News: Steam Next Fest, Improved Accessibility, Demo, Community Copy, and More!

We finally have a downloadable demo for you to check for device compatibility, and we have also refreshed the Community Copies!

After months of hard work, we’re now on Steam Next Fest, slated to release on March 4th! You can help by adding it on your wishlist! The build on Steam and itch.io are identical and we intend to push updates on both storefronts from here onwards, so you can make your purchase on whichever platform you prefer.

In the new build:

• A couple visual tweaks and under the hood performance improvement
• Better hardware support
• Improved accessibility!

I’m excited to talk about the last point. Reading experience is paramount in a kinetic novel, so we have added more options to make sure you can comfortably enjoy our story. Previously, we only highlighted Ren’py’s default accessibility menu in Controls, but this time we also bring it in the main preference menu, and you can enable a lot of things even before you start the game.

• Every navigation button is captioned so the self-voicing feature can read it. I have personally tried playing through the whole game with only a keyboard and without looking at the screen.

• There’s also sound and image caption for things that might not readily apparent from just the script alone.

• You can test the SFX volume and preview text speed right in the Options menu.

• Past choices and seen lines are highlighted.

Of course, while I strive to do what I can, we’re still limited in many ways. You can’t scale the text too much before it starts overflowing, and fixing this would require me to edit a good chunk of the GUI, perhaps automatically scaling the frame based on the text size. Maybe in the next game. I do hope what we offer is serviceable for now.

With this, The Butterfly Dreams is largely done. I intend to add a final update later down the road for better controller support. Moving forward, we have another projects in the pipeline, and I hope that you will lend us your support in the future as well.

If you have made a purchase before (thanks!), the updates might not be big enough to warrant an extra playthrough. If you do so though, you would have the collective’s gratitude.

May the wish of a thousand butterflies guide you ever forward.

🦋Requiem🦋