RenPy, Steam and other musings.

Hi everyone, Paz here.

TL;DR: We probably have to migrate to a new RenPy version, poll link at the end.

As you may (or may not) know, we have been slowly gearing up for an eventual Steam release of Desert Stalker. While the actual release is probably a good few months away, there are a lot of things to be done beforehand and a fair bit of planning ahead.

This involves things not directly related to the game itself, things like setting up business accounts, store page, making promotional material, getting reviewed, etc. etc.

It's a slow process but we're chugging along. One thing that an eventual Steam release provides an opportunity for, is reworking the codebase, something that we discussed for a few reasons:

• There are a bunch of underlying systems that were slowly developed throughout the last couple of years that could definitely do with a touch-up now that we have a clearer idea of how those systems should work and how they interact with each other. For instance, the quest log system was not built to have multiple concurrent or optional steps and whenever we wanted to add something like this, it had to be done in a "hacky" way to maintain save compatibily.

• In order to support Steam integration, potential achievements or other things ranging from mandatory to nice-to-have, we need to revisit various parts of the code, so it provides a nice opportunity for cleanup and housekeeping.

• The last and probably most important reason is RenPy itself. Desert Stalker is built with RenPy 7.5.3 which will become end-of-life as of this month (May 2024). That means no new features or bugfixes, which might not be an issue right now but could become one in the future, and we would prefer to be a bit future-proof. Moving to RenPy 8 is something that will eventually need to happen so this opportunity is as good as any.
  

Now, there is a slight issue with this last point. RenPy 8.x only supports 64-bit releases, and future versions of RenPy intend to only support Windows 10 and later, dropping support for Windows 7.

My suspicion is that there is quite a good number of players that would be affected, but I want to make sure.

So, in order to have a bit more informed view on the matter and see what the best course of action is, there's a link to a poll below about which OS you're playing Desert Stalker on. It also includes MacOS options due to versions after Catalina requiring apps to be notarized, but that is a lesser point.

Anyway, here's the link and apologies for the wall of text: https://forms.gle/SC5LcGRuPv76Yeok7

And of course, if you have any questions regarding the above, let us know.

See you tomorrow for the usual devlog!