Hello everyone! Time for this week's update!
Summary
Published Episode 3 to the public
Mostly have been focused on some bug fixes
Improving accessibility features
Coding and Other Stuff
So this week I published Episode 3 publicly. It was a few days early but I'd wrapped up all the art I wanted to add and decided to go ahead and publish the build instead of waiting.
I've had to push three small bug fixes since then for really minor code issues that were causing significant visual issues. Ha ha. And one that was breaking the game because a file was misnamed.
I also got a polite request to make the game a little more accessible as the self-voicing feature was not playing nicely with some of the UI (namely the customisation screen but there are a few other places I forgot to add alt text).
I've been working on that but unfortunately it's not always as easy as adding alt text. For instance, the customisation screen is tricky because it has to figure out which features are showing so it can say them outloud. And then it has to not just say EVERYTHING OUT LOUD ALL AT ONCE.
This means you can't just add alt text the way you normally do in Renpy.
Another thing I've learned is that self-voicing and tooltips don't really play nice together in Renpy. Which is a problem because the flowchart uses tooltips instead of labels on the flowchart boxes.
I spent all day with a couple of friends trying to make the self voicing read the flowchart tooltips correctly.
I think we finally found a workaround but that was excruciating LoL.
Upcoming Week
I have a few more accessibility things to work on related to self voicing and then I will probably push another update to the current build.
Beyond that, I will start working on the non-asset-driven aspects of the next episode. As always, I will not be adding any new visuals or content for a while yet but will be focusing on things that don't require new stuff (like sprite expressions).
I will also probably start writing the POV scenes that will go out with Chapter 6.
Chapter 6 will not have CGs but it will have POV scenes for the events of Chapter 5 and it does require at least two new sprites as a couple of new characters show up. It's a bit shorter than Chapter 5 so hopefully sprite expressions don't take quite as long.
At this point I do not have an ETA on when the next beta version will go out. Typically I like to have all the major things like expressions and such done by the time beta releases so doing corrections doesn't distract too much from that.
Chapter 6 is a sort of transition chapter where the focus is actually laying plot foundation for heading into Chapter 7. I think there are fewer group scenes in this one so I'm hoping I can do the sprite expressions a little faster than normal.
We'll see. I always say that and then they still take forever. 😭