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August 8 Update (Patreon)

Published:
2021-08-08 17:07:30
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

Busy week, busy weekend.

TLS 0.57.3: The public release seems to have gone fine. I expect a continued stream of minor suggestions and comments, but otherwise I intend to be moving forward.

Rainhorn Release: The second book in TWC is out! Please consider grabbing a copy or leaving a review.

OEA Trailer: The nearly final draft is above. I hope most is in decent shape, but let me know if you notice anything amiss. There are two active questions: 

1) Do you think the black screen transitions work? Would it be better or too busy with more page flip transitions?

2) Would the trailer be better or worse without the feature text in the last third?

OEA Newgrounds Demo: With the trailer done, I'll want to put out a Newgrounds demo. Problem is, bugs can sometimes pop up in web versions, and I had to cut a lot of stuff to get the game under the maximum file size. I really should test the whole thing for bugs before release, but that would take several more hours of my time. So I thought there are a lot of $1 and $5 patrons who haven't had a chance to play... use this link and the password "oeapass" if you want to play before the public! You should be able to play a significant part of the game without seeing any placeholder maps, ending with a message saying you've reached the end. Let me know how long the loading screens are for you.

OEA Map Build: Maybe? Here's the deal: I want to look over all the finished and integrated maps so I can get final requests to the mapper, but actually making the official 0.5.0 would require a significant investment of time that I intend to put into the next TLS update. Would those of you who have played in the past want to have a build to walk around in? Saves might end up in walls or doors might be misdirected, but if you have the teleport sphere, you'd be able to explore everything easily enough.

-

Okay! The point of all this busyness is that my schedule looks much clearer after today, especially if anyone has time to check out the demo or maps. I hope to be able to take a day off at some point and transition fully to TLS 0.58.0.

Files

OEA Trailer Final Draft

Comments

Mycroft

About OEA trailer, it is quite good, the text should stay,in my opinion, they summarise what we can espect from the game. The thing I would change is reducing the number of map shown and the number of battle scene shown. I think it make the thing a little longuer than necessary. I Hope you will be able to relax for some day. You deserve it.

Darthjake

I'd probably be a sucker for the page flip transitions, that just sounds too cool for OEA, but I'm not sure how much work for you that would cause. Yeah, just watched the trailer again, love the page flip for transitions.

logan80

A few months ago my friend recommended me to check OEA. I haven't had any contact with any of your games before and I have to admit that for the first few minutes of watching this whole happy bimbo crap I thought my friend was mocking me. How glad I am that I "lasted" a little longer, because I would have missed so much fun and I would never discover your other games

sierralee

Thanks for the feedback! I think the editor was aiming for a specific time due to the music, but I agree it wouldn't need to be that long otherwise.

sierralee

I'm glad you got through the intro, and I appreciate your support! I'll continue to move toward the official release for OEA.

Trevor

I had fallen behind in TLS updates, the last thing I recalled doing was finishing the 2nd Gathering but not delving deep into an 'optimal' path. I replayed from the beginning to remind myself of the plot, reexperience the game as a whole product and see how the new art changes things. It was great fun. The art really brings something to the experience and the past few updates have been impressive on multiple levels. I like the 'puzzle' fights from the past few updates and the most recent version was excellent on a story and a mechanics level. Looking foreword to the future.

sierralee

I'm glad to hear you enjoyed your replay! Though the work has in some ways been defined by the month to month experience, a satisfying final experience is my end goal.

Grim8P

Congrats on another book launch! I haven't picked up any just yet but we'll see what happens when I finish the rest of your games. The OEA trailer looks really good! It is cool to see the progress from the initial draft to now. You had specific questions though: 1) Black screen transitions worked just fine for me. I'm sure the page flip transitions could work. I actually had to go rewatch it because they didn't stick out to me (in a bad way). 2) The feature text doesn't bother me in the trailer and might hook anyone who stuck around that deep into the trailer. The info is impressive and is worth stating somewhere for sure. I could go either way though. Currently I don't think it is actively bad. You definitely deserve a day to relax. I hope you're in a position to do so soon!

sierralee

Thanks for the kind words and the answers to my questions!

Jens Mikli

OEA demo crashed with a "width" null pointer exception during the return to bangville right after having to repudiate the smiths claim to a MASSIVE TOOL. No issue when repeating the section. Aside from that minor issues like there was a brief flicker of the character bust right after Hood comes to the rescue. Also weird slowdown that leaves the textbox and screen blank for a long time around "Mister...Wolf?" Fenris dialogue.

sierralee

I really appreciate you taking the time to test the demo, especially since it seems that it does have some bugs! Unfortunately, I can't track down some of these exactly. The last report (Fenris dialogue) I can pinpoint... and unfortunately, the game isn't doing anything complex there. That means there will likely be unpredictable slowdowns for everyone, which is useful information. The flicker of the character bust is the one I'm least concerned with, but if you want to give more information about which line happens before/after, I can take a look. The null pointer error that appears only once... if you recall the smith's exact line, I can check further, but otherwise I'm afraid there might be just a bit of instability built in. At least I can warn players about it in my introduction. Is your comment about progress so far, or did you get to the end screen otherwise?

