Progress Report 2022.05.09: There’s a Finish Line Somewhere

Hi friends,

Happy May! The first week of the month has been hectic as I work towards getting the alpha update out. Since the last progress report, I’ve finished a UI update (you can see screenshots in the sneak peaks!) and coding all of the new material. The build is currently being playtested and I am aiming to release it on Thursday or Friday this week.

About the UI Update

The UI update changes how the game menus look and function. It has been necessary for a long time, so I made time to sit down and do it. While there wasn’t anything wrong with how the game menus looked before, there was a problem with how they were opened and triggered. Previously, the game menus (Journal, Codex, Tutorial, etc) were separate passages that the player navigated to, same as going to a regular story passage. The Return to Game button then returned the player to the spot they left by deleting the navigation history back to the point where the game menus were first triggered. This caused an issue where if you navigated between multiple “menu” passages (like opening all the codex entries, and then going through the journal menu), you would eventually hit the game’s history limit and you wouldn’t be able to get back to the game.

An additional problem comes from how Twine stores is game history. The higher your game history limit is, the slower your game will become when it starts to hit certain size limitations. This is fixed by setting the max history state limit to 1 (the default is 100 or 40 passages, depending on which version of SugarCube you’re using). However, if there’s only 1 passage being saved to the game history at a time, then the previous game menu navigation no longer works because the passage you were on when you opened a menu will delete itself out of the history once you leave it.

To prevent both these issues, I had to stop using passage navigation for game menus. Instead, I’m using a game menu overlay that slides over top of the game passage. It makes the game menus look a little different, but they are much more functional behind-the-scenes.

About the Episode 2 Update

As mentioned, Episode 2 is currently being playtested. There is a lot of material and, accordingly, there are a lot of bugs and errors. While I am trying to catch all the major ones, I can’t guarantee all of them will be gone by the time I release the update.

You will need to start Episode 2 over from the beginning of the episode (ideally from the Save Your Game prompt that comes up before Episode 2 begins) or you will encounter errors. I would download a copy of that save to your device. This release is unstable, meaning that you may need to start over from the beginning of Episode 2 later down the line as I fix more bugs.

Some fun things in the update:

• Re-designed character profile page in the Journal
• Re-designed companion and faction profiles
• Updated Codex look with menu navigation and [+] icons that indicate unread codex entries
• New & condensed Tutorial page
• Episode 2's total cumulative content is 348,000 words. An average playthrough is 81,000.

Once the update it out, I am taking a short break before I start work on Episode 3.

As always, thank you all so much for your support! 💕