It's the "Light at the end of the tunnel" update...

Hello!

The waffley bit

There was a "supah-sekret" soft release of Chapter One over the weekend to a few players as part of the testing process. What I was after here was to see what players would make of the interface without having the insight or design intent that the testers and I have. So, basically, to replicate your experience and see if there were any design issues that needed ironing out before you played it.

I'm glad I did, as a few points did crop up. Nothing major thankfully but enough to have made it a worthwhile exercise. Most issues were very small - one of the sound effects on the PDA was found to be a bit annoying, for example - and all easily fixable. 

The biggest weakness that came out of the process was that perhaps the tutorial needed a bit of tweaking. Largely as a lot of the new features on the PDA were not readily apparent to some players. I think there was an expectation gap in that the PDA could do a lot more than the player thought it could do and so several features weren't tried out until I asked about them. For example, the messaging system was still expected to be passive or scripted as opposed to being a feature the player could drive, or there was an lack of awareness over the achievement system also being able to log the results from all your playthroughs. Again, nothing major but it'd be a pity for these features to be present and for the player to not know about them especially given how useful they can be.

But, of course, the big question is what did they make of it?

The reception, I'm pleased to say, was very positive. Very. There's no doubt that this has been an exercise which has ended up massively improving the game. H5 does, simply, just play better now and the players agreed with the testers that the new front end (i.e. removing 4th wall Becca and having everything integrated as part of the game) has been a net improvement. The new integrated sound effects and incidental music also came in for some praise, adding greatly to the atmosphere and experience.

The other thing, in fact one of the biggest things, that the players liked were the new animations. Now these were really almost a side thought on my part. I was spending a fair bit of time on the PDA design work and the 3090 PC was sat idle so I refreshed the animations largely because the power to do so was just gathering dust otherwise. And, of course, this side thought ended up getting the most of the "wow" factor. Typical isn't it? :)*

Given the choice, I'd have still preferred to have being able to kick out more chapters over the past year (something which my bank manager would no doubt concur with) but that choice wasn't available to us for a large part of 2022. Still, it does seem as though I've used the enforced thinking time well. Making the best of a bad situation is, I suppose, what life is all about, no?

File size and compression

Unsurprisingly, the file size of Chapter One is now rather large given that it's now having to carry an awful lot of infrastructure for the entire ten chapters. Somewhere around 40 per cent of the file size has nothing to do with content for the chapter itself and it rocks out at around 900mb. A bit of an alarming figure at first glance but nothing to be concerned about. I've spent some time improving my skills in respect to file size and I'm confident that by the time we get to Chapter Six (which is where I have a hard close as the end of part one as it contains the first set of game endings - path dependent ofc) the file size will only be around 6GB. At that point, variables will be carried over and parts Seven to Ten are there own separate game and so the file size starts at nothing again.

However, I realise that such a large file size is inconvenient for some of you and, although I could point to the size being down to the amount of content that doesn't make the problem go away. So, on release there will be two versions. The "full fat" one where there's no compromise on image quality and a compressed version.

The compressed version of Chapter One, for comparison, comes out at around 300mb and my expectation is that by the time we hit Chapter Six this will be around 2.5GB. There is a slight reduction in quality, especially where scenes have complex lighting which can come out looking a bit flat, but I've spent the weekend tinkering with it and have something that is passably close to the "full fat" version.**

My preference would be that you play the uncompressed version for maximum effect but if you either have to, or would prefer to, have a smaller download size then at least you have the option of doing so.

What next?

The temptation now is to do these few tweaks, kick Chapter One out to you (I so want you to see what I've done with it!) and start bashing through the adjustments across the rest of the chapters, releasing each one as it clears testing. In fact, that was my actual plan. But, I've been advised that waiting until Chapter Two has been cleared might be the better approach.

Firstly, there are some elements of the PDA such as the Engineering Database that haven't been seen in action and the general view is that it'd be better to have this played with and approved than suddenly have to wind back and make changes to something already released. Secondly, I've no real base for how long adjusting chapters will take. Chapter One of course had to have all the new GUI redesign done whereas Chapter Two is basically copying over code and images and just adding new events to the interface structure. If I do Chapter Two, then we'll know exactly how long this work will take per chapter whereas now I'm operating on a bit of a best guess basis. It's hard not to look at those two factors and concede they have a point.

There is also a third reason. This is one which has met with some, understandable, objection but it is something I want to at least experiment with whilst busy with the above. We now have a game with constant audio - except for the naughty scenes which strikes me as a bit odd. Now I know that, generally, this isn't something that's been implemented terribly well as a rule. But, with the earlier lewds having been refreshed as well (By God, they're so much better!), this is something I do want to try by getting a voice actress in. No dialogue at this stage, just a nice simple "here's the animation, can you sync to it" type exercise to begin with. It might work really well. It might not. But I think it's worth a punt. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work and I'll run with no audio. On the other hand if it does...

Round up

Well, the game is alive, working and the changes are regarded as a success. So that's a bad situation made the best of it seems.

I'm keeping Patreon on pause of course and I'll just keep cracking on with the above, with the next steps to sort out the odd little bits and bobs that came from feedback on One and putting Chapter Two together. Once that's done we should have a much clearer view of where we stand.

Stay (or be) lucky,

Notty

* Someone who actually does this sort of stuff for a living told me that if you do the GUI right, players will never notice. Do it wrong though...

** I'm aware that someone will, no doubt, believe that they can compress this even further. But I doubt it can be done successfully. As anyone on Discord or the Forum will be aware, compressing H5 caused a significant amount of crashes and coding errors due to the complexity of the image handling and the coding in general. Code, even when unchanged, just refused to work and it took a lot of manual intervention to get the game stable again.