Technical improvements to the game

tl;dr - The residual image bug is fixed and I'm going back to the old, 'fewer loading screens' design from a few months ago.

I'm just breaking my usual update schedule because I wanted to mention a couple of technical changes I've made to the game before the next release comes out.

"Residual background image bug" fixed

I now, thanks to some help from Conash who works on Harem Collector, have a fix for the game-breaking bug that was putting up old images when saved games would be loaded and not letting them be removed. Long story short, as of the next release this shouldn't really happen on new saves any more, and any old saves that are broken for that specific reason should be salvageable just by loading them and then going to a new room in the apartment. Hooray!

If you're interested it is now clear it was a bug in the engine code (as I suspected) made by the developers and not a mistake I made. I would own it if it was, as I've been responsible for heaps of bugs, but I always try to fix those as promptly as possible. In this case I couldn't until the devs actually wrote some code to fix it.

There will be fewer loading screens again, like in earlier versions

A few months ago I decided to trial a new approach to the apartment, which would involve having more, but quicker, loading screens. The intention was to lessen the memory load in the game and in so doing hopefully cause fewer problems for people who have had the "now loading" crash issue. (That's also due to an engine problem, by the way...)

I have now rolled back that change because I don't think it achieved what I wanted and it's impairing the flow of the game too much. Therefore in future versions the loading screens for the apartment, when they crop up, will be a bit longer again, but they should be a lot less common once more. That also allows the music to flow more comfortably, and as an extension to that I've restored the full apartment playlist of music tracks.

This was always the design approach I intended for the game in any case, but the redesign was a bit of a desperation move to try to help the minority of people for whom the engine triggers a weird memory problem, due to an unpredictable incompatibility with some systems. Since it didn't help with that anyway the redesign was completely pointless and I'd much rather have the game restored, so that people who don't get that bug get the best play experience possible.

If you've got any thoughts, questions or comments about these changes please drop them in the comments section below! Feedback is very important for the development of the game.