anyone got the news from patreon? the last one?
I guess u wanna see the photo, right?
Hey everyone,
This is your regular portion of news about Innocent Witches. Since we’re getting closer to the release of 0.8B, we’re currently hard at work and can’t spend too much time on the news. Nonetheless, we have several things that we wanted to share with you today.
Let’s start with the mandatory preview of the upcoming content (available in the following post). This time it’s the Live2D idle animation for Daphne! As you probably remember, we recently had a voting process regarding the distribution of the animator’s resources. The results showed us that the players mostly voted for scenes and idle animations. Therefore our animator is now working on animating the idle pose for Daphne. This will include all her clothes, emotions and, what is most important, hand and body motions
Yummy!
Next, the development status. We’re still aiming at the 31st of October, which is fairly close. However, there’s always a chance that we will have to delay it for a couple of days, so please be prepared for that
The good news is that the texts are already finished and being translated/edited. Next, the art tasks are due to be finished on ~23rd of October, which is also nice. We shall therefore have a couple of days to put everything together and test it.
Now, here’s a short recap of what has been done during the past 10 days.
We were conducting an extensive testing and prototyping procedure to pinpoint the causes of crashes on Android devices, especially Samsung phones running Android 11. We are closely cooperating with Renpytom, the creator of Ren’py (game’s engine) and we think that at least one of the major causes for this bug is known now. Without too many details, it’s the subsystem that periodically flushes RAM in order to free up the device’s available memory for new objects that go there as you play. For some reason, this procedure is not executed often enough, which results in good ol’ memory leak. Hopefully, we will be able to rectify this issue one way or another, which should finally make the game playable on most of the Android devices.
Additionally, we were optimizing and tinkering with the Live2D engine to support the features we need now that we have more Live2D stuff coming. This should result in the whole scene playing as one long animation, without too noticeable tearing or stops/pauses in characters’ motion. Another thing is that those movements that use the same texture will blend seamlessly. For example, if the same movement has three different speed modes, when changing from one mode to another the animation will not be interrupted in any way, the speed will just be changed naturally.
Finally, we recently started testing the framework that allows people to contribute translations. We’re about halfway done with it, the only major thing that is left now is to make a couple of scripts that automatically export and import the translations in the required format. After that is done, we will publicly launch the resource and everyone will be able to relatively easily tinker with translations and make the game more accessible for players all around the globe. Yay!
Let’s look at the results of the previous voting, the topic of which was the naming scheme for the releases past version 0.9:
[...]
Most of the players voted for continuing the naming scheme we have now and just go past 0.9 to 0.10, 0.11, etc. This goes along with the team’s thoughts about this question, since this way we won’t get lots of angry messages about the game not being finished when 1.0 drops
Anyhow, we will follow this scheme for the future releases and continue until the true 1.0 version is finally ready
Now, onto today’s vote. As you know, we have several fullscreen scenes already, and many more are on their way. When it comes to this type of content, we usually choose from two major concepts - interactivity or linearity. Both of them have their pros and cons. For example, a linear scene allows for relaxed flow without too many interruptions. On the other hand, interactive scenes provide the player with the choice of how the game characters should interact with each other. Lately we leaned heavily on the more linear scenes so that our players could enjoy them without having to click/tap too often. However, we would like to know which type of scenes you as the player prefer more? Are you happy with the linear scenes like Daphne’s or Susan’s, or would you rather interact with them more like in Minerva’s, Ginny’s or Luna’s scenes? Let us know by voting or leaving a comment
This is all for now, folks! Thank you for the support and we’ll see each other in the next batch of (release) news.
Yours,
Team Sad Crab.