Open Letter: State of the Game (Patreon)

Hello everyone,

Today I am writing this “Open Letter” to the ones who are following me because of the game “Skie’s Inflatable Adventures”. First I want to apologize for the lack of updates during January and February. My only excuse is that I have suffered from heavy depression during this time. Long time followers know that I already have these since my teenage age. So I already have them since I have joined the inflation-community as an artist. For me, depression works like a barrel of water that gets fuller and fuller over time and needs to drain itself at some point. Usually this happens during my Birthday or Christmas/New Year: The Symbols of getting older. However, thanks to the dead line of the game for the Holidays I managed to have a great time. But like I said the “Barrel” has to empty itself someday. And that time was during January and February and has ended now (hopefully, with depression you can’t be 100% sure of it).

Now we are getting to the informations for the state of the game:

First we start with the “Boring” Technical-Stuff. The last 14 days I have started to rewrite some codes for the dialog-, weather- and lightning- system. These are things that the Player (You) won’t see. The changes I have made will help me to add new content more easily, because I am planning to support this game for several years. During this progress I have experienced some frame drops that are happening during the game. The game starts with about 150FPS in the location of the Town. But when you went through the caves it drops to 100FPS constantly now. Originally it has dropped to 30FPS but I already managed to optimize it a little. But still the frame drop of 50FPS shows me that some scripts are not working optimized right now. That’s what I am focusing on right now: Optimizing the Scripts.

Another thing that has happened is that “Parallaxes-Textures” have found their way into the game. Usually they are used for Backgrounds like a horizon that is moving slower as you walk to give the illusion of depthness in a 2D-Game. But you can also use them as fixed textures to create some lightning effects and shadows which improves the graphics a lot. At the moment these “Textures” are only applied to interiors to make it easier to see a wall. Look at the reference I have attached to this Journal.

Some new content also has found its way into the game already. We have our very first guest OC “Karan” as some sort of engineer in the game. You should know the gray skinned Lady already from some artworks I have did. With “Karan” added, the Main Story got expanded to give her some content with a small sidequest that teaches you how you can craft things. Yes, crafting has made its way into the game!

Thanks to “Mr.Squiggles'' we also got our first commissioned Inflation-Sequence in the game. I still have to put it into the game but it will be included in the next release for sure, and I don’t want to spoil too much but it's a Sperical-Inflation to give you a hint how you can unlock it.

Now to the most important question: When will Version 0.3a come?

I know that with no updates the last two months it’s already overdue to deliver it. I have planned to push it out this weekend but it doesn't look like I can make it. If I playtest it and I am still finding problems I just can’t do it. With the beginning of March I have to return to drawing pictures again because I need to make them for the regular updates during April. Once these are done I will focus on the game again. That will be hopefully the middle of March. That’s why I am expecting to have 0.3a ready until the end of March. Hopefully sooner but it all depends on how things are going.

I know that I am in the duty to deliver an update to the game. And I promise to get it done as fast as possible.

For the end I would like to thank you all for the support you are giving. Please take care of yourself and everyone of you and your family stay healthy!