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Quick Progress Update!
🕑 Added 2022-09-16 15:50:02 +0000 UTCHey, y'all. Sorry things have been pretty quiet this month so far. I've been posting small check-ins over in our Discord in the Patreon section as I don't like making posts here unless there's something more substantial than a small nightly update, but it all culminates into something bigger and worth talking about, so here's a small roll up of the development progress this month.
I've resumed work on 19x6 today and made some small progress, I'm hoping to make a lot more in the coming days. Today I ended up having to correct an issue over in Diego's route, and while I was there, the spell-checking tool in my editor pointed out a few spelling/grammar errors in the script. I fixed several of these within a single chapter, and wondered if the surrounding chapters were as bad. They were. As were the surrounding days. Even the earlier stuff in Tai's route had it's fair share!
Long story short? Over 1000 spelling/grammar fixes throughout the game. This isn't everything, these days I check my material in several more sophisticated editing tools and even have a human editor to review, but this hasn't always been the case. For this editing sweep I simply addressed what the simple in-editor tool was able to catch. The good news is not one single error came up on Day 19 of Tai's Route. This is compared to dozens on earlier days, though things in general have been massively improved since around Day 16 onwards.
So that's a nice improvement. But we've been working on more than just that!
One of the very cool improvements in the next update has to do with how Sileo feels to play. There are three individual changes that come together to make the game feel massively more responsive and satisfying to play. One is that transitions no longer force the game to wait - dialogue and such will now begin rolling out instantly even during transitions with no awkward pauses. The second change is that character portraits now also use dissolve transitions, so they change as smoothly as the sprites do. Finally, there is now a sound when you advance the dialogue. Yes, you can turn this sound off in the preferences menu if you don't want it, so don't worry! I just wanted to add a satisfying little 'click' to compliment the other changes and make the experience feel just that little bit more awesome. And the results are fantastic! They're small things, but the implementation wasn't simple. The first thing broke a lot of transitions throughout the game, so we're currently combing through finding any that need fixing and fixing them. The second thing required me to once again completely revise how the character portraits work, but this time, I have a much better and more uniform solution that also allows these transitions to work properly, so I consider that time well spent! The click? Actually, the click was pretty easy. That didn't take much time at all. Love those easy feature implementations!
There's a ton of other small improvements in the next update, such as some minor fixes to sprites, tons of missing silhouettes being implemented in the story, several sprite layers no longer appear when they shouldn't at specific points in the story, and so on.
Right now, my main focus is to get 19x6 done and then release that as soon as possible. We are planning to have this out this month, sooner rather than later all going well. We're then aiming to have the Day 1 remake drop on the 2nd of next month. Pretty much what we'd hoped to do last month, but this month instead and bundled with a ton of really sweet small touches and improvements to the experience.
Oh, and if anyone was wondering, yes, CurryCatz and me get along great in person! He's been here for a week so far and it's been great! He'll be around for another few weeks at least, so hopefully we can produce some extra juicy stuff during that time and take advantage of the extra synergy of working together in person.
Anyway, I'll be seeing you guys fairly soon with a build in hand! It'll be a few days at least, there's still content that'll need to be reviewed and we'll need to be extra careful with our testing due to all the technical changes, but all going well, it'll be ready before too long!
