Shadow Island R7 - Progress Update [1 July, 2022]

Hey everyone,

This month I switched Divimera to the latest SDK update of Ren'py (the engine used by Divimera which most of you are probably familiar with), the 7.5 version of Ren'py. 

In general, I usually avoid updating the engine too much as this always causes some issues which can take days to fix and it was a bit of hell at first to make everything works again as it should but the new features to the latest SDK added by Ren'py Tom were too good to not do the jump. This is the most significant update for Ren'py in years, and it fixed/improved the web versions and android versions. Notably, with the previous SDK, the web version couldn't run anymore on google chrome (which is like 90% of what the people are using anyway) and the android version had a lot of crashes issue on startup or game crashing after a while. 

All of that is fixed now, and on top of that, the new SDK adds an efficient way to precache images which I will be using a lot now (you will notice a new loading screen on startup): 

And overall a lot of performance boost because of the ability to precache and some new under-the-hood improvements made by Tom. I know it isn't the most exciting stuff for most of you but this was a big part of my days working on the game in the last 2 weeks so I felt like I had to talk about it.

This inspired me to improve a lot of subsystems for the game, the interface has been tremendously polished, and almost all the little bugs that were left ironed out. 

I also added some quality of life changes, when you reach the limit of rollback possible, you will be now warned through a notification like so:

And another new kind of notification, and I think this one is a must-have for the completionists, as long as you didn't toggle skip unseen in the preferences, the game will now interrupt skipping and warn you through a notification when you encounter a segment that you have never seen in the past like so:

Outside of that, we are well advanced in the script and have the first draft pretty much complete outside of a few events, there is still a lot of work to do though just in terms of polishing and getting it actually playable in the game in a not so barebone state.

On the art side, this month was completed all the new alternative MC looks and his new set of profile emotions + the new scene with molly that was teased early this month which can be seen in the next preview post (if you don't want to be spoiled, avoid at all costs).

My goal this month on top of the usual R7 progress is to try to get a 6.5 release out on Patreon as fast as possible with all the quality of life and the engine upgrade + the new alternative face for the MC option. I'm getting an almost constant stream of reports from android users who have trouble playing the game, the web version is getting review bombed because it doesn't run on most browsers, so I would like to wrap all that in a 6.5 fixed version with all the other technical addition (but nothing really new outside of the new MC alternative face).

Thank you for supporting Divimera, and wishing everyone a happy summer holiday until more to come as always.