Summer Vacation - S31 Update (v0.9.8.2)

FYI, still working on STEAM which is going to release soon ^^

Hey everyone!

This update is less about new story content and more about polishing what we already have. The S26-S30 experience finally feels more coherent with the beginning.

Sound and Music Across the Finale

When I released S30 last time, the final chapters were essentially silent. Writing an ending with no music underneath felt wrong, and a lot of you pointed it out. So I sat down and tackled it properly: new sound tracks covering every route, every mood, every ending. Well, I hope :) The Spring Break scenes have their own atmosphere, the confrontation with Fabien has its theme, the epilogues have their own musical identity too. I also reused the main menu music for the final moments, to create a kind of emotional loop: you started the game with it, and you end there too.

On top of that, I added some sound effects on the key moments of S26, S27, S28 and S30, nothing overdone, just enough to bring scenes to life. I also fixed a stubborn bug where the pool water sound would leak into the university chapters and refuse to stop. That one had been haunting the game for a while!

Story Polish on S30

A few of you (special thanks to PopKorn for the detailed feedback) mentioned that S30 felt a bit rushed in places, especially the moment where Mat decides to go find Fabien. It worked, but it lacked a real "click moment", something that justified him stepping up. So I added one, hope it helps in the story.

I also reworked the endings across the Fabien, Carlos and Jin routes, new text, new pictures, and some animations on the Fabien path. And on the "must decide" route, Mat can now ask his BF to stay together: they say yes or no depending on the relationship score you've built. Small touch, but it makes the choice feel real.

Character Profiles

Tim and Reynolds have joined the Character History screen. The grid has been redesigned in a 3+3 layout so it stays readable even with more characters added, and I reduced the spacing between paragraphs to make the profiles easier to read on a single screen.

Mobile Experience

The quick-menu buttons (history, skip, auto, save, settings) are now noticeably bigger on touch devices, and the top-right icons too. Nothing changes on PC. This was straight feedback from you, the buttons on mobile were tiny and frustrating to hit. Should be much better now. Let me know :)

Gallery: The Big Fix

This one deserves its own paragraph. One of you (thanks M S!) reported that the gallery was crashing on Android, particularly in the University and Spring sections. I dug into it and found the real issue: the gallery was loading every thumbnail at full resolution before resizing it for display. On a page with 24 images, that meant up to 400MB of RAM being eaten just to show a grid of tiny thumbnails. No wonder it was crashing on mid-range phones.

The fix was a bit involved: I generated 392 proper thumbnail files (one for each gallery image) and rewrote the gallery code to use them directly. End result: memory usage divided by around 20 times, and it loads faster on PC too. If you had issues browsing the gallery before, please try again and let me know how it feels.

What's Coming Next

Arc 1 still has rough edges I want to smooth out, especially some of the earlier chapters and the gallery unlocks. More music will keep rolling out across older chapters.

And the Steam release is getting closer! I'm still a few weeks away from finalising everything. If you haven't yet, wishlisting the game here really helps the launch (Steam's algorithm loves that). Every wishlist counts.

As always, your feedback is what drives this. Drop it in the comments or on Discord. See you soon!

- Erwin

---- Download S31 (0.9.8.2) ----

Steam to whishlist (it helps me a lot :)) : STEAM

PC / MAC: Before downloading a new version, please remove entirely the previous version from your device or you'll get errors (don't override files). The game saves are not in the game directory.

Android: DO NOT uninstall the game if you want to keep your saves, download the APK and launch it to "update" the app. (It's new, it might fail this first time)

Windows & Linux : DRIVE | MEGA
Mac : DRIVE | MEGA
Android : DRIVE | MEGA