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Devlog: What's New?
🕑 Added 2020-04-04 09:23:25 +0000 UTC
Hello, everybody!
It's already been a whole week since the new public release of After Years, and I wanted to share some news about what I've been working on past these few days and what my plans are for the near future.
MacOS Version
I've received your feedback about the issues with MacOS version. Namely, players are unable to save their progress, or the game crashes right after launch. Apparently, this problem is related to both the RPG Maker MV engine and MacOS (and how it handles its file permissions). From what I understand, it turns out that in order to make the build fully functional, I need to deploy the project using a Mac computer, which sadly, I don't own (yet?). So, for now, my response to the saving issue will be implementing an option to continue the game from a specific points in the story (this way players will have an easy way to jump back in the story, without having to skip all the scenes one after another). As for the app crashing problem, I'm afraid fixing this one is beyond my reach at the moment. And that made me wonder; is there another way for Mac players to have a better experience with the game? The solution might be just right around the corner and it's:
Web-Browser Version
If there's something I love about RPG Maker MV it's its versatility when it comes to the deployment of the game builds on various platforms. I've already tested this option by hosting the game on Itch.io on a separate channel, and I have to say, the build works better than I thought! Although, there is one key difference in how the game performs in this version. Long story short, the Web-Browser build streams assets (music, sprites, backgrounds) on the fly. The result? Scene backgrounds pop-up instead of smoothly fade in, and so do the character sprites, which sometimes leads to very jarring situations where a character's expression loads first, and then the character's body (hello eyes and mouths, casually flying around the scenes). While this won't take long to fix, this version of the game will require a LOT of testing, and that's why, for now, I'm not giving any specific date when will it be released. However, what will be released in upcoming days:
Android Version
Yup! After Years is coming on mobiles! This is the build I've been working on past four days now, and from what I can tell, the game works even better than the Web-Browser version. So the good news is - it works. The bad news? Despite being just a simple visual novel, the game still renders at 1080p resolution and the performance might not be perfect on older devices (like for example, my mid-tier 2015 phone I just tested). Luckily, both the sound effects and the music still play fine, so it's strictly a framerate thing, and shouldn't really be a big issue in this kind of game. For now, I'm planning on releasing only a short demo that will cover the first day of the story. Based on your feedback, I will determine if the Android version will require more optimization, like a downgrade in assets quality or rendering resolution, or if it's gonna be simple PC-version port. The demo should arrive around April 10th!
And that will be all for now.
Thank you for reading!
