Beta 4 Dev Update! (And some ramblings)

What's up everyone?

So yeah, here we are... Beta 4.

I can't begin to express how glad I am to be announcing that Beta 4 is finished and will be available to all patrons that have beared with me for so long.

Beta 4 marks the finish of the actual rework process! Yes! Everything from now on will be new content!

When I decided to do this rework 1 year ago (1 year... time sure does fly by), I couldn't really imagine it would take me this long and, for that, I'm deeply sorry.

A lot of stuff happened during the course of this year that, in one way or another, contributed for it to take this long. Namely my grandfather passing away in december, my grandmother battling against cancer, my wife getting two surgeries done in this meantime and, last but not least, some issues that endagered not only me but all other devs that use HS on their projects.

Honestly, from the bottom of my heart, I don't know if I would have been able to keep working on The Inn if it weren't for the awesome community, either here at Patreon, F95 or our Discord server always encouraging me and giving me their best moral support. You guys and girls are awesome and hold a special place in my heart!

The Inn and everything it encompasses is only possible because of people like you!

But anyway, enough with my excuses, I'm sure you're not here for them!

Since the Beta 3 (3 months ago incidentally), I was able to finish all the content for Day 8 and reworked some aspects of the game that I wasn't very fond of. I completely reworked the Save/Load screen (and, by extension, all other menus), cleaned up a lot of the code and optimized it even more and, let me say, I'm extremely satisfied with the end results!

Now, as it's tradition, let's some comparison shots of old vs new scenes, shall we?

The first one is this:

This image is kind of hard for me to explain... While I enjoy the feeling of it, everything in it looks wrong, from the weird shadows to MC's hair being red for whatever reason. Check out how it looks now:

Better angle, better colors, better models, better everything. I like how "cinematographic" it looks!

Let's move on to the next one:

Pantsu shot, haha! Anyway, that's another case of the "strangies". The image itself isn't bad, but the angle, the lighting and some parts of the pose feel very awkward. Check out how it looks now:

That look good! While it mantains the same vibe from the old version, it improves on general lighting, pose and enviroment. Overall a big improvement if I may say so myself!

Now, let's see the last comparison shot:

If I had to describe this image in one word it would be "weird". I dunno, I really can't put my finger on what looks weird in it... Maybe it being too dark, the colors being kind of blurry, I dunno, I really don't. Anyway, check out the reworked version:

This one has a better feel to it, colors feel more... Alive? The general enviroment also looks better and the lighting portrays better the period this scene happens (night).

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AAAAAAnyway, now that the comparisons are over, let's move to the last part of this dev update. Next I'll show you guys the new Save/Load screen. If you don't really remember how it looked, here's an example:

Pretty default, right? It looks just as any other Ren'py game would look like, just a bit edited.

Check out how it looks now:

Completely different, right? I added a lot of new features to the save screen and made it more intuitive, here's an explanation of what each of the elements are (please reffer to the numbers):

1 - Save screenshot: Now it's bigger and you can see more clearly in what part of the game it was saved! Just this, bigger image, that's all.

2 - General Data: This show general (duh) info about the game. It shows the money on MC's inventory, the current in-game day and, the new cool feature, Playtime! It's just what it sounds, it will show how long you have played the game on this current save.

3 - Player Data: This will show data specific to the player character, such as Player's Name and Karma.

4 - Girls Stats: Each of these squares is one girl (currently 4 introduced, more to come later) and their respective Affection and Lust stats.

5 - Fetishes: Remember the Fetish Selection screen introduced on the last Beta? This will show all the fetishes you selected in green and the ones you didn't in red, so you can easilly tell which one you picked in case you forgot!

6 - Story Events: This will show a list of all important events you saw in game and that will have some kind of lasting effect. It'll show only the events you have seen on the current save, so don't worry, you'll not be spoiled.

7 - Save Naming Toggle: This will either activate or deactivate the new save naming feature on your game. If it's on, everytime you try to save your game you'll be prompted with a screen asking you to type a name for your save. If it's off, it'll just simply save the game without any name.

8 - Save Slots List: This is a scrollable list of all the save slots available to the current save page (15 slots per page IIRC).

9 - Save, Load and Delete Buttons: Whenever you have a save slot selected, these buttons will appear besides it so you can, well... Save, load or delete on the current slot.  On a side note: I know it's kind of annoying having to click on the save slot and then clicking on the save button, but that was the only way I could make it work for this new screen layout. 

10 - Other Menus: This list of menus used to be on the left side of the screen, I changed them to be at the bottom so I could have more free space for the other UI elements.

And that's it for the new Save/Load screen! I'm pretty happy with how it turned out and I hope you guys appreciate it too!

Anyway, I guess that's all for this dev update... Yeah, it's the shorter one so far, but I have pretty much every other feature finished by now.

I'll make a post soon after this one with download links for the Beta 4  to all patrons. The Beta will be available for PC only, Mac and android versions will be available only for the proper release, sorry about that.

See you guys around and have fun!