Not gonna lie, I was looking forward to this just as much as you all. And as determined as I am to fix these problems, "embarrassed" doesn't even begin to cover how I feel right now. I anticipated something happening the day pf the launch, but the timing has just been terrible lately.

Thing is, the game itself has been finished for a while - I even posted the final stats to celebrate! This also means the coding was smooth and error-free, the game data size was comfortable and all of the art and goodies were successfully implemented (the demo was a lot of help in getting that straight)!

I even got rid of all the code bugs that would pop up during the browser testing stage and made sure my code stayed optimized so that it still launched from my computer! The game just refuses to play as a build. I've been looking around the code, around the Renpy Docs and forums, and my one remaining issue probably isn't a bug at all.

The fact remains that the largest part of the game is the art. And after all the work I did to compress the art files down, there's still too much of it. The character expressions each having their own sprite was good for me in hindsight, as there were no errors with sprite interaction and movement once through the game process. I even shrunk them down to half their size as webp and webm files. And I while I am certain that GameJolt can handle a game with 1100 files, I don't know if it'll be possible to have my game as a browser play unless I fix this.

I have two solutions in mind: rewrite the story script to include less expressions (which would make the story a little more bland) OR upload the game itself as a downloadable package. I hate the thought of both of those:

(1) every drawing is used somewhere in the game. A lot of the expression has to be somewhat tailored to their character and try and use even LESS layers in the process. This will inevitably strengthen the viewers opinion of my art style (in that they will dislike it or like even more because they will see it everywhere playable). Taking enough of them away to try and be "safe" for a browser with no help will make the main VN story kind of a bland read (I don't think I even have enough CGs to cover for one sprite change every 20 lines!), especially since said story has over 30K words!

(2) Theft danger aside, it's a lot to download to your computer, even if it isn't a gigabyte. The demo let me know that RenPy games of my best efforts are not very good for computers with less processing power. Plus, the audience of people who will play this game is already crazy small, having the requirement of downloading would shrink it even more - and since the game is free, the best I can do is try to get it available to as many people as possible - even the ones who have to go to a public space to use a computer since they don't have one.

Over the next few weeks, I will be endeavoring to find a solution I am satisfied with - all of you getting to play the perfectly running game that I currently have access to without having to sacrifice ANYTHING - even storage space. And I don't care what anyone says, I'm not quitting on this that easily.

#renpy #visualnovel #news #sorry #storygame #api #python #pygame #community #art