Date Ariane 2 test version 0.1

Here's the first alpha test of Date Ariane 2. You can download it from: https://arianeb.itch.io/date-ariane-2/patreon-access

Except for the opening screen, it looks and feels like Date Ariane Remastered except:

1. The default game resolution is 2560 x 1440. Actually all the old pictures are just upscaled from 1920 x 1080 originals so you won't be able to tell the difference but it will be noticeable on a 3K or 4K monitor once the graphics have been updated. Larger graphics is why the game now exceeds a GB in the download.

2. The player character avatars have been updated as discussed in a recent picture post. This affects the very beginning, and all the pictures that pop up when your character speaks.

3. The beginning of the game has changed, and new introductory text added. Many things have been rearranged, especially the first part. Instead of having multiple opportunities to ask questions during dinner, those questions are now asked on the couch before dinner. Pre-dinner game enders havent changed, so game could still be really short.

4. Like before the rules consist of demonstrating nice, funny, smart, and sexy traits, but instead of unlocking everything by doing all 4, you unlock personality points that are used as you do activities.

If it sounds confusing, it generally works the same as Remastered, but activities that used to be easy might be harder, and activities that used to be hard might be easy. There was a stat called "no nudity" that has been eliminated, so nudity is possible always if you do an activity that needs the points you have. I'm still figuring this out, and the confusion is half the fun.

The BIGGEST change is that most post dinner "soft" endings have been eliminated, which meant the game may start looping until you reach a hard ending. This is how the original HTML game worked, but I probably introduced a pile of bugs because of it.

5. All the music has been changed. Got the music from Epidemic Sound, titles in the credits. New title theme is a country ballad instrumental, the non-instrumental version plays during the credits. It's kind of catchy. Added new music to the drive downtown and the museum tour.

6. I went through the game line by line looking for grammar, spelling, and clarity mistakes, and re-wrote several old lines to make them better, often shorter. Then voiced them all. Rebecca has been completely re-voiced to a better sounding voice (Veronica from SITAR or Samantha from DiaWoF), as her voice occasionally sounded annoying before.

7. I decided to implement the text display the way I did with Dating in a World on Fire, where you can display text along the bottom like a traditional visual novel, with the name of the speaker above the text, or "comic" style like most of my other games where the text appears next to the head of the character speaking it. The preference is saved in save files, so if the texture doesn't look right, you might have loaded a save with a different text format. Just go to "Preferences" and pick your format to fix it.

8. By the way, old Date Ariane Remastered saves don't work with Date Ariane 2. Also, while I left the help screen walkthroughs in, they are likely very inaccurate with all the rule changes.

Been play testing for a couple of days and I keep finding bugs. With the rule changes there may be a lot more popping up. I want to spend at least a year improving it, so bug squashing is likely to be a regular activity for the entire year. If you find any let me know in either the comments or the Patreon community messages.