Dev Diary May 2026

Hi folks !
How's May going for you ?

Company News

For me, it is still a bit hectic with company creation. I just resolved the major hurdle with my nation's tax office last week. Just one hurdle left, and it should be resolved by the end of next week. Yippie!!

Taking Care of Health

Since I started working full-time on the game from the start of April this year, I noticed that my energy was going down. Mostly because I work from home now and I don't go out often. So I decided to hit the gym 3 times a week and do 4km a day walking, all done in the early morning. Need that energy to create those animations... 🤣 So far so good. 2kg down on fat also is a nice change :)

Engine Upgrade

On the game front, like I mentioned previously, I was dealing with an engine upgrade. I successfully switched from Ren'Py 8.0.3 to 8.5.3, which is the latest version. While the update itself was very easy... just download and install the new version. It is not actually easy when you have a game in development. Usually, you set the engine version in stone before you write a single line of code, otherwise, you risk issues down the line. I spent like 5 days since the last update testing the new engine version:

- I had to run through every version (win/linux/mac/android) multiple times to ensure there aren't any bugs preventing progress, ensuring that every menu, every flowchart tile, every gallery tile, etc., worked properly.
- In those runs, I discovered that, for example, "ff" characters weren't displaying at all. So "Stuff" was displayed as "Stu ". Thankfully, the fix for that was rather easy but needed a lot of research to determine the cause. It turned out that the new version of the engine changed how ligatures are rendered, and I had to switch off the new method in the engine.
- I also discovered a bug with the tablet mode of the game on Android. For some reason, the new version of the engine defaults to the tablet version on my phone now, and I noticed broken UI during gameplay. The background shade for dialogs didn't fit the dialogs, and the lower menu background didn't fit the lower menu items. I fixed that.
- There was another bug with the Mac version which caused the flowchart to not render properly. It was hard to find what was causing it, but the fix itself was pretty easy.

As always, I am just a one-man team, and it is impossible for me to test every permutation. When V0.94.40 is released, please provide feedback if you encounter any bugs ! It is crucial for my game to be bug-free, and your feedback is invaluable!

But on the upside thanks to this switch of engine version, I resolved a major issue that was bothering me for a while. Around the end of last year, I ran hard into the 2GB Android limit. Creating an .apk for Android larger than 2GB with the version of the engine I was using caused it to fail to install on phones/tablets.

So I was running out of space, so to compensate for it in the Android version, I was increasing the compression ratio on JPEGs more and more. For PC, I use around 80%, which is essentially lossless. Once I hit around 50% compression ratio on Android, I was hitting the wall where going below 50% had major quality issues. So then I reworked all of my old animations to properly loop them once. Which freed me another 200mb of free space and the compression ratio on Android went back to 80% with some MBs left in spare.

But that was running out too quickly. By the last update, 0.94.00, I hit the 40% compression ratio on Android, which for sure had an impact on the quality of renders. Thus, I needed to resolve that issue, change the engine version, and get that 4GB limit instead of the 2GB one.

Now after the upgrade, I have around 1.5GB free for new content, which is A LOT and will easily last me for the rest of the game. Honestly, without Bezerra_Pro, a community member, it was looking a bit dire for the Android version. I had in mind some further quality hit for animations or maybe not including all of them, but that completely resolved the issue. Now both PC and Android version are around 80% compression ratio which is effectively loseless compared to native.

More Endings

Well... with the increased space for more content, I decided to expand the endings a bit. As some of you know, my latest release has the P ending in production. If someone can count from A to P, that's the 16th ending. Originally, I wanted around 12-13 endings, but over the course of game creation, I felt that some combinations of choices would result in pretty weird ending receptions. Currently, I have designed around 17 endings, which also means we will expand the production time a bit. I previously thought that 1.0 could come by the end of last year, but we added the Flowchart and alternate POVs that the flowchart enabled, which expanded the content a lot, thus moving the release from the end of 2025 to fall 2026. With the new endings and rough calculations, it should be either the end of 2026 or early 2027 when IHS will hit 1.0.

I am an RPG guy at heart, and roleplaying is my mojo. I want each playthrough of the game to feel unique. Thus, a lot of endings. As mentioned, some of the endings will be short, some long. The current ending P I am working on is one of those longer ones.

Thank You

Thank you guys for supporting me. Your response to me going full-time has been awesome. I really hope that you can see the increased work pace and more content with every update.

You are the ones who completely make a game like IHS happen. Without you, I literally can't do it :) Even if you are a free member, please consider telling your online friends or other communities about my game. If you can, please subscribe naturally. It helps a lot!

As always leave your comments with feelings, feedback or whatever. I love to read feedback 🥰