Bugs, Bugs Everywhere

Greetings! I'd wanted my next post to be "Here's 0.9.3!" but given that it's taking longer than expected, I wanted to let you guys know what I've been up to.

0.9.3

I decided not to go through with the MZ port for reasons discussed previously, but I still wanted to have a new, better base for the project, and that's what 0.9.3 is supposed to be. It's supposed to accomplish a few things:

• Upgrade the game engine to improve performance
• Fix all known bugs
• Do a little more editing of 0.9 dialogue

I'm pretty pleased with the engine upgrade; it really does seem to substantially increase performance. The improvements should be particularly noticeable on lower-end machines. I'd still say MZ games run a *tiny* bit better, but the differences really are tiny at this point.

Bugs

When I received a bug report, if the bug was game-breaking I'd fix it right away. I'd do the same if it was easy to fix.  But if a bug was neither of those things, I usually just added it to the backlog. The backlog started off small, but by now it had grown quite large. Seeing that huge list of stuff was kinda demoralizing, so I decided to do something about it!

Thankfully, I'm now almost done with this part. And it turns out there were a few game-breaking bugs hiding in there! Many of the bugs are quite old. With the benefit of current experience, going back and looking at these old encounters highlighted some flaws that I didn't really notice before, so I'm making some minor tweaks to not only fix bugs, but (hopefully!) make the game better. 

We're not talking about anything major; to give an example, I went back to fix that bug in the Flame Spirit fight that caused the flames to move around him after you'd broken his shield (it looks kinda bad.) I fixed it, but after going back and playing it, I noticed that the fairy doesn't actually tell you when the ice shard shows up, you just have to hope you notice it. Which is hard, since the whole room is red/yellow and the shard is... also yellow? Why is ice yellow? (Note: if a fairy gives you yellow ice, do not eat it.) Bad design, so I'm currently working to improve that.

There are a few other nice improvements in 0.9.3. One big one is that you'll no longer have to use that weird workaround where you have to copy/paste game files if your computer doesn't support the lighting plugin. Now, the system simply won't load it if it won't work on your system. The flu minigame should be much less wonky now, too. Also, 0.9 introduced a bug that prevented most sprites from flashing, which meant that bombs in The Dark Pits no longer flashed! That was a huge problem, and I didn't even know about it until I went back to fix some other problem. But it's fixed now!

Anyway, 0.9.3 should be the best-performing, most stable, typo-free and bug-free version of the game. I hope to have it out later this week.

Linux Problems?

The upgraded engine seems to work well for everyone with the possible exception of Linux users. I've had one report of a serious issue with the Linux version, but I can't replicate it, mostly because I can't figure out how to run it on Linux (how do you guys manage to do it?) Specifically, it seems to throw an undefined error when you open the menu. Maybe this only happens for a new game? If you're a Linux user, please give the test version a spin and tell me if you run into problems, too!

0.10 Work

I've also been working on 0.10. Planning work for the first quest is now done, and I'm currently at work on mapping and writing. I expect I'll switch fully over to that once 0.9.3 is done. I've also been continuing work on getting the models set up in Blender; importing them is pretty easy now that I understand it, but getting the shaders set up is another story. It's shaping up to be another battle with my old nemesis, hair shaders. This is what I'm dealing with now:

Still, progress continues, and I'll post some renders once I get everything finalized. I hope to be done with it soon, since there are some specific technical reasons I'd really like to use Blender for the next H-scene.

Anyway, that's where things are at. 0.9.3 should be done soon, and I think it'll be a wonderful base for the project to build upon. I think you'll enjoy it - thank you for your support!