It's the "A bit of a revamp" update...

Hi all,

Sorry for being on the hush-hush again (no, that's not a brand of gin ;) ) but I've been on a bit of a revamp kick, pulling various bits and bobs out and mixing things around.

It comes back to the file size of the game and keeping it under the magic 5GB for many of you. What I'm finding is that I can squeeze the file down easily enough but the feedback from those that have looked at it is mixed. Broadly the compressed version looks fine but if you have vision difficulties then the difference is noticeable especially with certain colours.

So what I'm going to do is have both a sub 5GB version and a "full fat" version. That way it's in your hands rather than me sitting in my ivory tower  making that decision on quality vs size for you.

Now, leading on from this is the number of builds I'd have to make. Every build requires two uploads (PC and MaC) and if I start doing the two versions above - and have bonus content builds as well - then I end up eight builds to do. Not very efficient (and you know me well enough to know I'll ditz out and bugger one of them up!)

So all the bonus content is being stripped out of the main game and going in it's own individual file (hence the natty image on the header). The pros of this are I only have to make four game builds as opposed to eight. It also means that the file size of the main game is slightly smaller (so...win) but, and this is the big one, I can keep updating the bonus pack with all sorts of odds and sods as I go. I'll just say if it's been updated and you can decide whether to download it. You see there is a lot of stuff I make, as I test lighting, scenes etc, that you guys never see. So rather than just throw them away, I've found a home for some of them.

What else, well the GUI refresh is coming along -very- nicely and this isn't just me faffing around just trying to make things look prettier. With luck you're going to find this a huge boon to your gameplay especially in respect of clues, guidance and being aware of the number of paths and content you haven't yet found. As part of the refresh there's also a new music pack coming along as well. If you prefer  your game silent then you can of course but I know some of you do like a bit of atmospheric background music and so you're getting your own "jukebox" with a selection of tunes for you to pick.

And Chapter Five is still on track too. (You can now see why I'm a bit quiet as the simple matter of refreshing the builds ended up being a bit of a bigger project as the logic hit me in terms of possibilities . Doing all that and keeping Five in track has been....a challenge shall we say?)

I'll do a bigger post in the next few days once I've finished the build refresh. I want to clear the decks on this one first so I can show off a bit. :)

As always I'm miles behind on correspondence. Sorry. I'll catch up once I have the refresh done (if ness I'll just take a few days off work purely to deal with it)

Oh! And there's the supah sekret thing too...but more on that one later.

Notty