Jelly and Klehss chibi reveals + Devlog #128 + Illustration poll #3 is on!

Chibi pirates!
Very happy with these! Definitely not the most complex of all the ones I did (Jelly's relatively small size helped in that aspect), but Klehss's poses did have some challenges. I'm especially happy with how her KO one turned out at higher ranks :B
Hope you'll like them!

R4 and R5 chibis are available to $10+ patrons!

Chibi BE

I did find the time to work on more chibis this month, Cerelea in particular. I shared this in other places, but I actually redid her whole body to match the illustration better! Here is a gif showing the difference:

Cerelea went through quite a few phases. There was the original illustration which I wasn't satisfied with, so when time came to draw her chibi, I took that opportunity to redesign her. Then, she got a new illustration by Bulumblebee, and now the chibis felt a bit lacking and I wanted her to look stronger, so I updated them to their now final version! Of course, I also took care of her ranks which were a fair bit more complicated than most given each of her ranks looks so different. I'll share her chibis in a future update ^^
In fact, I'm going to reveal a new character next time, but it will be only chibi reveals after that for a few months! This will give me time to build a bigger characters-to-reveal backlog and possibly some of the illustration poll winners too, as well as contacting more artists!

When it comes to songs, more have been finished! In fact, I have everything I need for the time being ^^
And, 2 of the new tracks I've been commissioning are part of the new update!

Which brings us to the main news: the Optimization update!
This is for the most part a port of the whole game from GameMaker 1.4 to GameMaker 2. GM1.4 was basically obsolete, and caused a bunch of issues. Several people reported sudden crashes (especially when enteering the Biscotti tunnels or during the Angel fight, but at various other points in the game too), the cursor had been an ongoing issue with people reporting it drifting if not getting stuck in a corner, selecting a character in the chara select menu would cause a small freeze (generally loading anything would take a long time), and of course the D3DXCompile title screen crash had been an issue from the very beginning (the one mentioned in the readme file)!
All of this and more is now fixed thanks to this port, which will also be a great help from my perspective for development!
And the WHOLE port of the game was done by Mason, who you might know if you're in the Discord server. Thank you so much! And of course, thank you to the playtesters who helped a lot during that process as well! Cooki, Drac, GS, Kib, Nate, Tiger, Yaz, thank you all so much!

As I mentioned above, this update will also have some new stuff!
- 2 new tracks (Shape fight theme, Night dome battle theme)
- A new File select screen (also by Mason!)
- A copy file feature
- Greatly optimized saves
- An autosave system
- Persistent Traveler countdown across areas (= more frequent traveler encounters)

It could be argued that this is more of an exciting update from the dev's perspective this time around, but taking a step back I have no idea how I'be able to tackle some of the stuff I have planned without this port. Trust me when I say it's a huge step forward ^^

Now, GM2 isn't perfect. There is a particular cursor delay issue I'm eyeing and hoping will be fixed in the upcoming Long Term Stable version. There is kind of a fix which I'll mention in the new build's post, at least...! Thanks GS!
I was initially waiting for the LTS to come out to release this update, but decided to move forward after the expected date wasn't met. It's now been pushed to 2026, we'll see what happens...!

I mentioned above that the saves have been greatly optimized. Because of this, saves from the previous version are only almost compatible. That is, you might see some weird behavior or even crashes if you try to access alchemy recipes from an older save.
Of course despite our best efforts, it's possible some new bugs made it through! In particular, the whole frame freeze (hitstun) system had to be redone. I used to trigger frame freezes in a somewhat cheap way in the past, where I'd basically lower the whole game's FPS for one frame. It turns out GM2 doesn't like that so much, so I had to redo a whole new frame freeze system which required updating bits of code all over the place. It works great and I now have perfect control over how long frame freezes should last, but if anything I expect new potential crashes would come from this. The good news is that these would be very easy to fix, and the autosave system's now got your back if such crashes occur...!

One other very important thing I haven't mentioned yet is that there will now be a Linux version as well! FINALLY! ^^

The Optimization update will be posted in just a bit in its own post!
edit: Here it is! https://www.patreon.com/posts/142573097
It will become publicly available in one month, on December 1st ^^

And now, the poll stuff!

The next illustration poll has begun! The theme this time is [Casual]!
You can vote in the Discord server if you are a 2$+ patron! Here are the current theme and submissions: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Drz4UD09YftgaihcwWq6McqiFTa2l77XJ9oBJ0hfDcoThe
The first round of the poll will be active until the 7th of this month, the following 3 rounds will also take place over one week each ^^

Thank you for reading!
Thank you so much for the support!
BIG LOVE