Kho

Uprezzing?

Added 2020-03-18 22:42:27 +0000 UTC

When Four-Letter Word was first starting out, 800x600 resolution visual novels were pretty standard. These days, most VNs are in widescreen formats at much higher resolutions. By comparison, FLW looks quite dated, and although I am alright with that, I understand that my audience may not be. Furthermore, the low resolution may be a hindrance to new player acquisition, as there may be some who don't give the VN a chance because of it.

However, uprezzing Four-Letter World would be an enormous undertaking. A conservative estimate would be roughly 3 months of work, during which time I would need to release builds that I would need to bill patrons for because of the amount of time and work involved in the process. This is because Four-Letter Word's assets were never meant to exist in anything but an 800x600 resolution. I didn't future-proof assets by creating them at much large sizes because it would have taken much longer to get them done (and already I was really pushing myself too hard to get so much stuff done for each monthly build.) Since we would now be working at a different aspect ratio, this means that any backgrounds and fullscreen CGs will not only need to be redrawn but extended and all custom UI elements would need to be redone entirely and their image map code readjusted. All in all, there are almost 300 art assets to go through.

I would like to hear your opinion on what should be done, because if Four-Letter Word is ever going to be uprezzed, it would have to be now before the asset bloat gets even larger. If we decide to move forward with the uprezzing, there will be no story updates for months until the process is complete, and I know I've already kept you guys starved for story updates for 4 years now, so I want to make sure this is something you're aware of and okay with if you want to go down this route. To reiterate: I will need to bill patrons several times throughout this process for builds that do nothing but update visuals and format it for a widescreen resolution.