File Size Reduction & Smartphone

So... it's more than a week since the last post, sorry for that. There was just not much to show off. I did some more dialogue writing, rewriting and spelling correction. I also started with the post production of the new renders.

In addition I'm working on reducing the file size of the game without reducing the quality of the images. I'm always looking for a way to do that. The size of the game will always increase over time, no matter what, but there are ways to reduce that growth.

Right now I'm changing the way eye-blinking is implemented. If you played the game you will remember that the characters are blinking from time to time. I added this effect to make the renders and the characters to feel more alive.

The way this works is that 3 renders, one for each state of the character's eyes (open, half closed/open, closed), are transitioning into each other. This of course means that for each render containing the eye blinking effect the file size is tripled.

The new way I want to do it is by using multiple layers of images. Ren'Py supports multi layered image display. This way most people display character sprites infront of backgrounds. In my case I'm using it to only have one image of the whole scene and 3 images only containing the cut out eyes of the character and are otherwise transparent. Those will then be layed on top of the full image to create the effect like before. This requires some more code and also produces an additional image file per effect (1+3 instead of 3 like before) but their file size is smaller.

(For those who don't know how image coding works, the file size of an image is not only determined by ithe image size or the fiel type (.png, .jpg, .webp, etc.) but also by the content of the image itself. If the image has a lot of pixels of the same color the file size is smaller.)

In this case this new method reduces the file size approximately back to the size of 1 image. E.g. a file of my game is ~750KB large. The cut out images have a size of <10KB each. With over 100 eye blinking effects in the current game that adds up and also reduces the future growth of the game size.

But enough of this technical stuff for now. What is new that you will actually notice as a player?

Well, for those who played the free roam mode, know that I implemented a phone with a chat system and... never really used it...

However, that changed with the pure vn mode where the MC wrote some messages to Brooke while discovering Dark Falls. But there the chat was simply displayed as normal dialogue, because I had no implementation of the phone that could be used outside of the free roam. Now the phone will open up during the dialogue and messages can be received and written and after closing the phone the normal dialogue will continue.

I also added more contacts to the phone. Some will be added during the game, some will already exist from the very beginning and also already contain some messages (and pictures?). So make sure to check out the phone when you can!