Alpha 0.21 Release!

Hello there my beautiful patrons. How are you all doing?

Before I start, I wanna say this real quick:

Thank you from the bottom of my heart, for sticking with me, for supporting this project, for being the most understanding people I've ever seen in my entire life. You guys understand how hard, time-consuming, and difficult is to make a game. You guys understand that I'm making it alone, that even if I can give all my time to it, I'm a perfectionist trying to make the best out of the story, the characters, the systems, etc. You guys understand that I don't have beta testers, helpers who can allow me the tactics of divide and conquer easily. And you guys are still here with me. Thank you. From the bottom of my heart.

This alpha is the culmination of both my work in January and my work now in February using the new layout system you guys on Tier 3 decided for me to work with. I now divide my work into four segments of weeks, where I work on the story on one week, I work on the system the next, I work on the correction and insertion of the current text inside the game and at the start of the last week, I release the alpha I've been working on the last three weeks, the fourth week then I take to fix bugs and try to refine the system of the game (such as finishing touches on the gallery) or fine-tuning errors that sometimes happens without me noticing on the code, and so on. This means less content per build but more builds per year.

Sometimes this schedule can change, for example, I can solely focus two of my three weeks only on history and text for the game if necessary. The game has a total of seven days, with an extra 8th day that will work more like an epilogue for the game that will tell what happened with the relationship you built with any of the three main characters.

I've got to a point where a Day takes a very long time to do because the number of routes is increasing and text too!

So, what's new?

• All the changes added to the first demo are now applied to the alphas.
• The 4th day has been added.
  • The 4th day contains the following routes besides the main route for Wagner, Act0, Act1 parts 1 and 2,  1st, 2nd and 3rd encounters; (Where: The 1st encounter plays if you never got to knew his character, 2nd encounter happens if you already spent at least one day with him, and the 3rd encounter happens if you followed him for two routes in a row and has more than half the points you can earn with him on those last two segments. This value is incremental, so you also need to have played three days to open the third encounter with him on the fourth day given the fact it's almost impossible to have half the points you need with a character without playing only their route.) All the answers for Act 1 part 1 and 2 containing seven routes per set of questions: an F route, B route, two A routes, and three S routes; (Where the three extra routes can only be accessed with a certain amount of points, one of them expecting you to have the maximum points with the character through the entire game).
  • The 4th day contains around 6157 lines of code I was able to make in one month and three weeks meaning that every month this amount can rise between 2500 to 3400 lines depending on my productivity in three weeks.
• A new cutscene image is added to the game's code but it's not accessible on the game*
  • This scene will be implemented only when the gallery system for Bonding Images is completed.
• For safety reasons the following.sav files are now encrypted: game_data.sav, gallery.sav and skip.sav*
  • The gallery.sav was previously being encrypted by your system's unique OS ID, but since this ID changes with every update windows has on the story for its users for safety reasons I decided to use a personal key for each file.
  • The skip and save_data are now encrypted for safety reasons together with the gallery.
  • The encryption key is different for each file.
  • This was done to avoid tampering with those files which are essential for the game to work properly.
• There's a hidden skip feature added to the new credits scene, if you want to skip the credits maintain pressed the F2 key, which will exponentially fast forward the credits to its end.
• From now on, previous alphas are not able to update text-revisions.

Important considerations about the Save Files.

I want you all to understand that the save_data, skip, and gallery .sav files are fully encrypted now; the Gallery one already was before but each update your windows would make would render it unusable, and it would also probably cause crashes on the game too.

Now I want you all to pay attention to this: By encrypting the saved files I'm ensuring two important things for this game: The first is that no one will be able by conventional means, to change the content inside the saves, which could crash the game. The second is that no matter if you have a saved file from version 0.6 or 0.17, as soon as the game starts, it will try to load any existent file using the key of encryption, and if it can't because the file is not encrypted or is a file from an old key, it will ignore this and create a new file for you. This means that save incompatibility is not an issue anymore, but remember that the Save File is not on the game's folder, instead, it's on your Windows AppData. So, if you run the 0.21 save your game, and you play the 0.23 in the future, if there's something different with the save files, one version will always overwrite the other. Keep your backups if you like to swap between older and newer versions.

BUT: This also comes with a little problem for you guys: Your old save files won't work anymore on Version 0.21 so you will all have to start fresh on this new alpha. I'm sorry about that.

With all of this, after the release of this alpha today, you guys have until the end of February to download any previous builds because they will be removed from Patreon for safety reasons. They are consuming a space that is not being used anymore, they are outdated, some of them have severe errors that could potentially break your new builds and they are incompatible with newer save versions.  Download them at your own risk if you wanna check on them but they will only be available by the end of this month.

Oh, and please, tier 3 patrons be ready for the next pool that I'll be adding here later tomorrow!

I think I've said enough so, here's the new alpha!