Sadie Gets a Life 0.3.0 Dev Log, 2026-03-27
We're now at the final dev log before 0.3.0 releases. In this one, I'm going to cover a few miscellaneous bits that I haven't hit in the prior three dev logs.
Escaping Combat
One change that I've added is that combat escape is no longer a sure thing. Instead, there's an escape minigame.
This button-mashing mini-game will have a dynamic difficulty level based upon your team's agility versus that of the enemies. This means that a faster team will find it easier to escape combat, though my play-testing indicated that it's not too difficult even if you're going up against foes with higher agility scores.
The Bad News: Savefiles
This is something that I've admittedly put off mentioning for a while. With all of the changes that I've made to combat, characters, and everything else, this version of the game will not be backwards compatible with existing savefiles.
I understand that this makes me runner-up to Jimmy Carter in the History's Greatest Monster competition, but heretofore, I've done my best to make each new version of the game backwards compatible. And going forward, I hope to have as few breaking editions as possible. But this release was a good opportunity for me to clean up some technical messes that my inexperience caused.
The Good News: Save Files
Because I know the above news is going to be really annoying to people, I wanted to pair the bitter with some sweet: for release 0.3.0, I will include a set of save files taking you through Act I and Act II. With the release log, I'll also include some details on where each save point lands (e.g., save point 1 being when Sadie enters Hope Springs, save point 2 being when she leaves Hope Springs, save point 3 being the murder house prior to the end of Act I, etc.). I'll also include a filled-out recollection room at the end of the last save.
I don't intend to do this for every release, but I did want to help out those who have played the game, given their feedback, and already invested a few dozen hours into it. I appreciate all of you and although I'd love it if you picked it up from the get-go to see what a somewhat more-polished version of the game looks like, I also want to accommodate those who would rather not and just want to pick back up (approximately) where they left off.
Act III in 0.3.0
The last bit of news from this dev log is what's coming from Act III. There will be a little bit of exposition, where we introduce Sadie to Freistadt Harmonia and several new characters. As it stands right now, there will be a small number of maps available, but probably no missions. I'll know for sure next week, though with all of the playtesting and bug fixing, I think the brand new content will be quite limited. Even so, there's still a lot coming in 0.3.0 and anything that doesn't make the cut will show up in 0.3.1, which will be back on the 4-week dev cycle.