art update - once seen (Patreon)

Hello everyone! Hope you're all doing super fine. 

Have you already read the coder's update?  you can do so 

HERE

I'm going to call the coder Bob today. Just to make it easier when mentioning him.

Edit: he didn't like Bob so I'll change it to Cody. A worse nickname will teach him to not question my nicknaming sense!

Here's a small recap of what went on. As you know, I had to administer some tough love and forced Cody to take a break. I figured a real vacation of a few weeks or month would bring him back from the dead. Energetically speaking. I heard a few things about what led him to feel like a depleted battery, but as I later learned not the entire story. 

Cody has a way of downplaying his problems and for a long time I didn't fully realize this side of him. Anyway. Things looked like they were going well again and then I got a very alarming email from him. It was a one sentence email which contained the words, shattered, ankle and hospital. Not much else. 

We sometimes mess around with each other, but in a friendly manner. Never in a let's see if I can get the other to have a panic attack. I gotta admit slight feelings of panic and disbelieve did manifest themselves within me. Communication became extremely slow and limited from then on. It took me a long time to get the full story and I was pretty much at a loss of how to deal with the situation except to wait and see what would happen. 

It was very frustrating to not know what exactly was going on. Me and Cody don't even live on the same continent! I can imagine me staying silent has been very frustrating to some of you as well. I really am sorry about that, but I had no idea how to deal with this. So except for answering some pm's, I pretty much went into recluse mode again.

Since less than a  week I've gotten the whole story. The comparison Cody made with a confetti cannon in his post is a lot less hyperbolic than you might think. 

Anyway, he's had his surgery and right now is trying to get around on crutches and not get stir crazy. Since I felt it was  necessary to finally let you guys know what was going on I asked him to write a big post about all the things which had happened so far and brought us to where we are today.

He did and included way more details than I thought I already knew. At least in the first version which he let me read beforehand. But he was also very wary of putting all of that personal stuff out in the open and finally I just told him to forget about all of that and simply write whatever he felt comfortable with. If he feels like adding to it at a  later time,  fine, if not fine too.

Obsessively checking my email every other five minutes during all of this (and a lot of restless nights) resulted in me not entirely feeling like my own happy self anymore. But now that we've finally been able to put this out in the open it's a lot like a mini catharsis.

Still... it sucks for all our patrons, you guys.  I'm well aware of the fact you were unwilling participants in the game of "why aren't we hearing anything from MITY?" and I know several people are upset about that. We've been asking a lot of your patience. 

We promise that when the new build will finally be ready we'll email or pm the links to you regardless of your patron status. So if you're a patron you can quit and still receive the build once it's done. It's the least we can do.

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While all of this was going on I had the choice between pacing back and forward (in between checking my email) or I could try and do some work for FET (in between checking my email). 

I picked the latter and although things were going far from easy I did manage to get some work done. I toyed with the idea of just going at it myself and try to create a build continuing the story like I mentioned in an earlier art update, but Cody does have pride in his work and wants to do this thing. It's just that he couldn't and taking this away from him felt too much like me doing a backstab. I also doubt I could've written anything worthwhile. I simply couldn't get in the mood. 

So what did I do while all of this was going on? New scenes for future builds, a scene for book 3 and lots of changes to 'finished' work. I might have inserted some of my more negative feelings in some of the new scenes because of this whole situation. Well, it IS the slave route so... 

The scene I made for book 3 had been itching as a possibility in the back of my mind for awhile now, but since I was solely focused on the progress of book 4 I never really took my time to address it. I'll tell you about the details when it finds it's way inside a build

Don't expect to see it in the upcoming build even though in theory it could be slid in (relatively)easily. That's because currently I have only one mission and that's to NOT bother the coder with ANYTHING which might somehow hinder him more than necessary. 

I also did a bunch of prodding and poking into the software we use to create FET. 

Creating a mini-chapter by myself for Halloween made it feel a lot more pressing to know about this sort of stuff, but back then I had zero time to do anything but finish it asap. Let alone do some investigating!

Btw. I'd like to  release the links to the Halloween side story to all of our patrons.  So if you haven't had the opportunity to play it, here you go! 

FET - Spookytimes   0.4 -  PC version

FET - Spookytimes   0.4 -  Mac version 

FET - Spookytimes   0.4 -  Android version 

It's going to get slightly more technical and quite possibly boring from here on out! 

Please look at the pic below. It's a partly transparent .png  image file of 335 KB. 

As I've told you before I'm putting a lot of my time into creating the scenes and getting them to be as small as I can practically get them. For the longest of times my quota for one scene and it's art assets was about 1 Mb. That's things like a left arm, torso etc put all together. 

That's pretty dang small and nowadays I often blow way past that. But it's just nice to keep the game as small as possible for when you have to download it and I always figured it was one of the main reasons which increased the loading times. I think those art files are faaar less important than our script sizes when it comes to loading times now,  but I'm going off track here. Somehow I became aware of .webp files.

It's pretty much a different format to save pictures in, like .jpg or .png

I normally use the .png format to save my drawings when they need transparent parts. But I discovered our software also accepts the .webp format.  Why is that interesting? It's interesting because it looks a lot like the .webp format can shrink a .png file up to 40% of it's earlier size memory-wise!  Without sacrificing quality! If you're willing to accept some quality loss things can get even crazier.

below is the same partly transparent pic again, but this time it's a .webp image and 208 KB! ....Actually just take my word for it, patreon says I can only upload , jpg, jpeg, gif or png's.  Not webp. So yeah, the .webp format isn't as widely used as say .png.  Anyway , about 30% smaller without quality loss is still nice.

The images can get royally f'd up the Ass when you start messing with the quality settings, but it was still pretty damn interesting to see how small they could become.  I'm not interested in lower quality since the gains don't outweigh the cons, but the small-files-fetishist in me was impressed.

below the same .webp format of the original png at 40% quality settings. Actually I just took the .webp format and saved it again as full quality png to capture the bad quality since patreon won't let me use .webp.  I messed around with the quality settings, set it at 40% and It's size is only 65 KB now. Really small, but it comes at a big loss of quality though!!  

Since our ingame resolution isn't that big to begin with the perceived quality would only get worse if you watch it in full screen mode. The smaller the size the less visible the quality loss.   I'll admit I wasn't exactly looking for a good middle ground between quality and size though. 40% is more of an extreme example.

Unfortunately(?) A lot of the game's larger files aren't image files (but for example sound) so even changing all of the image files wouldn't make nearly as much of a difference as you'd expect.

Doesn't it have down sides? Well, I have to use an extra stand alone program to convert my files into .webp and generally have a bit of a harder time processing them.  And all of the scripts concerned with those files would have to be adapted so it's slightly bothersome and has the potential to make some bugs pop up when it's not done correctly. 

There's also a slumbering fear. The fear I'm overlooking something potentially horrible. Just your average good old fear of the unknown! I'm going to keep my eye on this and maybe start using it for  new scenes in the future. Not entirely sure, but a 30-40% decrease is hard to pass up IF there aren't any other things to consider. Anyone with some more experience using webp, I'll welcome any of your insights on the matter!

I also looked into other stuff. But I think this post has become big enough as it is and I still have to prepare the art assets update for this month. I don't think I've ever missed one of those and I don't want this month to be the exception. 

tl;dr   Shit happened, then some more shit happened and then we had a pile of the stuff. Great. Anyone willing to stay a little longer with us, as we try to crawl out from under it, you guys are saints. Anyone else, we'll make sure you get the build regardless of whether you're a patron in the future. As for when that will be.  I don't know. This whole string of mishaps following each other has made me very wary to even want to take a guess!