This Week in the Forest! #53

YO FOLKS~! 

Here's what we've been up to - starting with A Word from Vixel!

11/22 weekly report:

Heya floofs! Last week I finally got the Act 2 bugfix builds stable. (I'd broken the save system and chapter select while trying to fix other bugs.) I also finished an upgrade to the original save system that will allow players to chapter select without losing their gossips, gifts, dates, and movie unlocks. Keep an eye out for an update soon as we republish those builds to Itch. :}

We've been curious about eventually doing a mobile version of TFOL, so I started experimenting with touch controls in a separate Unity project! A native android app should eventually be doable, but we won't be able to publish an iOS app on Apple's store due to the game's sexual content.

So, another possibility for mobile is crafting a well-optimized WebGL version that can play in any phone's web browser. It looks like WebGL touch support works great on Itch -- we were able to move Red around using a touch joystick on an iPad -- but there's a lot of nuances getting the game to load and play consistently in all browsers. (The test project wouldn't even start on another iPad and an android phone we tested.) I'll keep pursuing this angle as it'd be fantastic to have a browser version of TFOL that worked seamlessly with keyboard, gamepads, and touch!

Along with the touch support R&D, I also took a deep dive into texture optimization in Unity. This is useful for improving performance, load time, download size and memory usage in WebGL builds, but it also has tons of application for the desktop builds. We managed to dramatically compress textures without a significant loss in quality using the techniques I learned. For example, we reduced a 1.5 MB uncompressed texture to just 61 KB! :O

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On my side I've finished up the portraits I was working on last week, and started making some design progress on some future systems we'll have in Act 5! 

It's our future Chapter Select/Dates replayer! An object tentatively called, The Omni-Shard. I'm not gonna go into this much since it has some spoilers, but basically it's our glorified way to experience game content. Unlike the Gallery which just shows the action, this would be a way to re-play certain events.

This way, you don't need to replay the game to experience, say, your own personal quest! It'll also work this way for dates - incase you want to relive any of your favorite parts of the game :>

This particular item will have a unique UI design since it's an item and concept that's "out of this world"!

Here's what were thinking the UI might look like. Noteably, the New Critters here would be for the patreon collab tier critters ;o!

Anywho this whole system won't be in any time soon - but this is the first phases of breaking down a design. Let's us start solving problem's we'll run into in the future!

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Other than that, i've been brainstorming some new ads. We gotta update our banner on E621, possibly make one for FA, and probably cobble some video together for our eventual Steam Page :O!

Then did a bit more writing stuff! Oh, and lots of play testing for our current builds.

SPEAKING OF WHICH! I'll be uploading those right now! More info in that post, so keep an eye out!