Update - Shizu & Nobuko kiss (Patreon)

tl;dr - The new version of VN Maker brings better performance but voids old saves and persistent data.

This week's image

Another image from the upcoming scenes - Shizu and Nobuko share a kiss at the end of the action. ;)

I didn't upscale this one as I felt the original resolution better represented the painted parts of this one that I did in post-work.

Exporting PAT in the upgraded engine

The engine I build PAT in is VN Maker, which has had some technical problems thanks to its use of NW.js in the past. This is likely the source of the crashes on loading screens, as well as a number of other issues. While I've been mitigating those problems by manually updating NW.js myself, the developers of the engine have finally done something about it.

NW.js has been removed from VN Maker altogether in a major update, and it's been replaced with Electron. This week I packaged up the export version of the next release of PAT and with that version has brought some new options - including a more up to date Mac export, and also one for Linux. Hopefully those will work a bit better!

I'm also hoping that performance will be a bit better for those of you who've had slow loading with the game or intermittent crashes. I also think right clicking should now more reliably bring up the menu screen, but I haven't tested that yet.

There may also be problems with it that I haven't yet discovered. If you find bugs, please report them to me!

All progress - lost! Curses!

Yeah, so I'm very sorry about this part, because I know it's disappointing, but all saved games, and even persistent progress like unlocking endings & Mika, plus all your collector cards, are going to be wiped for this new version. The change in the code means that VN Maker just works a bit differently now and it can't store the old versions. Of course, you'll be able to unlock those things again and it'll save it.

It's one of the perils of a game in early access, unfortunately. I don't anticipate any more losses of persistent data in the course of development, although I wouldn't be able to 100% predict that. 

Saved games, of course, are a bit more unpredictable - I think they'll mostly stay intact but eventually I'll want to do a polish pass on the game before final release and improve a lot of the older graphics, which might invalidate some saves. That's partly why I built in that accelerated start mode, which I may remove from the final game.

Is losing the persistent data worth it for the update, do you think? Or is this just a pain in the arse? Let me know in the comments!