Version 0.23 Complete - The Overhaul Update Part-3

Download Version 0.23 Here

Version 0.23 is now out and ready for play testing. In this update we continued with our ongoing overhaul to the main plot, romance pathways, and h-scenes, adding 20-25 minutes of new story to act 1 as well as some new h-scene animations.

Once we're finished with act 1, we'll move onto a major story addition to act 2 of the story, including a new animated virginity scene for Eryn similar to the one we have on Lena's path but a lot larger. In order to get to it faster, we decided to add in some black and white placeholder images to sections of the story that need a lot of art. Originally we didn't want to add any placeholder assets to the game, but it actually turned out to be really useful part of our workflow since it lets us see and fix small issues before we spend a ton of time drawing stuff. For example a while back we accidentally drew one of Lena's h-scene images in a way that the textbox covered up the good part. There's more but seeing it all in game helps us with composition among other things.

This update added a ton of these kinds of placeholders to help us flesh out the story all at once, but we also finished a couple of new h-scene animations. One is more environmental that Harth and Eryn stumble on during the festival, but the other replaces the really old and janky animation on Raisa's festival path. We tried to do something new and cool with it, but the results were a mixed bag. While it looks fantastic, getting it to work the way we had envisioned turned out to be tricky. It was also really time consuming with our art style in Refuge of Embers, so we're planning to reserve it for major scenes or the most popular characters.

In a nutshell the idea is that we have 6 different looping video animations. Each of these loops can only every start and end with what we're calling 'home frames'. In the new Raisa scene, we have 2 home frames, let's call them home frame A and home frame B. Of those 6 animation loops, 3 start with home frame A and the other 3 start with home frame B. We also added in a final 7th animation that starts with home frame A and ends with home frame B, and we're calling that a 'bridge' since it bridges all of the loops together. I promise it's simpler than it sounds when I put it into writing, but I can't make a public post with a video example because it's NSFW. If this is confusing just check out the new Raisa scene and it'll definitely click for you.

What all of this really means is that all of these 7 different video files are modular, and you can loop or connect them however you want into an infinite unbroken video with no visible cuts as long as you give it some rules to follow. In theory you could make some pretty cool stuff with that. We could also make it larger with more bridges, loops, or home frames. The sky is the limit really, or so we thought. I say that because we hit a wall trying to get all of this to work in the game engine. There are some really fundamental issues with how it handles video playback, so after a while everything gets really choppy and out of sync. We had to give up on how we originally wanted to do it, and instead we made a really natural looking loop as a single video file and just looped that. It repeats so it's less fluid, but it still looks great. The biggest issue was making 7 different animations, it just takes forever. In our next game we're going to go with a more cel-shaded look on the characters and that alone will make it way more viable. In the meantime though expect to see some Eryn scenes using this kind of thing because of how good it looks, but only sparingly.

So what's next on the plate for us? Version 0.24 will be another 45 day release with more greyscale placeholders. Right now Escape Artist is working on a new very important location as well as a new character who will be central to the story. I think it's unlikely that I'll be able to write ahead far enough for them to make an appearance in the next update, but I'll definitely try. More realistically you can expect to see the rest of the writing in the prologue completed, as well as a revamp on the festival h-scenes. Even though we're focusing on getting the story built out we still want to add new animated h-scenes in every update. This time around it will likely be the second half of Raisa's festival h-scene as well as the second half of Lucine's. Expect the next update on or around Feb 17th. It's really nice seeing everything finally start to come together, and we truly appreciate your support. To be real last year was really rough for us but we're both proud of what we've been able to make so far. As always send us a DM or drop a bug report on Discord if you find any typos or other issues.