Update on The Pill Progress (Patreon)

Hi all,

I figured I'd post an update on The Pill to let you all know where the latest version is it since with me having December off it has been a while.

(If you tl;dr just skip to the last question)

Are you still working on it? Yes I most certainly am! 

What's been happening? What I've been doing since the last update is attempting to optimise the experience by changing a lot of "call scenes" to "change scenes". What this means is that the game will use that opportunity to unload all the current assets and load in new ones.

The way it is currently built the entire character arc loads in all at once at the beginning of a play-through (or a time reversal pill). While this makes for a more seamless playing experience, it's a lot for the game compiler to load at once. 

The problem really comes from the fact that the game engine I use "Virtual Novel Maker" is designed for exactly that - virtual novels that go from a to b with maybe 1-2 alternate branches along the way. Anyone who has played The Pill knows it's a lot more circuitous than that, and exists as almost a closed circuit. 

Some of you might have experienced this as the "black screen" that you get when trying to start the game. On older computers this can go on as long as 40 seconds between loads (or can fail entirely, especially on older macs).

I'm hoping to solve both the current loading issue and future proof the game as it gets bigger and requires more content to load.

That sounds dry! It is.

Anything else going on? Well because I know "rebuilt the backend" is pretty boring for you good people I'm also writing 2-3 arcs to add to Trish's story. So doing those in conjunction with each other is sadly taking some time.

Is there any good news? Yes. Yes there is. 

Between the end of Feb and mid April I have time off from my contracts (which is literally made possible because of you awesome Patrons) which means I can work 100% of the time on The Grove content. To put that in perspective that last time I had that amount of dedicated time is when I first built The Pill.

I'll be revamping the patreon site slightly (with a new *voiced* intro animation that I just need to finish off with sfx and audio) and put a lot more time into The Pill, if possible finishing Trish and releasing a third character.

Beyond that I have plans for a second game and am learning code for a new gaming engine to achieve that. Whether that will be realized during this time is yet to be seen.

If you have any other questions let me know in the comments!