magicnuts

Weekly report 73

Added 2021-10-01 22:54:22 +0000 UTC

Hi everybody.

I hope you have all played 0.5 by now and are as excited about Rose's story in 0.6 as we are.

0.5 Quality Poll

Please remember to go to this poll and let us know what you think of the quality of the 0.5 update.

Refunds

We have many new members this month (hello and welcome!), and I just want to remind those who joined in the final days of September that we will soon refund your earlier pledge so that you're not charged twice. You can expect to receive a message from us sometime around the 5th of October (when all payments have been processed) confirming that the refund has been issued.

Android issues

Even though the Android versions available were ported unofficially by players, they work well on most devices. With 0.5, though, we have received reports that some phones and tablets experience issues when loading more resource-heavy scenes (i.e., sex scenes).

Why is that? Because I did not make the game with Android devices in mind (it is hard to do that given the variety of devices out there), and I had not done any Android testing either, since it would have taken us even longer to release 0.5 had I done that. The sex scenes in 0.5 use more images per loop (20 rather than 12), and some of them are larger than 1920x1080 pixels. The vast majority of phones and tablets can run the game, of course, but some can't.

What can those players who experience issues do? In the first place, I suggest you try Joiplay. I have heard from many players who had problems with the Android version that they could resolve their issues using Joiplay (together with its Ren'py plugin).

Additionally, I will try to see if there is anything else that can be done to resolve this issue for current players. I can't promise a solution, and I'm not going to change the existing (and functioning) code, but perhaps modifying the framerate or making an Android-only version with fewer images per loop will do the trick.

0.5's serious part

We have received a lot of messages and comments from players and patrons to the effect that they are happy with the content of 0.5 and don't mind and even enjoy its more serious parts.

I think I need to clarify the situation since perhaps 'serious' wasn't the right term. When we were planning 0.5, it was by far the most difficult update we had made. It had a lot of things to achieve: get us inside the city, introduce Simmone, advance Lana's personal story, resolve her issues, unlock the mansion, introduce us to Sev, rescue Madeline, and do these in a way that would allow us to add sex scenes in the middle and include enough humor and action to keep things interesting. The one bit that I wasn't sure of was from Lana's first vaginal sex until her rescue from the pillory. I remember us thinking it lacked humor and was a tad too dramatic without many fun events. We added the time magic and foreshadowed what was going to happen to Serena, but we didn't have more ideas and had to move on. You can imagine that when after months, we heard some of our testers voice the same concerns we had (because we asked them to be brutally honest and critical), it made sense to us, and this time, we could see a solution. That's why we said we were going to make some changes.

What were the changes we had in mind?

Sev speaks to the MC twice, once telling him he has the Gift and then the next day about how he is going to die. The main information shared in the second scene could easily have been included in the first one. By removing the second discussion, we wanted to reduce repetitiousness and shorten that part a little.
Lana attacked the MC with a dagger, looking for the runestone. We thought that was a bit too much, and instead, we decided we could remove the scene entirely and have a serious chat when she's in the pillory.
With Lana believing the MC quicker, we wanted to add an additional cutscene in the pillory. This would have been a tough one, as we thought we could do something slightly sexy and light-hearted without messing up the overall seriousness of her situation.

That's it. We thought these changes would improve the update, and our plan was to do them during the weekend. We weren't going to say that, of course, in case we needed the last six days of September. But when we saw people's negative reactions to our decision to work a few more days on the update, we simply didn't have the energy to deal with it.

But anyway, that's over now, and we're just so relieved that most of you enjoyed the update.

Will we still make these changes in 0.6? That was our initial plan when we announced the release last week. But right now, we just want to focus on Rose's content and haven't sat down to discuss what we'll do with those changes. Perhaps we'll change them in 0.6, perhaps with the next part of the Main Story, and perhaps we keep the content as it is and spend our time developing new stuff.

What's next?

Starting tomorrow, we will begin planning Rose's story. I cannot tell you anything about it until after the planning phase is done, but it will be somewhat similar to Myrtle's update structurally.

Lastly, we will take Sundays off again.

That's all

Hope you have a great weekend
Cheers