March 2024 Progress Update

Hello everyone! We hope you’re having a Feb- Wait- It’s March?

Demo Update

This update will be a bit of a short one as what we did last month was *checks JIRA* the demo update. That’s it. It was a lot. But that’s it.

So in case you haven’t seen it yet- ✨Here’s the release notes for the update!✨

The demo update was mainly for:

• Fixing some small bugs reported
• Introducing all the performance changes and some QoL changes
• Gamemaker Engine Upgrades

Engine upgrades are pretty straight forward in terms of bugs – upgrade the engine and run into API changes, lifecycle changes, Steam extension changes, etc. So this led to random crashes, weird artifacts on the screen and so on. One upgrade actually broke the starting map and it required an interesting use of excel, php, and scraping the raw map files to figure out what what affected and how to fix it.

As for performance, well, things ran too fast so we had problems with flickering – cutscenes, screens and maps loaded so fast you could now see state changes (ex. showing and hiding NPCs based on completed events).

So we ended up replaying the demo a few times to fix all the various issues, which came out to 70 or so bugs, if not more, all of which were fixed during the month! Then as for getting the update out, we had to scrub all of the cutscene additions we’ve made to the game from the demo due to ✨spoilers✨

Suffice to say, there won’t be a big update for the next while.

Please don’t find bugs. But if you do please tell us.

What’s Next?

We’ll be going back to our original plan for the month which was:

• Olvia Interiors
• Kickstarter Interiors
• MSQ Cutscenes
• TTBattle VFX & SFX

Happy March!