Important things

First of all, once again we got past our $3000 goal. I want to thank everyone again who made this possible. I am thrilled and excited to see the project grow and change month after month. In the past month I already started experimenting with new art opportunities - the gallery and the new voyeur content are a part of these - but to go further than that first I need to tackle another beast.

For the past few months a recurring theme has been me apologizing for certain niggling little (and not so little) issues with the game. Save to file, saving problems with longer games, slowdown issues, save disappearances just to name a few. The reason behind most of these is simple: Hornstown wasn't planned and built it has grown and it has grown to a tremendous size. Twine, while an amazing tool for creating short interactive stories was never meant for a project of this size and many of the game's current features took a lot of creative manipulation of certain assets to fit into Twine's (and Harlowe's) more restrictive sandbox.

I have been struggling for months with these issues that I thought would only require a few days worth of work at most. After a lot of dead ends end infuriating setbacks I think I have found a solution.

Hard Times in Hornstown is getting converted into a new engine. Specifically the game's HTML data will be handled by a self-made PHP based system.

The change should be happening when the next content update hits (May the 25th) unless something goes spectacularly wrong. This will obviously eat into my time a lot so my side of the next update will be a bit smaller than usual content wise. It will likely contain a bunch of extra content for already existing storylines. The part voted in by you, the patrons is unaffected.

But what does this change actually mean from a player's standpoint?
Well, here are the most important bits:

- The game should be faster, especially on slower hardware setups
- All saving issues should be solved
- The system handling new patrons and pledges will work automatically, allowing newcomers (and people returning to the game) to access the patron only content much faster
- The downloadable versions will get neater, more 'game-like'
- Certain features like access to the high resolution images will get more user friendly

This is a change that has to happen for the game to be able to continue to grow. I hope everything will go smoothly and in a few weeks everyone will be glad for their brand new Hornstown :)