Dev Log 32

Hey guys, it's dev log time again!

First of all I want to start by welcoming all of the new supporters that have joined since the release of 0.9, the reaction to which has been particularly positive, so thank you all for the amazing feedback!

Now, on to the dev log:

Those of you that have been around for a while will probably have noticed a pattern emerge, where I release a 0.0.1 patch for the public version, which usually includes quality of life updates such as work on the user interface, or improvements to older content. Well I've decided not to do that this time, so that instead of working on a 0.9.1 I can leap right into working on 0.10, as I'm going to need all of the time I can get to put it out in a reasonable time-frame. There are a couple of reasons for this:

First, I'm breaking another pattern, the one where I alternate between single day and double day updates - 0.10 is going to be another double day update just like 0.9 was, and it's also going to be extremely long, if the work I've done so far is anything to go by - I've got all of the scenes plotted out, and written about 9k words which only takes us about 60% through the first day. To be honest, it may end up being too long for a single update, but I'll cross that bridge if I come to it, as I really like all of the scenes I have planned out and I don't really want to chop it up.

The second reason I'm gonna need plenty of time to work on 0.10 is a technical one regarding the Android version of the game. Android apps begin to get a little iffy when you go above 2GB, and there's a hard limit somewhere around 2.5GB, which the game is now approaching. There are various ways to get around this, but aside from dropping Android completely as some other devs do, they're all going to take a little time to figure out, and probably a reasonable amount of coding work behind the scenes.

The solution I'm leaning towards at the moment is a new feature recently introduced to ren'py (the engine that the game is made in), that allows the user to download a small 100ish MB app first, which will then download all of the assets separately from an external server. But again, this could take me a week or two to figure out, test, and then set up hosting for it. If that turns out to be too much work every update, the alternative would be splitting the android version into multiple parts, but again, that would be a lot of additional work every update.

So that's where I'm at right now, with the scenes planned out I'm looking to get the writing for 0.10 finished next weekend, at which point I'll move into the rendering phase. The next dev log will be in a couple of weeks as usual, but to be honest I'm very uncertain of a release date at the moment because of the above issues - when I say that I think this update could be a long one, I mean really long compared to the previous ones! I don't want to diverge from my usual 2 month release schedule too drastically, so for now I'll just get to work and see what happens.

As always, thank you all for your support, I really appreciate it!

- Cosy Creator