Hey there everybody! Jacob here with some updates about the game that ya'll may find interesting. Some pretty cool stuff has been happening since my last post on here, so I thought it might be fun to give everybody the details.
The German translation for the game has officially begun! And not only that, but we've got the entire first chapter translated! Thanks to the hard work of Pan over in the discord, I've been given a lot to work with. Which is great, because between waiting for the rest of the art to finish and completing the script as a whole, I've been itching to get back to some programming. VNMaker has its problems, sure, but actually plugging the translations into the script has been an absolute breeze. It's a little time consuming, because text has to be shifted and certain parts of the UI have to be reprogrammed to accommodate for longer German sentences, but it's not difficult (for context, plugging in the script and adding the lines of code that pace the dialogue properly took me about 5 days with Blue Skies Ahead-- the game's first chapter). I was definitely worried that the translation process would manifest some new bugs for the game...somehow...but thankfully this seems like it was just me being paranoid. So yes, German Siren's Call is happening and it's fitting into the game's code great so far! Expect more to come.
New art is in the works! In addition to the new art of Andi up above, Ray is also in the process of making another new CG for the start of the game-- this time for when Oliver meets with Judith alone for the first time! She's a little surprised to seem him this early, it seems. Everything he's made for the game has been freaking awesome, but I'm especially looking forward to this CG because it's gonna be the first big hint that Judith...might not be everything she seems.
I think it'll be a really fun moment for people playing the game for the first time. Also, maid outfits may or may not be in the works. Maybe. Almost definitely (blame the discord for this one). Major bugs for the game have been fixed! The game takes a bit longer to load at the start now, but everything else runs smooth as butter. It's still way higher in terms of RAM usage than the average VN, but I've gotten no frame rate complaints from my play testers so far, so that's a HUGE step forward. It still doesn't do great on anything with less than 4gb of ram when multiple applications are open, but most people probably aren't rocking hardware like that these days so I don't think it's worth it to switch to renpy at this point (especially if the translation programming process is gonna take as long as I think it will). Essentially, there were a few common events (little nuggets of code that run in the background) that weren't terminating when they were supposed to. Those common events now either A) don't exist anymore due to no longer being needed or B) have been baked into the main script itself so that they terminate upon the player completing the scene. A simple fix, sure, but an effective one. Sadly, the bulk of the ram usage seems to be directly tied to how many different music tracks are set to play in a scene...which smells like VNMaker not optimizing its audio code properly. So short of reaching out to the devs for a fix, I don't think there's much I can do to deal with that, but a few optimizations I've made and the common event bug fix has smoothed things out considerably. So that's nice. There was also one bug that was crashing saves that were made when certain lines of text were fading out (namely when people get an "item" or unlock a gallery image). I guess the game couldn't handle reloading in the middle of the more complex animations. Now, the common event in charge of that is set to terminate upon clicking the settings buttons, and erase the text with it. I'm pretty sure most of the load game crashes are the result of saves being made in the middle of the complex animations, so I'll be on the hunt for as many of those as possible during my translation adventures. Here's hoping to no more crashed saves! I wanna go to a convention and give out macarons. Imma be honest, I'm a very very very very shy person. But you can't be shy and have a successful visual novel so...yeah...I'm gonna have to do something if I want this game to reach 500 reviews (more on why that's important in a future update I guess). I've been looking into anime conventions in central Florida that my wife and I can potentially booth at. I know this really doesn't seem like "dev log" stuff, but I feel like if I JUST focus on the game itself at this point, and not marketing, I'm kinda shooting myself in the foot, along with anybody else that has faith in this project/wants it to succeed. So I'm gonna try and get out of my shell a bit! It'll probs be closer to the game's release, but I think it could be a fun way to get the word out. This is something I have essentially no experience with (I've gone to anime cons in the past before, but never as a dev), but I'll keep everybody updated either here and/or on my twitter if things become official. Anywho, that's about all I got for now! I'll give you guys more news as things progress, so until then, stay cool. Yours and stuck in Florida forever, Jacob