Devblog #67 (Patreon)

Hey Wizards! Shady Character One here!

So, there was no devblog last week—sorry. But that's just partly my fault. I barely had any time to work on the game for the last two weeks. At least, very little was done that would justify another devblog. Of course, there was some progress on the second Trial, which is now about halfway written. And Shady Two did some more work on the artworks. But most of the little free time we had was spent on preparing the next build of the game for deployment.

Deployment, which takes more and more time as the builds grow in size. The game files weigh a bit over 300 MB now, which is still really small, but it is a far cry from the initial 80 MB when I could assemble new builds on the fly. Now—not counting the moment when I mess up somewhere and have to rebuild and re-upload the whole thing again—every time I need to build new distributions and upload them, it takes more than half an hour for each version. This is one of the reasons we had to rearrange our update schedule and make the updates less frequent.

I am honestly considering dropping the Mac version of the game, because Mac users only count as less than 5% of our downloads, but it takes just as much time to build and upload as the other two versions. Of course, that's the question for the future. The builds are more or less manageable now, but as time goes on and the size doubles or triples, that might become a real issue.

Maybe it is the issue that can be solved by a better PC. The laptop I am using now is more of a glorified typewriter than a real computer. And my internet connection has not been the best, either. I'll have to think of the ways of crossing that bridge when I come to it.

But back to the development. As I said before, the second Trial is halfway done. At least its active part, and probably the most difficult one to write. I still haven't even started to write all the possible win and lose outcomes. And after that, there should be a section where you are just watching Bassant participating. And I still haven't written Lily's "come to wish you luck" event. Right now it just says "Lily comes". That needs to be fixed. But I am pretty sure that I will be able to finish all of that (or most of that) by the next update.

Shady Two is continuing her never-ending work on the artworks for the game. She was planning to finish two new introductory artworks for the latest update—one for Mitsuki and one for Gwen. But the one for Gwen had a spiral staircase in the background, which proved too much of a challenge for Shady Two, who isn't that used to drawing backgrounds—especially ones with complex geometries—so that one would have to wait a bit more. We managed to more or less beat that damned piece of non-Euclidean geometry, but not quickly enough for it to make the latest update.

Maybe Shady Two will tell you her stories of background woes in her art blogs, one of these days.

For now, I guess that's it for this week's devblog. See you in a week.

Shady Character One, out!