Jens Mikli

The flickering seems to happen very often so I'm not sure if it's something particular to the web build or if this is just how sprites change normally? There seems to be a vanishing empty textbox as well. The null pointer exception cropped up right after the intelligence bar was shown during the grayscale section if I remember right. I've reached the portal leaving Ulfina's world but it freezes on a loading screen (I've been waiting 30+ minutes, I also reloaded the page and repeated the boss fight to no avail). There was a message about redone maps I'm not sure if that's supposed to be the ending or not. Other issues have cropped up occasionally (saving failed for a bit, also the screen froze while sound effects indicated actions were still happening) but those were resolved by reloading the page.

sierralee

The flickering has to do with images not being loaded. I thought I'd taken care of it with pre-loading, but it wouldn't surprise me if it's not working right in the web version. As for the end... this is my mistake. I forgot that the game skips through a later map prior to reaching my endpoint, so that loading screen is fatal. I've now uploaded a new version - if you could test the boss fight one more time, I'd appreciate it. There actually is a fix for the save failing thing, but I can't turn it on without invalidating previous saves. If anyone else is testing or thinking about testing, I'd appreciate if they stopped in here to mention it.

DankPotatoes

I'm really digging the OEA trailer, a clear improvement over the original. Struggling to find anything to criticize. Maybe rephrase the "over 200 maps" line? It IS rather impressive, but it probably appeals more to a game designer than a consumer, and if I hadn't been following the process on Patreon I likely wouldn't have known what it meant, and if it was a lot. Congratulations on another book launch! Honestly, you write faster than I can keep up with reading. I'd have to skip out on 2/3rds of the other stuff I read to keep up, lol. And I truly can't wait for 0.58. Hearing it's to be your primary focus now, is very reassuring

Jens Mikli

Seems to be working. After redoing the boss fight I get the ending message and a return to the title screen.

sierralee

Good to hear! I might upload a version with the save fix added, if there's anyone else who intends to test, but otherwise this should be solid. Thanks again for your help! You found a critical oversight and helped me improve the warnings for players.

sierralee

Huh, I hadn't thought about that being an ambiguous line. I'll think about it, and thanks for your feedback!

Jens Mikli

Anytime! The demo was very fun.

Jade

Load screens for the OEA demo were a bit longer than I expected, but didn't find they were so long as to be distracting or really affect the experience. I think I was getting... 5 seconds-ish on some load screens? A bit longer on stuff that seemed bigger like map transitions, usually something like 3 seconds whenever a load screen popped up for a battle (which didn't always happen). Got two bugs throughout - first was the game crashing at the same point Jens Mikli had above (return to Bangsville), second was an odd one - the screen went entirely black when I was menuing inside of the Red Arena waiting room, where you go to enter fights. I was able to go and save with the screen black, and refreshed to get rid of the black screen, so the game was running during it; unfortunately I don't remember what exactly might have caused it. (I was slightly annoyed by losing progress to forgetting to save, but I figure autosaves are probably hard to add in, especially this late in the process; that's more a personal issue where without big glowing save points, I forget to save frequently in games that require it.) Overall, as someone looking at the game for the first time: very enjoyable! I've played TLS and not watched the OEA trailers yet, so I expected a twist soon into the game but didn't know exactly what it would be; the execution for it was very well done! Had the feeling I've had with TLS before where I hit the current end and go "Wait, no, that's the end? I wanted to keep going!" (In a "I just want more of this because it's so good" way, not an expectant "how is there not more way") Very very much looking forward to the full game!

sierralee

Thanks for leaving feedback! I'll try to look into the lingering issues further, but it's a bit of a relief to hear that the recent version was stable. That said, I'm glad to hear you enjoyed your taste of OEA. ^-^

Runcible Technician

Finally got to watch the preview with music. That was well mixed. This is actually a trailer I would take interest in on steam if I saw it and knew nothing about the creator or their previous games.

sierralee

Thanks for the feedback, glad you liked this one.

DukeLeto7

We've got a couple trivial TLS bug reports from the wiki forums: 1.) In Premium Steel in "Old" Yhilin, (011,014) has alternate dialogue for Megail and Aka's Routes, but (019,014) doesn't. 2.) In the Endgame Caverns in Yarra's Route, it is possible to trap the party and "soft-lock" the game by moving the snowball at (033,029) to (035,022/023). The reporter, "thisgamething" notes that "There is a patch of ground where the boulder wont cross, probably to prevent exactly this, but its a wide cavern and I just... went around." I'm not sure what this means if he isn't talking about the spot where the crystal used to be stops the snowball from going further south. Assuming #2 is intentional, which I suspect it is, it might be cool if there could somehow be event code that caused the game over screen when the snowball enters (035,023), assuming that is possible.

sierralee

Hi ho, hi ho, back to bugfixing I go. I suppose in the second case it's better to protect players from themselves. Though it's possible to check the location of an event, it would require running a parallel process, which can be unstable. I'm just going to prevent the player from rolling the snowball over there.

DukeLeto7

On the brighter side, if thisgamething is as obsessive as these reports imply, he'll give good QA when he catches up to you.

Kinky-Kong-Keith

A bit late to the party, but I just got to Mythin's Island and HOLY FUCK I am LOVING this soundtrack! And actually, now that I think of it, the version of the tower's theme that played during the Anak's event at the Second Gathering was also stupendous. Wish I could download them or something.

sierralee

Glad you're enjoying it! I do my best to select tracks, but unfortunately many are purchased from specific packs, so I can't distribute them freely.