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Chapter 2 Progress

I've been making some good progress on chapter 2 so far. I'm almost done with all of Ch. 2-0, which is the first of 11 total chapter parts. The way I do things is I get all of the writing into Ren'Py dialogue, render the scenes, and then go back and add all of the effects and audio.

I'd say I'm sitting at about 7% completion for Ch. 2 right now, but I've been doing a lot of work on the coding end of things, which I don't factor into the completion percentage. So if this seems kind of slow, that's why. I'm nearly completely done with the code now. So it'll soon be nothing but story progress.

Speaking of code...

Coding and UI Changes

I have been doing so much work on the coding side that it's unreal to even begin listing off everything. My hopes in doing this all now, is that I won't have to do anything else with the core code throughout the rest of development. Which means faster chapter releases for all of you!

Like I said, I can't list everything I've done with code, as it's simply too much and most won't be interested anyways. That said, here are the notable features and improvements.

• Changed "Preferences" to "Options" and divided settings into categorical pages for easier navigation.
• Drastically improved the UI for better Android usability and a cleaner look on PC.
• Added a save naming feature. This can be toggled on and off right from the save menu, to use either a name you set or the default chapter part names that are present in v0.1.
• Implemented a save versioning feature to migrate and patch any bugged code between updates. (Hopefully meaning that saves will never break from an update.)
• Fully integrated lore unlocks into the in-game Developer Menu and completely rebuilt that for ease of use.
• A lot more on the backend...

Translations

Those in my discord have already seen some examples of the work I've put into getting proper translations done. A lot of my old code was missing the structure to export translation strings. That has now been fixed.

Basically, every piece of text in the game will now be translatable. Also, based on talks with a translator, getting just Ch. 1 translated to Chinese would be a minimum of $3,000, so I think proper translations will be out of the question for quite some time. Especially, when you factor in other languages that I'd like to have.

With that information, although I'd rather not, I'll be shipping a few other languages with Ch. 2 that are machine translated. It'll be rough, but with the community's help, we can improve upon it until proper translations can be done. Let me know what languages you'd like to see implemented into the game.

When loading up Ch. 2 for the first time, the game will pick up on the language that's set for your device and should switch to that language accordingly, if it's a present translation in the game. I'll also be bundling some alternative fonts that it will automatically switch to so that the translations can display correctly. This will only happen the first time you load the game and if you manually choose a different language in the options menu, it will keep that language unless you yourself change it again.

Anyways, this post has become pretty long, so I'll leave it off there. I'll also include a render from one of the scenes to show off some more about the graphical improvements. I hope you're all doing well!