Development resuming.

Long time no see! First of all, thanks to everyone for playing this little project of mine. It's really, really heartwarming to know that people want me to keep going. There's been a time during this period I didn't even want to look at the game, as I felt very ashamed and embarrassed that thousands of people have seen my errors, poor design decisions and bad drawings. But I don't want to disappoint anyone or myself, so I'll complete what I started.

So, let's go through everything!:

# Issue 1: Status of the game.

I'm working again on the game. It's been a while, so now I have new ideas. There's some things I want to rework, and others I'll remove.

Some of the reworks involve changing heavily how the base game work (schedules, events), so this will take me a while. I've been coding game stuff a bit on my free time, so I've learned a bunch during this time, and want to make things better and more scalable.

Some things might not work out, and that's why I'm gonna work on it privately for a bit. That leads to the next issue.

# Issue 2: Porting game to Godot 4.

Since there's gonna be some core changes of how the game works, I've been thinking if I should just start over the code on Godot 4. Godot (version 3.5) is the engine I've been developing the game on. Last year Godot 4.0 released, but it wasn't optimal for development yet, so I kept developing on 3.5.

I've been testing Godot 4.2 for a month, and it's SO much better to work on. Now I've returned to 3.5 to keep working on Love Inn, and it's been painful.

Here's the problem: Godot 4 supports two modes, Forward and Compatibility. Forward is the one that renders things nicely in 3D, but uses Vulkan, which means older computers can't run it. Compatbility is the one meant to be used in older PCs, so that's the one I'm using. There's some things, graphics wise, that are better in 3.5, than in 4 in Compatibility, the most important one right now being SSAO (the "shadow" that appears around edges of 3D objets).

Even if I get a new GPU and develop in Forward, people with older PCs would need to play a downgraded version. So for the sake of everyone, I'll still develop in Compatibility even if I upgrade GPU. The features not yet in Godot 4 Compatibility, are being worked on by Godot contributors, so hopefully by the time I release a new version, the features are on par with Godot 3.5.

# Issue 3: Patreon.

Since I'll be experimenting, (almost convinced of) porting, and might need to backpedal on some ideas, I won't open Patreon yet. These things take a lot of time, and some things will take me weeks but players won't make a difference, so doesn't feel fair to me to have Patreon open right now.

I've been seeing more and more devs and artists having their Patreon page closed by Patreon. I guess some violated their guidelines, but others I'm not so sure about, so I'm a bit cautious, might need to change platforms eventually, not sure right now. My ultime goal is still to be able to work full time on this and release on Steam when the game is in a good state.

Personal life: the time off the game paid off! I finally finished my law degree. And the gov job I had some exams to do went kind ok at first, but I needed to be top 1% and only got top 10%, but such is life.

Here's some random drawings in different styles since I've missed the world and characters:

Spoilers?

Whatever happens, Love Inn will continue! Thanks for your reading.