itch.io

No problem. Sorry for the trouble. Itch seems to be really picky about how it's downloaded this time around. I'm not sure why. 😭😭

I believe someone else had a similar issue where their machine was telling them it couldn't find the file.

Their advice is to uninstall and remove the demo if that is installed as well as try to download directly from the website and not the itch app.

Beyond that, I am not sure what advice to give. Unfortunately download issues are a little outside my wheelhouse if the game build itself is working because I can't say for sure what is happening between your computer, Itch, and the game build itself.

It's all good! I've mentioned it before but honestly, it's scattered across various devlogs so it's always fine to ask again. LoL!

(´▽`ʃ♡ƪ)

Hello! So for the record, I don't typically refer to the game as 'free' since it is being monetised through Patreon where patrons get additional content (art, lore, etc), early access, a game guide, etc.  

I don't intend to change this pay structure and the base game will remain available without payment here on Itch, so there will not be a hard paywall on the game.

Thank you so much. (☆▽☆)

Thanks! Originally I didn't think the new UI would make that much of a difference but it really changed the vibe, I think.

I'm glad you like Yren. He turned out so fun to write. He's such a sweetheart.

Thank you! (´▽`ʃ♡ƪ)

Yay!! I'm glad to hear you enjoyed it. ╰(*°▽°*)╯

Thank you. 🥺

Yeees! The save system was a stroke of genius. Ha ha. I love it for testing too. I know that's such a dev thing to say but it's so useful. Rofl.

And yes, Kav shows up in Chapter 3! Buuuut. I did want people to get to meet him so he does have a bonus scene that unlocks at the same time Noel's unlocks. So you can get a brief glimpse of the space hobo. But he won't appear in the story until the next Episode.

Yeah, the new BGs definitely gave the game a nice look and feel. The ship looks quite slick now.

Yay! I'm so happy to hear you enjoyed it. The first episode is really just setting up the scenario and introducing the characters. But subsequent episodes will start introducing more story and plot stuff so I'm looking forward to getting the next one out to people. 🥰🥰

I hope you enjoy it. 🥺🥺

╰(*°▽°*)╯ Huzzah!

Thank youuuuuu. (～￣▽￣)～
*is supposed to be going to bed*
*is not going to bed*

Time zones are sneaky. 😭😭 Curse our round planet!
(╬▔皿▔)╯

Esper is really just kind of a preferred word. Psychic has too many weird associations so I only use it in a more tongue-in-cheek kind of way. And any time I try to come up with a unique word for Espers, it typically just feels too quirky and unrealistic for the setting when a word like "Esper" is convenient and right there.  

That's why I tend to default to it in any settings with people who have some kind of psychokinetic ability. It's just simple, to the point, and sounds good.

All my settings are somewhat connected by thin lore similarities but the time lines for WSC and GS don't align well enough for these to really be in the same universe. I think I was originally considering if they would be but there were just inconsistencies that wouldn't really work out.

Always lurking and waiting for my chance to burst into your feed like the kool-aid man. ╰(*°▽°*)╯

Thank you! I am hoping maybe we can add his route during the next Amare Fest. It requires several new assets so it'll come down to time constraints on when we do it. I'd love to include it since that route is the one that somewhat wraps up some of the elements of Aell's backstory. And also, Lachan is just adorable and I love him. 😌😌💖

I also sometimes have no idea how long it takes. ╰(*°▽°*)╯ 

Seriously though. I am thinking that the public version of Episode 1 will be able to release sometime in November. So we're only a couple of months away! After that, I will release an episode (2 chapters each is my plan at this point) every few months.

So it'll a while for the full game but I should be able to maintain a steady release schedule since the writing is done and all the remains is the coding and art!

Thank you! I am so looking forward to finally releasing the public version. It's been such a long process. Way longer than expected. But we're nearly there!
( •̀ ω •́ )✧

It is a lot. Somehow it felt like less. Ha ha. The months are going by so fast.
(┬┬﹏┬┬)

╰(*°▽°*)╯ *tries to catch the bouquets*

Thank youuuu. (～￣▽￣)～

(´▽`ʃ♡ƪ) Masterpiece feels too generous but thank you for the encouragement! =D

Couldn't have done it without youuuu. (☆▽☆)

╰(*°▽°*)╯ The dev cave is definitely cosy!

Hi Lance.

So to explain the art, Wil's sprite is coloured in greyscale. The dynamic colouriser Feniks made uses RGB channels to help increase the flexibility of the tool. This means I can use a red channel, for example, to add a rosiness across certain areas of the sprite to increase the depth of the shading.

Fen and I played a lot with my sprites and art when they were developing that tool to see how close to my original colouring style. And we were both sometimes astonished by how close it can get. It is a really phenomenal tool.

I can set some defined skin tones that have a range of swatches correlating to the different levels of shading on the greyscale sprite. These are, in my case, based on the fully rendered skin tones that I did previously.

I defined 5 different skin tones, each with this full range of shading and then the slider extrapolates the in between skin tones.

In my case there was a lot of tweaking of the art to figure out how to best set up the files for the colouriser.

It gets a little more complex when you have something like a smiling mouth where the lips need to get recoloured but the teeth do not. So you end up with a sprite file that looks like this:

The blue channel is adding depth to the lip shading and the green channel is keeping the teeth white.

Once I figured out how the colouriser was going to affect my art, then from an art standpoint it wasn't actually hard because you're just colouring in grey scale. Then adding these red, green, and blue elements for coding purposes. And honestly, for me, shading in greyscale is pretty simple.

