Version 0.24 Complete - Raisa's Path & More

Download Version 0.24 Here

Version 0.24 is finally wrapped up and all set for play testing. This time around the word count is up to about 66k, meaning about 20 mins of gameplay has been added to the early game. We've also finished the last of the new animations for the festival h-scenes on Raisa and Lucine's paths. Expect overall story improvements and expansions plus the new choice system expanding across more of the prologue, although there's still more to be done. The title screen has also been completed, and we've added some more of the menu decorations.

We've also added in the placeholder art for the final creek scene, but the writing in that scene still needs to fleshed out. We plan to finish that in our next update, then slowly chip away at the placeholder sketches and remaining menu art in future releases so that we can move forward into the later story.

The next update will be version 0.25 which we intend to be another milestone for the game. The last of the fixed prologue writing and story jank removal will be completed, although EscapeArtist will be spending a good chunk of her time working on assets needed in the second act. That includes a sprite for a new main story character that a lot of the events will revolve around, plus some new locations. The writing likely won't catch up to that point until version 0.26 or possibly 0.27 at the latest.

This last update turned into a game of whack a mole with issues so it took a lot longer than originally planned. There were some bugs and unimplemented features that needed to be addressed sooner than expected to solve other issues. As a result a major bug that some people reported in the story route that was hard to repeat and diagnose has been solved. There were also sections that were effectively blocked off that are now working. Because of that, the next update should be out sooner since that's all out of the way.

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.

Version 0.22 Complete - The Overhaul Update Part-2

Version 0.22 is now out and ready for play testing. In this update we focused on overhauling our menu systems, GUI, and redesigning everything in a way that fixes support for controllers and handhelds like the Steam Deck. The Android experience has also been improved with a more polished interface with special made assets instead of just rescaled assets from the PC version. In the story we focused on expanding and refining Eryn's romance path, although the changes are part of a broader overhaul that isn't yet complete. The total play time has increased by about 10 minutes, but this includes major rewrites to existing scenes so a significant amount was removed. Like the last update, this version will require old persistent data to be deleted, so if you have weird bugs on Windows check in your appdata folder (C:\Users[your username]\AppData\Roaming\RenPy\RefugeOfEmbers) for old persistent data files that could be causing issues.

Based on user feedback we slimmed down the textbox and choice buttons in the redesign to increase the amount of screen real estate for artwork. The mobile version has the biggest difference by far since it was huge in our old GUI. In the past we also had an issue with dialogue and choice text sometimes extending outside of the text boxes on mobile. This was because the mobile font and text boxes weren't both the exact same percentage larger than the PC version. Now they're both the same, so if it looks good on PC it'll look larger but otherwise identical on mobile.

We also found a better approach for the quickmenu, which are the small buttons at the bottom of the screen. We ran a poll to see what buttons were used originally intending to slim down the list to only the most popular buttons, but we realized that was unecessary and ultimately decided to turn the number of buttons into a menu option. Under video settings you can now toggle between the standard 5 button panel, a full 8 button panel, or just disable it entirely. There's a weird screen jitter when you change the setting for now, but we have a plan to fix this in a later update. We've also added a setting called film grain which adds a really subtle film grain effect. We were trying to go with an old anime kind of a look to really work well with the animations and we both think it really adds a lot of visual flair, but it's an expensive effect for performance so if you're on older or lower end hardware and suddenly the game is really choppy go ahead and turn that off.

The screens and logic are all working, but the sprite viewer has been temporarily removed and will be returning in the next update. We're also missing the new journal and achievements screens this time around but they'll both be making an appearance soon, likely in version 0.24 or 0.25.

Eryn's path is expanded in the prologue, but still very much incomplete. In the next update we'll be adding to her festival scene as well as a new animated h-scene with her on her romance path. A lot of the writing for her reworked festival scene is in and it's in the second to last draft, but there's a lot of artwork missing so we just reused what was in the game before as placeholders. We did manage to add in one of the new scenes minus the animation just before release, but it's incomplete and the final rendering for it will be in the next update.

Version 0.23 will be out much faster than this one was and will have a lot more story content, but 0.22 has a lot of necessary changes. Under the hood we've reworked a lot of the code for the screens and gui to get rid of as much tech debt as possible. There are still some remnants of the old screens and systems in there that need to be sorted out, but with the extra time we've spent this should be a mostly stable and bug free update. The story is still pretty cut up and scattered though, so that'll be in flux for a bit longer. I think you'll like the direction things are heading in with Eryn's path though. Send us a DM or drop a bug report on Discord if you find any typos or other issues.