So, for the sake of making it simple to mantain this post, i will be just pasting my devlogs from the game here separated in sections.

Devlog #01 - Whap Happun?

So, this is our first version of the game... It's late and it isn't even the full version, what happened?

Well that is simple, a poor time management/lack of time from our coder, our coder works at more companies than just our own, both to be able to pay the bills and to keep this studio going,  and it just so happened that he didn't have any free time in October until the last week before Halloween, which wasn't quite enough to be able to code and polish all of the game, the game also had WAY MORE to do than we first anticipated.

One of the things not anticipated by our coder was the sheer amount of animations, soooo many of them to code in, and they all take a ton of time to code and to test to make sure they go together well, we believe they are all smooth now, but there may still be some bugs from one animation clipping on another.

And then, we had the biggest problem of them all, we made the game in 4k resolution just because we could, its not really a heavy game, 150mb, a normal size, our Sonia game was heavier than that and wasn`t 4k and had much worse animations, but we learn a lot with every new game we make, Sonia will still have a big update at some point, but that is beside the point, the problem with making the game in 4k is that for some reason we have a high memory usage and a REALLY heavy main scene for the game, on a windows executable, that is no problem, you can run it with ease, just a bit more loading than planned, but on HTML5... We crash Open-GL when opening the game... That obviously is not good. 

So there is this problem that we couldn`t really predict, as I said, this game is LIGHTER than Sonia, and Sonia works well with HTML5, we are guessing that is the fault of the 4k resolution, since this is the only thing that is really different between them, so, our plan is to duplicate the project and downgrade the resolution to 1080p, but this bring its own problems since the animations uses the transform and scale properties to make things work, and those will all have to be changed to reflect the new resolution... One by one... In all of the dozens of animations... So i guess you can see how that could be a big problem for our busy coder haha, but it will be done in the next couple of weeks, and we hope this actually fixes the memory problem, we don`t know for sure, but its our best guess, we never encountered this problem before... Oh, android is also affected by it, so the play store version will also be delayed until we solve this. There were also some animations that were cut because of time constraints, they will be implemented on the next version as they are really simple and improve the experience by quite a bit, was just a time problem...

In the end, we have a game, and a quite good and beautiful one at that,  our artists and our coder worked their ass off to be able to make this experience for you guys, and we are really proud to say, we have done it, and its here for the world to see.

If you would like to support us, you can do here on itch.io, support our Patreon, visit us on Neonmob or just take a look at our first commercial game, When the Winter Comes, which has a demo right here on itch.io.

Thank you guys so much for your support and for taking an interest in our development process, we live to bring you guys new unique experiences every day!

Devlog #02 - The wonders of reddit

So, to solve our problems that we didn't even understand of crashing open-gl and android with our game, we went to reddit, i posted my scene tree on the /godot subreddit and we got a ton of responses from the community, everything from "change the import settings to lossy at 0.7"(which helped but didn't solve the issue) to "maybe you are instancing the scenes wrong, you should set an owner to them"(which made no difference at all), so, how did we fix it? any sort of black magic needed?

Nah, it was really simple, as I said in the first devlog, the only problem was the 4k textures, you see, i learnt reading our responses on reddit, that Open-GL is not able to work with compressed textures and needs to decompress them all to run the game, i also learnt that browsers don't work too well with heavier than 2gb files... Our game when uncompressed had 2.7gb, its only when compressed that our size goes down to 150mb, so every time we were trying to play it in the browser, Open-GL was decompressing our textures to the RAM Memory of the computer, over 2gb of textures, making it crash, android was a similar problem, android also had to decompress our textures, but on android it crashed because my phone has only 4gb of ram, so we were actually flooding it until it had no space left and crashed.

The solution was simple, resize and compress our textures to make them more friendly with web and android, and that is what we did, we came to the conclusion that we don't need more than 720p on web/android, so that is the resolution we used, the problem that comes with it is adapting every animation since we had to change every position keyframe manually, this took an entire afternoon, but it could have taken longer if it wasn't for the fact that the size was exactly 3 times smaller, so we could just divide the position of each keyframe by 3.

In the end, everything is solved, web version is online, 4k windows .exe is working, an update with some bug fixes is already deployed and the android version is coming as soon as play store approves the file, we took a lesson from this, either we make 2(possibly 3)different versions with different resolutions if we are going to do 4k games, or we just don't do 4k games to begin with, and i think we will stick with the second option for now haha.