RoE Devlog 5 - Performance Updates & New Sprites

Hey everyone, it's coming up on the end of the month so it's about time for a progress update.  Version 0.08 is just about done with one and a half renders left to complete before release.  This is a pretty massive update that adds in some additional events for day 3 as well as the complete events of day 4.  Before I go into the other major tweaks and changes we've made, I want to paint a quick of a picture of where we are with development to set some expectations.  The first 6 days in game are a prologue chapter, and we're planning to have it completed by version 0.10.  During this time the artist and I have been learning everything as we go and we've been focusing on the building blocks of the game like core art assets, menus, & systems.  There's also a lot of material we've been reworking and updating along the way as we improve, so the story has been moving forward pretty slowly.

Once we get past this initial slog we'll be able to focus all of our attention on dialogue and renders, so the pace of things will pick up considerably.  To give a realistic timeline for that we're probably looking at around another 3-4 months.  Thanks for supporting us during this time even though we're averaging 30-60 days per release, but please keep in mind we're just 2 people and we only have evenings and weekends to work on our game.  We're putting in as much time as we can without burning ourselves out.  With that said, here's what we've been up to this month.

Character Sprite Upgrades:

One of the major changes we've been working on is a poseable arm system to give our character sprites a broader range of expression.  In release 0.07 you saw the new poseable system implemented Eryn & Biorn, and since then we've finished bringing the rest of the main characters up to that same standard with a ton of new poses.  While going through and reworking the characters we've been making other small tweaks here and there.  Now the characters have additional rendering on their bodies and beautification changes to the faces like better looking noses, eyes, and mouths.

All of the pregnancy morphs are finished as well, and they work with all of the poses and clothing states for each character.  For now they'll only be viewable in the gallery, but as we move further into the story they'll appear in the story if you have the content option enabled.

Performance Upgrades:

One surprise from the last release was that some players were starting to run into performance issues.  After looking into it I realized the game needs a serious optimization overhaul for the next version to make things easier on mobile users and anyone running on older hardware.  As far as I can tell the problems come from how RenPy handles its cache.  Our sprites and even some of our scenes have a lot of layers, and without diving too far into the weeds it looks like a shortcut I took early on with positioning images needs to be changed.  Long story short instead of saving a bunch of 1920x1080 images with alpha channels for each layer, I need to crop everything and manually position it in RenPy through code (xpos, ypos).  I can't overstate how huge of a job that is, and even after spending most of this month on it I'm still not done.  I may need to split it across two releases if it drags on too long, but I think I'm on track to finish this by the time that the artist wraps up the last render.  Since I'm already re-saving almost every picture in the game, I'm also taking this opportunity to change the file format I've been using for images from PNG to lossless WEBP.  This is a pretty big upgrade that results in a 50%-70% reduction in game size with even higher image quality.  I also added in a toggle switch in the video options for the animated particle effects, and may add some more similar options to turn off other expensive visuals.  Let me know if you've had any weird bugs or performance issues and I'll look into those as well.

So overall this upcoming release has been pretty huge so far, and it looks like we're on pace to release it within another week or two.  Thanks again for your support, and as always feel free to message us with any questions.