No More Phones (Patreon)

Published:

2020-09-23 00:31:37

Imported:

2021-01

Content

Hello there, kitties and ponies!

This is just a quick update and explanation as to our reasoning. As of today, we at Sneaky Kitty Studios decided to drop mobile support for Pony Tale Adventures. There are a few reasons for this, which we'll go into below, but if you want to avoid the blab, well, there's your TLDR!

As for why we came to this decision, it has multiple factors. One, unlike any other port (such as to Mac, Linux, etc), Mobile comes with its own slew of problems. UI Issues, the dropped quality of art assets, mobile trust issues, and the HUGE array of hardware that we have to debug for, not to mention many people have older phones and we can't develop for phones that are just too old. Unlike a PC, we can't even really set minimum requirements for it, because most don't even know what's in their phone, leading to a lot of false bug reports that we have to look at, then dismiss because their chipset just doesn't support some protocol or another. Developing for a phone is less of a port, and more of a redesign, and as such we may choose to do so AFTER 1.0, perhaps with a dedicated programmer (or maybe Error will just have a lot more free time then).

Another reason is just that those that play the game on the mobile release have a worse game experience overall. This game is rapidly becoming far more than just a visual novel, and as such, in order for it to run on the phone we often have to down sample our graphics, the custom music just sounds worse, the UI plays clumsy, hitboxes are inaccurate, and it adds significant overhead just thinking 'How can they pan the screen on mobile'? 'How can they enter this menu on mobile?'. 'Will this button be big enough on mobile?'.

So... Yeah. That's why we've decided to drop mobile support. It will allow the desktop version of the game to flourish, and if we decide to make a mobile version later in development, we can give it the attention it deserves, not just an afterthought.

Thank you for your time, kitties, and thank you again for your support!

~ Silk Wright