new details to it. It should also be released by the end of this week, along with the other updates.
“Is that all?” I hear you ask.
It sure ain’t! I also cobbled together a shiny new Gen. And by “cobbled together”, I mean worked carefully and meticulously on it for several months. What is it? It’s a secret. 😉 Keep an eye out for the update later this week.
That’s not all I’ve been up to, but I’ll leave it at that for now. That should be enough to wet your whistle. In the meantime, thank you to everyone who has continued to come by during these trying times, and thank you to my continued Patrons
Duncan, Ellie, Lokomotives, Sander, Stuart, Terence and Kim
And a big thank you and warm welcome to my newest Patrons,
Ostagaar and Kristin!
Thank you all so much!
If you’d like to support the site too, please check out RanGen on Patreon.
I’ll be back soon with the most recent bunch of updates, and the regularly scheduled programming after that.
