The Proteus Effect 10.2.1 (Patreon)

Greetings! First off - Happy New Year! I figured a good way to start off the new year is with a new build of the game, even if it is mostly just a bugfix release. (Still, there are a couple of tweaks and minor features.) Before we get into it, here’s the link to the folder (same as the 10.2 folder):

Google Drive 

Changelog

Minor Features

• Added more explicit hints to scenes you haven’t unlocked in the Recollection Room
• Revised dialogue windows to look a little better
• Added tools for Mac users
• Added experimental Apple Silicon-native build

Bugfixes

• “Panty search” skit triggers when returning for help in Plains End
• Embassy sneak mission triggers at inappropriate times
• Arena champion hanging out in the wall during exhibition bouts
• Fixed empty name boxes appearing after hiding/unhiding message window
• Minor typos and bugs

About the Changes

H-Scene Hints

I probably should have added more helpful hints to the Recollection Room a long time ago. Questions about “how do I get X scene?" are pretty common, but they should become less so now. The hints don’t always explicitly tell you how to get it, but they’re a lot more useful. One thing they do always tell you is if the scene has some sort of prerequisite. It was actually a little surprising to go through this part - some of the scenes are gated by more things than I thought they were.

Dialogue Windows

Revised dialogue windows are next. I mostly liked the UI revamp in 10.1, but a couple of things bothered me. First, the decorative elements on the corners sometimes impinged on the text, which is a no-no for such a text-heavy game as this. Second, the name boxes looked kinda dumb, mostly because 4 corner decorations were stuck so close together. Here’s what it originally looked like:

And here’s what it looks like now:

There are two basic changes: first, the corner decorations are smaller (and one of them is entirely absent if there’s a nameplate) and second, the nameplate is now visually part of the dialogue box. It probably should have been that way all along. Small change but I like it, and I hope you do too.

Mac Stuff

There’s now an experimental Apple Silicon-native build of the game. I’m back to developing on a Mac and I’ve been using the SDK version in my testing, and it seems to work well. The Intel Mac version should still work just fine under Rosetta, but Apple being Apple, I expect them to retire Rosetta at some point, just like they did with the Power PC to Intel transition. Welp, even if they do you’ll still be able to play The Proteus Effect!

Getting set up on the new machine also prompted me to write a couple of tools for Mac users - the first creates a save directory for the game, and the second opens up the save directory (so you can easily transfer/back up/replace saves). The one that creates a save directory won’t do anything if the directory already exists, so you don’t need to worry about it overwriting your saves or whatever. They’re AppleScripts, so you can open them up in the script editor if you’re curious about exactly what they’re doing. I exported them as AppleScript applications, so you can just double click them and they do their thing. I’m assuming they’ll work just fine on Intel Macs, but please let me know if that isn’t the case!

I’ve been thinking about ways to make this process more understandable for Windows users, too. If you play RPG Maker games a lot you probably understand how to work with saves quite well. If you don’t, however, the process of transferring saves from one build to another can be confusing. I’d put up a poll quite a while back asking if Windows users wanted saves stored in App Data like they are on the Mac version, and the general consensus was “no.” There were a few people who really seemed to like the idea - you don’t have to transfer saves at all, you just download the new version and play - but for something like this I think it makes sense to go with the will of the majority. Still, I’d like to find a way to help those folks who don’t necessarily play a lot of RPG Maker games.

Conclusion

I wasn’t able to reproduce some of the bugs on my tracker - and thus wasn’t able to fix them - but I did squash several. Let me know if you find more! Please let me know what you think about the new stuff, and thank you for your support!