It's official! We are finally, finally back to developing Aaron's story. Two years in, and only five builds released... don't know what kind of project strategy this is. One of unreliable chaos? That sucks to say because we wanted to avoid that, and it happened anyway.
Please accept my apologies for keeping you on hold. There were 4 or 5 months after the release of ParaBEN in May 2024 where I didn't touch visual novel code, and I should have announced a brief hiatus. I didn't because I was indeed writing and proofing during that time. I just… didn't see much value in keeping everyone updated, but I was wrong.
Build 0.5 - What's it about?
Anyways, it's here. Let's talk about Build 0.5! With a year passing, one would expect a year's worth of content - right? Well, kinda. It's a lot, definitely more than any other build before it, though it may not feel like it because the focus was on one route, we removed another, and the "extras" you'll have to dig a bit for.
Build 0.5 is the first to interpret Part II of any branch. We start with Danny since he was extended all the way back in 0.2. You also get the second and last major expansion of the Exploration segments, which accounted for a huge chunk of development time. The exploration segments have to be written with other branches in mind, so they conceptually take longer. But I'm very proud of them, and I think you'll enjoy them too.
And since it's been so long since our last build, we've finally come through with something we've been promising since those first couple of builds… read below!
Here is the changelog from this release (0.5).
New Content:
- Danny's storyline is expanded through Part 2!
- Danny's sprites have been overhauled for (hopefully) the final time. The process for doing this was documented in our halftime report last year. Let us know what you think! Any additional edits to his sprites in future builds will be kept to minimums (clothing, expressions, etc.)
- Several new CGs along the way - some of my most confident art.
- Danny's family member sprites also received facelifts / additional edits.
- Part 2 touches on Danny and Aaron's developing friendship, how Aaron's life will progress forward, and what types of things Aaron will do to keep Danny close…
- Explorations: Part II adds new areas to explore: the computer, the television, and… a secret unlockable branch? (Hint: Who graduated highschool with Aaron?)
- Refreshed some old side-character sprites!
- New side-character sprites! Aaron works with some interesting people at the bank.
- Character Sheet: it's now accessible! As you read the story, any major characters you meet will be added to this page, along with details about their life. This option is found on the Game Menu and works best with brand-new save files. You can finally see the fresh-faced Aaron in all his glory, too.
- We added +25k words (111k -> 136k) of dialogue. It sounds huge, but much of this is exploration content.
Story edits or changes from Build 0.4:
- Minor one-sentence additions or one-word changes to many parts of the story.
- Plumbing and plugging story loopholes and contradictions
- Ex: Aaron would not know he went to Cambodia with Tyson on Mike's route. He only knows this information through Danny's route.
- Some eagle-eyed readers noted that the heights of characters compared to their sprites seemed inconsistent. We agree, so this has been rectified in their profile descriptions. Your favorite coyote boy eclipses 180 cm / 6 feet, so enjoy that factoid :3
- The Character Select screen has been updated for 7 routes.
- Malik is no longer accessible, as his story has been deprecated. If you have any saves for this branch, you are likely to run into issues. Any Malik branch saves should be overwritten or considered unsupported.
- Background imagery updates, sound additions, and sprite image compression.
- Aaron and Warren's house image has been updated as we were unable to confirm whether the previous image was free-to-use.
- Some CG art pieces have been updated to match current sprites.
- The odds that you can afford a month of rent have been slightly increased.
Known issues:
- Older save compatibility:
- When loading an old save that included older sprites (primarily Danny), he may not look as expected - he may even be shirtless! This is an expected bug - keep reading until his visuals return to normal, or scroll back in the script until he looks normal again.
- The Character Sheet is now accessible, but it is not expected to load correctly with older saves. Some of the art on the screen may be inconsistent with the sprites in-game.
- A change at 0.3 to music formatting means you may experience periods of silence if you update to 0.5 and start a specific save file from 0.1 or 0.2. Continue reading until the music "kicks back on" before saving the file again. If you see an error message, restart your save file (if possible) & save at a point prior to changing scenes. (This is the last time I'll have this listed as a known limit, as build 0.3 was released almost 2 years ago.)
- When Danny sings at the baseball game (yes you read that right), you will not be able to scroll forward or click. This is intentional. However, if you scroll back on PC after the scene completes, you may run into replay errors and issues.
- You can't choose to go to the patio after entering the lounge with Mike.
- When a character moves across the screen and the reader clicks to read the next line of dialogue, the character's movement may repeat itself.
- Some thought bubble dialogue doesn't display in the right color or format but remains legible.
- Sometimes an error occurs when clicking an unread entry in Zeke's glossary.
Enhancements & fixes:
- Quality-of-life:
- Imagery compression and audio file format changes to .OGG, to decrease installation size. This is an ongoing effort.
- For mobile devices, interface controls (menu buttons, textboxes) have been adjusted to make it easier to press and minimize text runoff.
- An "Ambience Volume" setting has been added to the Preferences page so you can control ambient soundscape volume separately from sound effects.
- Optimization of certain void scenes and path intro text to take advantage of Renpy capabilities and cut down on installation size.
- It was possible to encounter an error after unlocking Joel's route if you used a save file where you didn't go see him at the bar. This has been fixed.
- Accessibility: Added a visual indicator for exploration discoveries. Sound is no longer required for these segments.
- The number of mid-sentence stops has been reduced for a smoother reading experience - about ⅔ of them are gone. Many of the remaining breaks have been included in the Interruption Time control introduced in 0.4 so you can manually set the break speed (after all, who am I to dictate how fast/slow you read!) You're still going to encounter them when the story calls for it.
- Code optimization for music pausing, character names, sprite tinting, etc.
- Renpy build updated from 8.1 to 8.3.1
Final Word
I hope you enjoy this as much as I have! Deep diving into a character's arc always feels like an opportunity to explore the different sides of same-sex relationships. Do any of these guys remind you of guys from your past?
Build 0.6 comes next. We will extend Byron to the end of Part 1, and - because he's become a reader favorite (not surprised) - we are working on Part 2 of Chet. Now that the character sheet is available, we owe you one last tool: an Explorations tracker sheet. It will help you remember what you've discovered and what details from those discoveries are important. Some of that will become apparent as you unlock character information, but non-character related info you'll have to jot down for now.
Once again, special thanks to the folks following me on Bluesky and the FVN Discord who held a group readthrough of my novel. They gave great feedback that helped improve the story. Additionally, all readers out there who provide words of encouragement - you're the best!
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NOTE: If you have any problems with your Android install, please notify me. It's working on my phone, but my level of confidence that it'll function alright on all other phones is a bit lower than usual!!