Happy Valentine's Day! (Patreon)

First off, Happy Valentine's Day! Hopefully you have a 3D waifu to share it with, but if not, don't feel bad. 2D ones are almost as good! (Bonus: you can save the money you would've spent buying chocolates and instead buy more 2D waifus!) 

Poll Results and Other Housekeeping

A few weeks ago, I posted a poll asking whether Windows/Linux users would rather have their saves stored in the game folder (as they currently are) or stored in the user's app data folder so that new versions of the game would find them automatically. Combining poll results both here and at the other site, the vote is... to keep things as they are, 62-17. If the poll were closer, I might've tried a way to satisfy both parties (I kinda had one already figured out) but given how lopsided it is, I think I'll just keep things as they are. More new features mean more new things to break, and I suppose the development time would be better spent elsewhere.

Version 0.9.5

Speaking of things going wrong, there's going to be another bugfix release in a few days. I wasn't able to reproduce the issue, but two different people reported it, so it seems to be a legit bug. This one causes a crash during the flu minigame, giving a type error related to SceneManager. If you'd like to try out the fix, replace the PROX_Minigames.js file (in www/js/plugins) with this one:

Link 

It's the only change between 0.9.5 and 0.9.4, so this'll also save you the trouble of having to download the new one when it comes out!

Lighting Revision?

That will be 0.9.5, but there may still be a 0.9.6, even if there aren't any other serious bugs. This one won't be about adding any new features; rather, it'll be about removing one. The lighting plugin has been a pain in the rear ever since I introduced it. All sorts of people seem to have game-crashing problems with it. I've done a lot to try to mitigate that, but even with the steps I took in 0.9.3 some people are still having problems.

All these problems have me wondering if the lighting plugin is more trouble than it's worth. It isn't used for mechanics; it's just something I added to help establish mood in certain parts. Well, I think I've figured out another way to add lighting effects that won't cause all these compatibility problems, so I plan to experiment and see if I can get it to do what I want. If so, I'll put out another 0.9 version adding that and removing the troublesome lighting plugin.

But that will have to wait for a little bit because I want to get some more work done on 0.10 first.

Work on 0.10

The plan for 0.10 (right now) is to add 3 quests, and I've been working on the first of those (The Hell's quest) for a bit now. I have a plan that I've been working off of, but something about it just didn't feel right, so I'm now in the process of going back and revising the concept. It's not yet finalized, but I have something now that feels like it has potential and I'm kind of excited about it.

The other thing I've been working on is practicing with Substance Painter, a piece of software for texturing 3D models. It's pretty important to me to move my workflow from Daz to Blender (for a host of reasons which I've probably elaborated elsewhere) and Substance Painter will be a big part of that. First, I need its help to make Alex's (and probably Ana's) hair look good in Blender. Looking a little down the road, though, I think I might want to make the environments look a little stylized in addition to just the character models, and a tool like Substance will be helpful in making that happen, too.

So that's where we are in development. Expect 0.9.5 soon! (It's just 0.9.4 plus the file above.) Thank you for your support, and Happy Valentine's Day!