Time to make an official announcement on the status of Faith & Prayer Version. If I had to round out the percentage of completion of Demo 3, I'd have to say we're at 98.99%.
I have spent the entire past week, and then some, working on where I left off on progress. I managed to finish all trainers, include a trade NPC, drop the Coin Case, and get every single Rival Battle instance and Team Rocket battle finished. Very very little remains before I can release Demo 3, in fact I'll list what remains.
- Setting up Fuchsia City Gym and its trainers. Probably the last big challenge for this Demo. I've checked the levels I end at and the levels I have slated for Janine. If you battle every trainer indiscriminately, you will be on par with her, if not 1-3 levels over her strongest. I may tweak slated levels. This is roughly 1% of the completion progress, putting us at 99.99%
- Getting the Bill event in Fuchsia City finished, which is the last event in Demo 3. He gives you the Mini Teleporter/Portable Teleporter, which is the Item replacement for Fly. This, however, also has to be coded in. I would really like to release Demo 3 with the Teleporter programmed in, but if it is taking too long to get I will release Demo 3 at 99.99% completion and aim to get the teleporter for Demo 4.
- I also have to account for some buggy moves. I'm going to look into whats bugged and attempt to fix it. Push comes to shove, i'll ask for help on the moves and see what I can learn from some experienced scripters.
- I need to lay down some items in the Safari Zone for the player to collect - what is a dungeon without any collectable items.
Once all these are done, I will be sending the text to my Writing Adviser for grammatical and typographical errors and inconsistencies. Once they finish checking, I will apply changes to the game (Under a new language pack likely titled "Proper English" - this is something I intend to do, if it doesn't, I'll manually fix the dialogue). While fixing dialogue, I will be sending out Demo 3 to select people for bugtesting procedures. I will then fix any bug I get pointed out, and I should have it refined enough for release after that.
All in all, this process should take around a week or longer. I do not intend to delay Demo 3 any later than April 1st, and if I must, no later than April 21st. It has been almost a full year since the last release, and I apologize for that. Several things have prevented me from working consistently on it. A broken workstation computer (I was forced to use my netbook laptop for 5 months, completely stalling progress on Faith & Prayer during that timeframe). I got some minor work done in that 5 month span, but nothing noteworthy. I was also working on another project (Touhou x Command & Conquer: War of the Rice) in the meanwhile. When I did get a new computer, I was burned out from working on War of the Rice that I took a break for a month. I did some more work on Faith & Prayer during February, and that's about it.
I aim to have Demo 4 out much faster than Demo 3, but we'll see how things go.
Faith & Prayer Version is not dead yet.