Is it a plane? Is it a bird ? No, it’s a post-release weekly log !

Well here we are, the 0.3 is finally out there and I was able to gather some feedback. Including precious bug reports. That experience is always humbling but trust me : without Krille and especially Cor’s work on the bugtest phase, this would have been so much worse.

Yesterday, I had to spend a good chunk of my time getting Itch.io to finally accept displaying the web browser build on my page. The first time, I got an error message saying there were too many files in the archives (1047, with the max limit set to 1000). This was due to the “progressive download” feature in Ren’Py, which creates smaller, blurry duplicates of each image so they can be used as placeholders while the rest of the game loads. Problem is : while I could archive my normal images in a .rpa file together, I couldn’t do it it for these duplicates, so I had several hundreds of veeery small images that reached the 1000 files limit pretty fast.

So I tried disabling the progressive download feature (not ideal for players with slow Internet, but the other alternative would have been not to have the game on web browser at all). Well this time the archive file set to be loaded upfront was obviously too heavy (350 Mo, so above the 300 Mo limit)

I ended up tweaking the progressive download file itself to pick out which files (the heaviest, like background or NSFW scenes) get duplicated as placeholders, and which files (the numerous smaller files like items or various assets) get loaded upfront. And it squeezed comfortably under both limits, which means I probably shouldn’t have any problems with future versions with this method.

Shit that was a very long technical ramble. Bottom line is : I’m glad I could work this out, people seem to enjoy themselves and that makes me happy too ! I’ll gather every bug report I see over the week-end and fix all of this in a 0.3.1 on Monday, after which I’ll try to get the web browser version on sites like Gamcore and Newsground. And then ? Well I wouldn’t mind a little break before taking on G’raha ~