Progress of the new update
Time for another monthly progress report! Let's go through some of the things we've done this month.
Hair
A big part of this months work was hair. it was quite hard to come up with and implement a modular system that fits all the requirements I had.
The system I came up with works in the following way: You can equip multiple "hairstyle items" at once and at will enable/disable their individual parts. This allows to freely combine hairstyles while also keeping it relatively simple. The UI for handling this might have to be improved before the release, but it already allows for all those combinations.
Because you can freely combine different parts of different hairstyles the amount of possible combinations increases exponentially with every hairstyle we're going to add. I was able to achieve those combinations with just two new hairstyle items.
We are going to of course add more than just two! Can't wait to see all the combinations.
One more thing, the systems allowing modifications of items like the hair are available for modders for all items. This will allow for a lot new interesting mods for sure.
New backgrounds
Game's backgrounds are currently quite inconsistent, we have a mix of hand-painted ones and some photos with filters. I'd like to fix that in next couple updates. I've commissioned an artist I know, to draw backgrounds for the new update. New locations will have unique hand-painted art, but also a lot of older ones are going to be replaced. Look forward to it!
MDRG on an iphone?
Unity 6 that came out recently promised one big feature. Web build of the game now supports mobile devices. This doesn't seem that important, but remember that before this, playing MDRG on IOS was pretty much impossible. Apple doesn't allow nsfw games in their app store and you can't sideload apps too. The browser version allows users to bypass that. I upgraded the project to Unity 6 and did some testing on IOS devices. The support seemed to be better, but I've still experienced crashes. I've pinned the cause to be running out of memory. It seems the browser version is a lot more ram hungry compared to standalone ones and available memory seems smaller. Based on my testing limited to around 800MB.
To alleviate the issue I've added a special "Low memory mode" that will be automatically enabled when playing on mobile in the browser. As the name implies it does some tricks to decrease the memory usage.
Merch
In case you missed it MDRG merch is out now and you can buy it here!
When will it be released?
Progress this month was a bit slower than I anticipated, but I think I got over the biggest hurdles now. If everything goes well we should be done by the end of November.
As always thanks for your support, this wouldn't have been possible without it!