KoD Preview: Overcoming Problems

If anyone is worried by the title, no need: this isn't an announcement of delays or anything bad. No, we just wanted to share an update giving insight into how the game development process isn't always smooth.

Some problems are inevitable, so we planned for them in our dev cycle. The goal is for the first release to be as smooth an experience  as possible for as many players as possible. We've dealt with a variety of challenges, but this post will go into more detail on one of them, specifically a problem relating to our navigation screens and performance.

Relatively early on in the process, we noticed a little bit of lag when using the navigation screen. This was odd, because Ren'py is not a processor-heavy program. What made it even weirder was that it didn't occur on all computers and didn't seem directly connected to CPU usage.

Since it was just an annoyance, we pressed forward and kept working on the core content. A variety of things change around on the programming side as the game comes together, so we hoped one of those might fix it. But after several major changes to the back end, the problem didn't get better - in fact, it got worse.

We tried a number of different things, without success. The navigation screens use a more complex method, programming-wise, because it looks much nicer, but we were starting to worry that it might be causing a problem. Though Nomo could have redone the camp - he'd already redone some art for the sake of performance and filesize - the loss in quality would have been significant and we didn't want that.

Sierra's best guess was that the program wasn't optimized enough, and so got in contact with a number of programmers for help in creating a more efficient version of the navigation screen. And that was where things got weird, because the new optimized version had worse lag. We were worried it was going to be a real issue for the game.

But the feedback on the programming also contained the seed of the solution: the idea that the problem might have to do with certain graphics card or renderer combinations. And after Nomo did some hardware testing to nail down the issue and Sierra optimized for that, we finally managed a version that runs well even with the heavier image method!

We hope that the game will run completely smoothly for most players, but we haven't done testing on how many systems will be affected (that's something we'll cover over the coming weeks). But if there are any issues, you should be able to fix them by choosing a different renderer (it's easy, we'll explain the steps when the release happens). We're also looking into a few other improvements and we have options that could improve performance even more, so we're generally confident that there shouldn't be any issues with running the game.

This problem was trickier than most, but dealing with bugs and other issues is just part of the development process.  

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In other news we are very happy with where the game is and how close we are to release of the first part.  Given the above issue and how bugs can appear for different systems, in the interest of having the smoothest launch of our new game, we want to try and get a few volunteers to do some hardware testing before that. We will make a thread  with more information  for our $15+ tier patrons addressing that in the upcoming days.

Another part of our final performance testing, bug testing, and polishing is that we are planning to release just a part of the first update, the introduction events that led Sabia to the events she is in. While the intro is around ~5% of the total game, it will give us some information on potential issues. Unlike the hardware testing, the intro introduces important characters and shows our choice systems plus sexual content and gives a taste of what we have planned.

Back soon with another update!