Hey thanks tons for these posts, this is helpful.

• On the mac, I noticed that voiceover separates certain words, the way it breaks up paragraphs. I was able to click on those words to get the glossary info. I couldn't figure out a way to get that to work for me in windows.

This is probably down to how I've actually got the glossary working (there's a hacky bit of javascript that goes back after the page is drawn and looks for keywords, and if those keywords are found it retroactively wraps them in the glossary div — this way I only have to add definitions in one place as opposed to manually doing them every time I write the text out, and it detects the keywords automatically instead of me forgetting a word here or there.) I probably won't be able to do anything about this in terms of screen readers, but that's why I added the glossary button on the side so definitions can be accessed outside of a passage. Dunno why it's interactive under macOS but not Windows, but maybe that's down to their screen readers specifically.

• Looking at the area with attributes and inventory, I know I have encounter secrets and perils, but I'm unable to get more details about them. Meaning, it just says encounter secret, or peril, but doesn't tell me what it actually is.

I think that I can rectify this by adding in the img alt text that I meant to go back and do but never had a chance. Right now if you mouse over the various images it gives a hover tooltip that tells you what the secret was, for example, and I think once I go back and implement those it will accomplish the same thing for people on screen readers.

• Also, I can't tell if I should be able to get more details about the items in my inventory, such as a description or if it gives me some kind of boost to an attribute.

This is also in the hover tooltips and should (hopefully) be fixed with appropriate img alt text. However, are you able to interact with the buttons in the inventory to equip/unequip items once you have access? That's one thing I was worried about since it was an issue earlier on. Otherwise the inventory screen is just a pretty wall of images that doesn't do anything useful!

Thanks, glad to hear it! I'm just waiting on assets for the second two internships and then the four will get pushed to the demo; once the game's UI and so forth is locked in and concrete, it's just the writing  left to finish and I'll get that in place pretty rapidly. Thanks for your support!

I'm extremely pleased to announce the initial release in the Alcyone: The Last City alpha — Alpha1!

Thank you all for being so patient as I've gotten this organised. This first release is a substantial change over the demo file I presented during Kickstarter; there's not any component of the game that hasn't been redone in some capacity. This portion of the game contains the same "areas" as in the original demo — character creation, a choice of two internship pathways with exposure to the Encounter system, and a secondary Encounter following completion of the internships. However, all of this has been rewritten and should look new even to players who saw the original demo.

Alpha1 Release Notes — 30-04-2018

• Total overhaul of the game's appearance compared to the demo
• "Dyslexic-friendly" font from Fontsmith to improve overall readability
• New splash, menu, and interstitial screens
• Custom cursor icons
• Consistent styling implemented for buttons & UI elements from the Twine engine & SugarCube 2 functionality
• Massive editing/rewriting passthrough to the Alcyone prose 
• Text is now broken up into much smaller "bubbles" to further improve readability
• Implemented additional audio and visual effects
• Preliminary fixes implemented for screen readers (this will require further testing)
• Glossary tooltip system has been overhauled to improve functionality and readability
• Better differentiation between dialogue "bubbles," story "bubbles," and more important game moments
• Passage headers are separated and better differentiated from the rest of the story bubbles
• Improvements to various CSS elements

If anything comes up please don't hesitate to let me know — enjoy!

I still get it launching and then instantly/immediately closing whether I launch it through the itch app or from the standalone zip download. I tried opening it a couple of times to clear out the first launch issue, but nah — still unplayable for me on macOS unfortunately. Anything else I can test?

Nope, it just literally opens for half a second, the icon bounces a couple times in the dock, and then the icon closes. If I open it directly, the application remains in the dock but doesn't show any windows or anything (it doesn't seem to be locked up, however) and nothing happens.

Unfortunately, I did try that and it didn't fix the issue.

I tried downloading it through the itch app and launching (it just closes instantly), also I tried downloading it through itch as well as directly from the website and the same thing happens if I move the .app file somewhere else or the entire folder. I've had to resort to playing it in a virtual machine to get it to work at all.

As above, the moment I launch the game it just instantly closes without showing anything. If I launch it directly (without the itch app) it remains open but it sits in the dock and there's no game windows or anything else visible. I hadn't seen this posted already so I don't know if it's a bug on my end or what.

Very glad to hear that! :)

Hey Alterion, unfortunately I'm not a Linux user and I haven't been able to test that as much as the Windows and  macOS versions just yet. I remember this coming up during the kickstarter campaign and other users had comments about it (including running the 32 bit version with extra dependencies).

I think the demo contains a 32-bit binary for Linux in the download but let me know if I've left it out.

This comment might have some useful information, otherwise try running it through the itch.io launcher (or without it, vice versa) instead of downloading it directly. If you're still having trouble let me know and I'll poke my much more knowledgable Linux friends for help. Unfortunately given the wide variety of distros out there it's hard to know what the problem is without more information, but this (hopefully!) shouldn't be an issue by release.

Yep, you're absolutely correct — they're all the demo for the time being and as the alpha and beta tests progress they'll be updated accordingly. You don't need to download anything besides the alpha for now, and that will update when it begins. Hope that helps!