Dev Update - January 16th, 2019 (Patreon)

Heyo everyone! Vilsa here with a quick little update for the week! We've been hard at work on implementing the story content for 0.8, so there isn't much eye candy to show this time around.

Environment

We've been commissioning new environment art for a location that we'll be lightly dabbling in with 0.8, and exploring more in 0.9. Here's a little sketchsheet of the props and tiles that will be used.

Behind the Scenes

Here's a quick little peek at the whiteboard on some things we're currently working to implement. My kindergarten level writing ability is amazing I know.

Bugfixes

We've delayed the second bugfix update for 0.7.x until the public release of 0.7.6 (Feb 1st) because of new additions that are unique to 0.8. The added complications of having to build bugfixes for two different versions of the game at once (for a total of 8 builds) along with all the pushes to multiple websites and hosts required to update a public version means it's just easier for us to wait until 0.7.6 goes live. This means that the bugfixes will just be built into the new public version of 0.7.6. Of course, the same fixes will also be included in 0.8 when it's released to patrons, so no worries!

Optimizations

Feel free to tl;dr if you aren't interested in the nitty gritty gamedev talk! :P

We've been trying to make memory optimizations here and there to try and solve the problems with low-end devices having frequent crashes. We've identified some culprits for the memory problems:

The first culprit is the loading screen images that get displayed per level. These are all loaded once the game starts up and kept in memory so they can be displayed right away anytime a loading screen happens. We're currently testing ways to unload these images when they aren't needed.

The second major culprit is character sprites. These are also loaded all at once as soon as the game starts up because of how our character system works. The way that character sprites are stored on a character would need to be fairly overhauled to support loading and unloading unneeded sprites when they aren't being displayed.

The third culprit is CGs. These aren't as huge of a problem except in places like the motel or Carceburg where lots of scenes with lots of CGs happen. Basically when these levels are loaded, all of the CGs are also loaded into memory even though they aren't being displayed and aren't needed. The way our dialogues store CGs would need to be overhauled to support loading and unloading CGs only when a dialogue starts up and ends so that we only load the CGs we need to display.

Basically the main issue with all of these optimizations is that they will be a huge bitch for us to complete. This would normally be perfectly fine for us to take care of except that we also need to keep creating new content for monthly releases.

We understand that it's frustrating when the game doesn't work properly and crashes, and we're actively thinking of ways to improve this, but it's just unfortunately going to be slow for these major optimizations to roll out.

tl;dr: we're working to solve the crashes, but it'll probably take a while.

That's all for this week! We'll see you all next Wednesday for another Development Update!