The difficulty in the colour slider was really testing swatches (which wasn't difficult per se, but was a little time consuming until I got the hang of it - like any new tool) and the coding itself as far applying the colourised art to a sprite, then CGs, then a gallery.

And I think the coding was harder for me because frankly, I'm a very low level coder. Windchimes helped me with it and was subsequently traumatised by those bright green teeth. 🤣🤣

An inability to just...stop typing? 🤣🤣

No, in all seriousness. It's really about love interest amount and branching usually. All games have a inherent structure to them. A shape you can visualise through something like flowcharts if you want to. Writing the game is like revealing that shape, little by little. As a writer, I'm currently half-planner and half-pantser which means I like to let a large portion of the story develop organically as I write. This means I know the story going in but the 'shape' of the game is a mystery.

With GS, though I did go over my target word count by a lot, it was largely due to the three additional LIs. I think I originally said 600k for that game but I knew it would probably be closer to Changeling's length (686k). I didn't want to promise 700k if I couldn't get there so I went with 600k instead. But I did know that game would be more like 675k+. And actually the original six LIs were right at 700k. So that was within the ballpark. The game went over 1,000,000 purely due to the additional LIs. I had difficulty pinning down an *exact* amount but with games this size, honestly, within 50k is definitely a pretty good estimate. I thought it would end up at around 990,000 words and it ended up at 1,037,000 words so I consider my estimate for that game pretty accurate.

With Changeling, it was my first game and I really did not have any idea how to predict anything. I knew what I wanted in terms of hours but had no idea how to translate that to a word count. And at the time, in the VN dev community you couldn't get a straight answer on that topic. Now the community is bigger and it's a little easier to suss out how to convert between play time and word count. So with Changeling I started out thinking I'd hit about 300k but realised that was too short for the amount of love interests and size of story I was aiming for. So I adjusted the word count up to 500k. I was thinking about 75k per route + 50k for a common route. But my issue there was not accounting for any choice branches or endings. 

The routes in Changeling *are* about 75,000 words...if you don't count the choices and endings. So I was kind of right...but also not really. Ha ha.

With WSC the issue is completely different. I've never written a game structured this way before and I cannot express to people how *different* it is from the usual structure I use and how hard that made it to predict anything about this game. It was a completely unique experience for me. Where the word count tends to balloon unexpectedly is really the branching and variations...and unexpected love interests popping up.  I really did not have a feel for the "shape" of this type of game. I added a love interest. I couldn't predict the branching at all. All of those things combined made it really hard to estimate where this one would end up.

I wanted it to be 300k but realised fast that with that structure, it was going to feel rushed. So I bumped the word count up to 450-500k as the target, thinking that would give me more space to expand the story and slow things down a little. And then I added Kav. So...ㄟ(≧◇≦)ㄏ

This game, more than any other so far, I wasn't able to grasp the "shape" of what I was constructing as I wrote it and that was probably the biggest reason I could never estimate where it was going to end up.

My playtest saves always descend into madness. I am already seeing the benefit of this system now that I can keep each character's test on its own page. (☆▽☆)

Yeah, when you are in the middle of the writing process, it feels like treading water. I call it "writing purgatory" because it absolutely feels like being in limbo. But that is the drawback of working on large games. Well, one of the drawbacks.

I'm also really excited about the save screen. I think it's probably the feature people are most excited about.  I think some players are close to asking to be able to romance the save screen. 🤣🤣

So currently I am the only tester. I always do a full play test of my own before anyone else sees it. As far as others go - I have a group of close friends and people I've known for a while that sometimes get alpha access for more of a "beta reading" phase. 

And beyond that, in the past, most of the beta testers were from Patreon and Kickstarter. This time around I'm not doing a Kickstarter so it'll be Patreon where most of them come from most likely. I may drag in a few other friends and acquaintances from Discord too.

Thank you, Grey! (〃￣︶￣)人(￣︶￣〃)

Thank you! (´▽`ʃ♡ƪ)

Thank you!

Honestly I was having this conversation with some fellow devs recently - I think we just get really comfortable with doing things a specific way and don't tend to deviate from that much.

As soon as the design came to me - and especially after I had it coded - it was just such an obvious solution. I'm also really surprised I've not seen it before.  (☆▽☆)

Yay! Honestly the same thing happens with my save slots when I'm play testing. I often try to keep different playthrough separate so I can refer back to them but it always ends up a mess. ┗( T﹏T )┛

This system was born half out of wanting to re-use the design I did for the gallery and half out of a conversation with two fellow devs when we were discussing non-standard Ren'py UIs.

And it just hit me how *useful* this would be to have different pages for the characters. Windchimes was the one who mentioned being able to add additional save slots though. That is honestly such a cool feature. ╰(*°▽°*)╯

I'm sorry you're having a hard time with it. 

Unfortunately I'm not sure what else to suggest either. I test-downloaded the file and it works fine, just to be sure. At this point, I have to assume it's an issue outside my ability to fix whether it is with Itch or your internet provider.

I'm really sorry I'm unable to identify or repair the download issue.

As far as I'm aware there is no issue with the game file as there have been thousands of downloads without issue over the last year. A download error is much more likely to be something outside my control such as a problem with internet connectivity, even itch.io.

The only advice I can give is to enable alternate download mode, which you can do if click the small link next to the download button. You will get a small pop up that allows you to do this.

Outside of trying this, I'm afraid I don't have any other solutions since a download error is likely being caused by something outside my control. Hope this method helps.

Thank you so much. I hope it does end up being worth the wait. Though writing this game has been more of a struggle than the others, I really do love this setting and this dorky crew of characters. 

(´▽`ʃ♡ƪ)

Thanks for stopping by! (～￣▽￣)～