Posted October 20, 2024 by Steamberry Studio
Hi everyone! This release was supposed to be a little later than it is coming but a couple of Real Life events have pushed it up by about a week and a half.
Episode 1 of When Stars Collide is officially released. 🥳🥳🥳
I cannot stress this enough.
Old saves will break. Even if they show up. Even if you can technically load them without initially crashing the game, the saves are broken. They will eventually crash the game. There is too much new content that did not exist in the prototype for those saves to function.
*Everything is different*
Please be sure that the correct version (1.4.3) is loading for you. You can find this info in the lower right corner of the main menu. Some people reported that launching the game would launch the snapshot even if they had the update (this seems to be some sort of weird Itch quirk. )
The new title screen looks like this:
If this is not what your title screen looks like, you are not in the correct version of the game.
Everything. Tons of features and additions.
New backgrounds. Flowcharts, new glossary, music room, achievements, recap screen, etc, etc, etc.
About 50,000 words of new content (combined with the previous prologue and chapter one)
If you want a full breakdown of the new content, you can click below. A lot of it is stuff that has been mentioned in updates here before.
Total Word count of Episode One: 83,000 words (not including the bonus scenes)
What isn't in the game right now is any content for future chapters. Future variables, future chapters, flowcharts, future CGs, etc. None of that is in the game files. 👀 Just so you know. LoL
Not for a few months. Please remember, though, the next episode is fully written and edited. I am already working on coding it and doing the art.
But it's a lot.
My aim is to release a new episode every 3-4 months. But I don't know yet what the schedule will look like. This gap between Episode 1 and Episode 2 is what will show me how long to expect to take to get each episode ready without killing my art hand.
Just like before, the episode will go through a process of Patreon Beta → Patreon Early Access → Public release.
The next episode will go through a longer period of early access than this one did though. This one ended up being a bit shorter due to various reasons.
Since this release is coming right around when I'd normally be getting ready to do my monthly update here, I'm going to include a quick update here. It is pretty short - just to give you an idea of what I'm working on.
Since my last check in, I've been slowly starting to work on the next episode.
I coded the BG changes, the music cues and SFX. And I also started coding in sprite expressions. I've completed several CGs and received some new BG art.
I will be focusing on getting sprite expressions done and then probably the flowchart. I can release a Beta before the CGs are totally done but I really need the expressions and flowcharts set up so they can be tested.
So CGs are kind of my slightly lower priority thing, though I am breaking up the intense monotony of sprite expressions with CG work. So I'm basically working on everything at once.