It's still Thursday somewhere

Greetings, friends! We're eni and Stoker (and Maxi, who is very late to posting this) 

here with a DOUBLE THK Thursday for you (((because Maxi has been EXTREMELY HYPER FOCUSING ON WORKING ON THE HUGE 1.6 UPDATE THAT DROPS THIS SUNDAY AAAAA)))

Today we've got a behind the scenes for the behind the scenes!

THK is made in Ren'py, an engine designed to be used to create visual novels. The engine takes care of rendering, text progression, save slots, and a number of other things that make it an excellent choice for interactive stories.

However, it is a reality of game development that, when an engine updates, it's often not a terribly good idea to update the game to run on the latest build of the engine, since changes in the engine could make the game stop running, or bring bugs forth that did not exist previously.

On the other hand, updating means access to new features, faster processes, and being able to keep running the game on current systems. It becomes a choice between risky, cutting-edge technology vs using safe, if stagnated tools.

THK has finally taken the leap to the newest current public version of Ren'py! Just in time before Ren'py 8 comes out. This will makes future updates to Ren'py less painful to embrace, since incremental change is easier to deal with than huge changes.

Sometimes, unexpected changes still happen, however... And not precisely where you think things would break.

You may remember the scene where Ilegrab arrives with the Merchant?

Well, originally, the Merchant was only drawn from the waist-up (approximately), since anything below that point was never seen in his case, taking "everything half off" to new extremes. 

However! The faster loading times thanks to the engine update lent to a higher frame rate in a few of the animations... which revealed a most unfortunate lack of lower art!

Thus, Maxi decided to take the chance to redraw him, giving him a beard restyling, the smallest hint of horns, ears (forgotten for five years) and, most importantly... a bottom half!

Thusly, art loads faster and now the Merchant is twice the man he used to be.

((Picture eni doing fingerguns here.))

As you can see, updating the engine brought along some new opportunities for change and improvement, and with time we will get to see even more of them!

That's all for today, however, can't be giving everything away in a single post!

Hope you have a wonderful week, deer friends! (someone stop eni from stealing puns!)

Best wishes and stay safe out there!