v0.4.0 launch

[ Introduction ]

Whew! Looks like we're getting through release week intact, friends. 

As always, I'm completely blown away by the amount of attention and support these little projects get. I am hyper nervous whenever I make something because I'm afraid of letting people down, especially after such a long period of radio silence. But you've all been incredibly cool, it's been a real blessing. 🦎🦎🦎 

I'd also like to thank everyone who helped me track down bugs and typos. This game released in a rougher state than I'd have liked, and I'll make changes to my process going forward. I'll have more thoughts about this in the upcoming post-mortem.

[ v0.4.0 release ]

In the meantime, I've uploaded a new release - a "proper" one this time, not a hotfix. It makes some changes to important sections of the game, including the scene transition code, so I wanted to test it on a variety of platforms. Because of this, I've also bumped the version number to v0.4.0.

First, this version should have quashed most of the remaining typos. There are some cases where characters use grammatically incorrect speech, but there weren't supposed to be quite as many of those. I've also rewritten a few misleading lines of dialogue, and cleaned up a little strangeness left over by decisions changed late in development. (You CAN reset your lizard points, you just CAN'T turn them back into experience points.)

Second, levels are now pre-loaded at game start. This is to increase performance and stability for scene transitions. This does increase RAM use and startup time - the game now takes multiple seconds to start after the loading bar fills up, at least if you're running the web build on a very slow machine. However, it should make level-switching both faster and smoother, and it should also reduce the risk of crashes in the web version. (There's a smattering of awaits and null checks in the scene transition code, which are likely not required, but better safe than sorry.)

Third, there was a little weirdness with some of the hotspots, especially the ones that do in-scene transitions. (As opposed to transitioning between scenes.) The same weirdness also affected the experience points label, which could occasionally cause it to not display. (Experience was still awarded.)

Fourth, there were two flags that didn't get set properly. One pertained to Sbeve's dialogue in the ending (which could be confusing), the other one was a really specific branch involving the Businesscritter background that I'm not sure anyone ever actually saw. They've been corrected.

And finally, I've replaced the in-dialogue emoji with pre-rendered PNGs. This doesn't look quite as good, but the emoji font had a problem where some platforms displayed replacement characters instead. This problem seemed to be limited to Chromium-based browsers on Windows platforms set to non-European locales, but that's not exactly an obscure combination, so.

[ What's next ]

v0.4.0 should, hopefully, be the last short-turnaround release we need to do. I believe I've caught most of the major bugs - but if any are left, definitely drop me a line.

There'll be more thoughts and tidbits about the game in the post-mortem blog post, which I'll try to get done by the end of the month. 

Then, after that, it'll be time to work towards a proper v1.0. This will be a content patch - replacing the remaining placeholder art, possibly adding some new scenes, and including more illustrations. (You might've noticed that the nerd doesn't have a large portrait yet.) There are also some weaknesses in the plot that will require minor rewrites, which I'll leave for the content patch.

Thanks for joining me on this journey, everybody. <3