V0.89.70 Sneak Peek 1 / News

Hi folks,

Who's that ?

Update on 0.90.00 progress.

Unfortunately it goes much slower than I have anticipated. I hoped that by the end of this month it would be either done or mostly done. It's about 50% done instead. It is just big and I need more time with it. Meanwhile as promised there will be smaller 3rd update this month targeting next monday or tuesday. 1 new story event and one POV in form of 0.89.70. Sneak peak is from story event.

Technical debt.

For past several releases I have been fighting hard with 2GB limit on android releases. As some of you know Android has build in 2GB app limit because google fucking sucks. So for past few months I have been increasing compression ratio of my images with each release to keep game into 2GB range for android. It was getting harder and harder with each new image and animation added as compression would make game look worse and worse. I knew I had to deal with this issue sooner or later but I didn't expect it to come up so quickly, I did test adding new images and anims from 0.90.00 and image quality just looked bad...

Main culprit behind bloating game size actually was video budget. I got better and better over time with how i do animations and how do i loop them so with latest releases my animations which are just looped video files are really small like 600kb up to 1mb per animation. But early on they were very wasteful like 20-30mb sometimes per animation.

So past whole week and a half I have been focusing mostly on touching up and rerendering all of animations made up to around april this year. Which was a ton of work as there were 100s of animations up to this point and each I had to reload, touch up, check, render, cut so it loop properly and then test loops in game for each animation.

Thanks to this effort I lowered raw MB of videos from 1,4GB to just 600mb. Saving almost 800mb of that 2GB space. With that compression ratio for jpegs went from 50-60% of quality back to 90%. Ton of time needed but imho was worth it for android folks. Game file stil will be around 2GB but it won't be as compressed as it used to be leading to much better quality.

September

What is the plan for September ?
Finish 0.90.00 obviously. Around the middle there might be 0.89.90 with another pov event if I won't be done with 0.90.00 by that time.

Thanks for reading that and thank you guys for your support :)
Perkel