The "and it's a launch" update...

Hello!

Just a quick(ish) post this week for, incredible as it may seem, I have some downloads for you...

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm going to be re-releasing a new chapter every couple of weeks until we get to Chapter Five. This is largely as Five still has some play testing to be done and rather than me just sitting on everything until it was ready to go, I thought I'd give you the choice of having regular updates. 

It is of course your choice. You can feel free to ignore the updates and just wait until Five drops and download it all in a single go. Totally up to you.

There are, as promised earlier, two versions of each chapter. The standard version and a compressed one. The compressed versions are, roughly, a third of the size of the standard one and I've tried to hit the sweet spot of "smallest size yet still acceptable graphics quality". Certainly any smaller than this and the graphics become, to my eyes at least, unacceptable.  The compressed version is, however, of a lower graphics quality. Still images are slightly more washed out and animations, although presentable, are less sharp and smooth in comparison to the standard version. Note that the file sizes for both are disproportionately large for this chapter due to the inclusion of all the interface graphics. But these are needed from the start and thus this is unavoidable I'm afraid.

Chapter One Downloads

PC Standard Version (Higher Quality)

PC Compressed Version (Lower Size)

MAC Standard Version (Higher Quality)

MAC Compressed Version (Lower Size)

Changes (and why)

The old interface was awful. It looked terrible and wasn't very useful or clear. So it's been improved to rectify those issues. 

Path guidance was non existent. This has been a major buff. I haven't gone so far as to provide a walkthrough as I dislike the concept of them to be honest. That becomes less you playing the game and more you following a series of steps typed out for you. But H5 has so many paths that it would be easy to not even realise the content existed. So now there is both a "major plot point" path identifying together with individual ones for each character. Both done on a chapter by chapter basis. Why both types? Well you as the player may just want to have an idea over character content without accidently revealing any story points. It's just a way to give you a bit of flexibility in how you play.

Immersion destruction. Prior versions of H5 had an introduction from Becca. she'd explain the chapter, any new features and then say how'd you done at the end of the game. It was cute and fun and she was quite popular in some places but...she did kill any immersion in the game. So she's gone, replaced by a new "in-universe" start and tutorial and with an "in-universe" results scene.

Animation buffs. The old ones weren't too awful but I had a lot of power sitting around whilst I re-coded the game and added extra and new content. Polishing the animations seemed a bit of "no-brainer" as they could run whilst I was busy.

I'm still behind on admin issues, such as clearing mail and refreshing/re-designing the patreon page but I've taken a couple of days off at the start of next week to do this (I needed to make some changes to the combat modules in Three and Four and so the time originally set aside for admin went on development work. Sorry...)

And that's it for now. We're getting there and for those who do decide to have a download of the above, I think you'll notice quite a difference in terms of quality overall.

Until later, stay lucky guys.

Notty