Shrunken At Home - Updates / Dev Blog (Patreon)

First - usually I tend not to publish more than 2 posts a day, sorry for spamming you.

Since my last update about “Shrunken At Home” I’m getting a lot of messages here and on deviant art, most asking for a release date, some with other questions about the process.

First I’d like to say that I’m super happy with how interested and excited you all are. Second, to those who want an inside look, and those who are eager to get more updates - this post is for you.

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Progress

• The main frame of the story is written, there’s a branch the size of about 30 steps that does not affect the main story and I’ve decided to delay it to the Beta phase. Right now the game has 180 unique steps and 50 unique endings, which makes this game about 2 times the size of “Shrinking In The Mall”, and it’s going to have more added after the alpha release.
• Dakota finished taking all the photos for the story, last time I said a hundred, right? So there are exactly 226 customs she took, we discussed and changed some, then I asked for more. In some steps I asked her for more than one option. So I'm drowning in beautiful photos, picking the best ones and making a collage, then adding to the game’s database, it’s fun - but that’s A LOT of work, as you can imagine.
• The game is tested, and with the amazing help of RobertHouse, we’ve verified that all 50 endings are reachable. I had to fix some bugs in the process.
• I’ve made some infrastructure changes in the website in order to support another story, more about it in the dev blog.

In the theme photos, I've added 2 photos, exposing the first step of the game, and a random step from navigating in the apartment.

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Dev Blog

A look at the database:

Every row of data contains the key of the step, which is what identifies it, then the description, a photo, extra data that indicates its options, if they need a precondition to be unlocked, and if they lead to random results.

Loading times

While working on this game, unlike “Shrinking In the Mall”, I’ve encountered with several issues I needed to face:

Dakota photos are all 4k, the size of at least 3MB each, which makes the first time experience a bit slow, when you enter a new step you’ll sometimes need to wait 5-7 seconds for the image to change.

At first I thought about lowering the quality, but I’ve decided not to do that eventually, the image should change while you read the description for the first time, then it will be cached and will be loaded faster.

When you click at the image you’ll see it in full size, and I know many of you care about the quality, so I think it’s worth the latency cost.

Another issue was that since the number of steps and their content is hugely different than “Shrinking In The Mall” - the indexing and mounting period takes more than a second, currently the buttons are just not clickable for a while until it’s finished.

I will solve it with a loading screen every time you enter the game or click on “Try Again”, don’t know if it will be ready for the alpha release, but I’ll implement it for sure for the beta phase.

Unlocked Endings - Game Picker

From now on the good old “Unlocked Endings” page will have a dropdown available, letting you choose between the endings of “Shrinking in the mall” and “Shrunken at home”.

Home Page - New Look

I was always embarrassed with the quality of the former home page of the website, I was mainly focused on delivering the interactive story that I kind of neglected everything else, so I gave it an overall new look with a lot of good informative texts to give some context to the casual visitor.

Surprisingly, with zero promotion except from here, there are few hundreds entries from Google every month. So I thought they should have a better landing page than a random girl holding shopping bags.

Back Button?

Some of you asked about it, and although the game is huge, there won’t be a back button!

Yes, a bit hardcore, but what I really don’t want is for the game to be casually brute forced, to make mistakes on purpose just to see the ending and go back to the last step like you haven’t been just crushed to death by Dakota.

It ruins the fun, it’s like enabling a cheat by design, and it won’t happen, sorry.

I want people to actually consider and think twice before making a choice, the price of starting over for making the wrong turn might be harsh, but in my opinion it’s fair.

My suggestion - don’t try to brute force it, draw yourself a map and enjoy the game, make genuine decisions and experience the consequences. You will unlock all endings eventually, just have fun.

Release Dates

Guys, there are no release dates, I can only say and I hope you believe me that I want this game published just as you, perhaps even more.

I’m working on it whenever I can, almost every day, one way or another, and even made some tough decisions to cut out content for the alpha release, but I won’t let people play without having a collage for at least 90% of the game, all endings included.

I will share with you my complete release strategy though, to be fully transparent with you:

Alpha Release - exclusively to patrons with lifetime support of 30$+

You will get a private message, informing you that the alpha release has started, if you have an account on the website it means that I’ve already manually unlocked the game for you and you will just be able to enter.

The main frame of the game will be available for you and you’ll be able to experience everything except getting into a specific apartment of the building, the option will be grayed out.

Beta Release - Tickets will be available on the website, Tier 3 patrons will have a post with a free coupon for them to use, also patrons with 20$+ lifetime support will be able to contact me to get a free coupon.

Just like “Shrinking in the mall”, having a ticket means that the game will be always available to you, whether you are a patron or not, it’s only up to your lifetime support or if you bought a ticket manually.

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That’s all from me. I hope this post clears things up, and hope you enjoy the tons of content this month. There's plenty more to come and “Amazon” is definitely one of my favorites, 2 more parts to go.