Post by Steamberry Studio in Concern about dialogue usage when game was included Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality

Viewing post in Concern about dialogue usage when game was included Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality

Just wanted to post a quick update that we're definitely running into some more significant issues than we expected when it comes to building an update. There are multiple issues at play - including the fact that version of the game engine that Changeling was built in is severely outdated. We started coding this project over four years ago and the engine has gone through multiple massive updates. Trying to rebuild the game in the current version will require us to make some more substantial changes to just basically update the game code.

But we're currently struggling to even get the game to launch in the old versions of the engine.

All of this to say that we're working on it and will continue to try to find a workable solution to let us update. We've already corrected the text itself (as well as an additional use of the same phrase in William's route).

It's just about getting the update live and working around the fact that this 4+ year old code from back when I was...really bad at coding! And I'm currently a one person operation as the other half of Steamberry Studio is on a hiatus. I did want to make sure you knew that I'm definitely working on it.

~Esh

Jemini15105 years ago(+4)(-6)

Thank you for the update! I can understand if coding/age of the game ends up being a roadblock that becomes too hard of a challenge to overcome. I appreciate the work and effort towards addressing my concern.

Addressing the Maulth's comment of not being able to please everyone, while yes this is true that literature evolves and you can't please everyone in language choice, I felt it important to point out especially when then the Studio has donated the game to the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. Such a language choice goes against the work of racial justice and equality which the studio is obviously striving to work towards or else they would not have donated their work.

Steamberry Studio5 years ago(+6)

;A;

So far only a few people have tested the possible update but it's essentially wreaked havoc on the save data for everyone so far. I think the issue is stemming more from the conflict between the version of the Ren'py engine in which Changeling was originally built and the current one.

Ren'py went through several massive changes during the course of Changeling's development. At one point we had to stop updating the engine because it kept completely devastating our code and breaking the game. And at the time we just didn't have the budget to be able to pay someone to overhaul the code every single time Ren'py updated. Because of that, the version of the engine the original builds are done in is just really out of date compared to what's available now.

We did find the old versions and tried downloading and building the update in those old versions but it didn't work and, for some reason, we couldn't get the game to launch. So we were stuck with trying to build the distributions in the current version of Ren'py. The problem is that it required us to fix the glitchy parts and try to update the code so that the game is playable and not buggy. That part was a little tedious (one of the issues required me to make an edit to every single choice menu in the game - of which there are 307! LoL).

But the issue is that saves are just completely messed up now, with many of them completely crashing the game if you try to load them. While overall progress is preserved, it's clearly the update would completely destroy everyone's saves.

As such, we're just trying to decide what to do next! I'm also waiting to hear from a few more testers because right now there have only been 4, which isn't a huge test group and we definitely need to make sure there aren't more significant issues with this build than just broken saves. Even so, with at least 7000 new downloads of the game in the last week, we definitely can't push an update we know would actively destroy everyone's save files. There are still options available though and, at the moment, we're just trying to confirm the save files are the only casualty.

So yeah! That's an update on what's going on! <3

~Esh

itch.io

Viewing post in Concern about dialogue usage when game was included Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality