Shale Hill Secrets | Episode 3 released to $10+ patrons!

Happy Saturday everyone! Why don’t we celebrate the weekend… the third installment of Shale Hill Secrets is here!

This episode is a long one that will help you learn more about the MC’s past, along with some new things about the people in his life. There is a lot of information to take in here, so please do take your time reading through as it’ll all be important for the future of the game.

We hope you enjoy this episode, thank you again for all your love! ❤️️

New Features

We’ve been working hard on some new features that will improve your gameplay experience. We encourage you to test them out and report any feedback if possible! The new features are:

- New asset compression method. Quality is still as high as possible but the game is smaller.

- New skip method similar to Renpy: you can use [Tab] to toggle it on/off, or hold [CTRL] to skip in a more controllable way. The game also records the lines you’ve seen, meaning the skip should stop when a new line appears during a replay. See gameplay options for speed and direction.

- Animations are now preloaded in bulk to avoid too many annoying interruptions during animated scenes (gameplay options > preload animations. It is enabled by default). Please let us know if this causes a crash or any other issues. Preload animations can take up to 2GB of RAM, which shouldn't be a problem for a modern desktop.

- [F12]: Record the current line to the system clipboard (useful to report typos or use translators in case English isn’t your mother tongue).

- [S]: Take a screenshot.

- Music and ambient sounds don't reset anymore when using rollback (undo).

- And lot’s of other tweaks behind the scenes. More features and options to come.

Install Instructions

Windows: Download the file below, extract the zipped file to a location of your choice and then run the Shale Hill Secrets executable. The game should open straight away after this. Do not try to run the executable without unzipping it first or you’ll get an error message! Do not mix these files with previous releases! This release contains all the episodes.

IMPORTANT: Do not play previous builds (0.1.x, 0.2.x etc). Always play the latest build available (it contains all the episodes). Since we are constantly adding improvements to the engine, executing a previous build after you've ran a newer one could mess or corrupt your progress.

V0.3.5 - Full Download here (Windows 64-bit, macOS and Android)
There's also a patch file available for Windows in case you already downloaded a previous 0.3.x version and don't want to download the full thing again. Just download it to the game directory, unpack and replace the needed files. There's no patch for Mac or Android.

The file is hosted on itch since their download speeds are better.
You don't need to create an itch account. Just click "Connect with Patreon" > "Allow" > "Download". If you have cancelled your pledge, Itch may not allow you to access the downloads. Please re-enable your pledge (you won't be charged again) to download the files. Then you can cancel it afterwards.

macOS

We have figured out a better way of installing the game on Mac by using a DMG file. Double click Install Shale Hill Secrets.dmg. Then, in the window that open, drag and drop the app to the Applications folder.

If the DMG file doesn't open, this mean Gatekeeper could have quarantine it. It can be fixed by running this command in Terminal:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine $HOME/Downloads/Install\ Shale\ Hill\ Secrets\ v0.3.5.dmg

Android

After downloading the file, open the APK file and select "update". You don't need to uninstall the previous build manually.

Animations preloading is disabled by default on Android. If you have a newer device with enough RAM (say at least 4GB), you can enable it in Settings > Gameplay Settings > Preload Animations. This will provide a better experience during the animate scenes. However, be aware this can also drive the app to crash as the Android operating system usually doesn't like when a single app allocates huge amount of memory in a short time span.

Help

Report any bugs or issues to #bug-reports or #typos in our Discord channel. Please do not post bug reports here on Patreon’s comments section, it’s hard to track and difficult to give you guys proper assistance. If you don’t have a Discord account, please send us an email instead to support@love-joint.com. Please also feel free to leave some feedback in constructive-feedback on Discord.

Developed by Love-Joint

Ricky | Producer, Code, Engine
AW | Plot, Writing, Direction
NiRo | Character Design, Art
Mr. Vargas | Character Design, Art
Zed | Marketing, Art
Luke | Marketing, Art

In Memory of Palmer.

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Again we hope you enjoy this episode, and we’ll see you for the next episode!
The Love-Joint Team.