Progress Report 2021.11.29

Hi friends,

Just a quick update to round out November. It’s been a bit of a tough month; I did have to take some time off earlier as I was feeling under the weather and my province is currently in a state of emergency due to severe flooding. While my area is safe and relatively unaffected, I have family and friends who have been flooded and the whole situation is a tad stressful.

Game Updates

I have still been able to get a lot of work done on Chapter 2. I’m happy with the new content, though it is taking me a lot longer to structure the party scene than I originally anticipated. I do think the scene will be a lot of fun to play as there are a ton of gameplay elements and what content you see will change drastically depending on how well the player character integrates themself with their new environment. There’s foreshadowing for future events and subplots, meeting important new characters, first impressions—it’s a pretty busy sequence!

Since the last progress report, I’ve written around 19k of new content, which pushes this next section to around 55k total. I’ve decided to hold off on updating the alpha build until the whole party sequence is complete, which will likely be sometime mid-to-late December. It will be a very hefty update, with more total playable content than the November 1st update.

I am also working on some behind-the-scenes QoL elements. After chatting with some folks about accessibility and reading, I’ll be adding a setting to make the text left-aligned instead of justified. I have (briefly) looked into adding OpenDyslexic to the font selection drop-down, but because the font is custom and needs to be embedded directly into the HTML file, I need to learn a little more about how to do that first.

I am currently learning how to embed fonts and icons by converting them to Base64, but it’s a slow process (aka I don’t get it and I can’t get it to work… yet). I’m looking into this now because I would like to offer a true offline version of the game at some point. To do that, the fonts and icons need to be embedded. Otherwise they will fail to load if the player launches the game without an internet connection and they will be playing the game in Comic Sans. 😂

I’ve also written a couple of widgets to make coding certain elements (like notifications) faster. Since I’m making a new widget, I thought now is a good time to reconfigure notifications. I currently have a poll open for the game’s player base to get opinions on whether to add new settings that would turn off pass/fail notifications. Because I’d have to edit every notification in Chapter 1 to implement the setting, I’m only going to add this option if there’s enough interest in it.

If you’d like to participate, you can find the poll here.

Other Updates

I compiled a list of common launch errors and other problems that can happen with the Twine engine. These will apply to the alpha build, so if you run into problems, check out the post and try some of the solutions. Most problems can be resolved by trying the game in a different browser.

For Chrome-users, there’s a recurring problem where sometimes the game takes a really long time to load or loads without images. Wayfarer uses a preload macro to load most of its image assets so they appear right away when you navigate to a page with assets. For some reason, the preload doesn’t always work and the game gets stuck searching for the asset, trying to load it, and failing.

Do I know why? Nope. Can I fix it? Also nope (not without removing the preload entirely and sometimes the game still fails to load correctly).

This is only a problem on Chrome and doesn’t happen all the time. You may not have encountered it at all. I’ve been using Microsoft Edge to run the game when Chrome doesn’t do it and Edge has worked perfectly every time. I would definitely try that if you encounter load problems.

Patreon Updates

Thank you to everyone who participated in the Update Schedule poll. The results were pretty clear-cut—the vast majority of voters wanted to see larger game updates, even if they take longer to create. I’m going to stick to my current work method and update the alpha build when I finish a major sequence, rather than dividing it into smaller parts.

Thank you all so much for your support! 💕