Update 13 Devlog 2

It's been around a year since version 12 came out, so it's reasonable to wonder what I've been doing all this time. The truth is: not a lot, actually. I've been busy with other obligations, as well as finding the time and motivation to make a game that most likely won't be played by a lot of people. But I still have made some progress:

Toolchain Changes

Before a couple of days ago, I was using the official Twine app to make edits to the story. While the Twine app recently got a major overhaul that overall increased it in quality by around 300%, I just didn't want to use it any more. So, I decompiled error-unknown, and converted it into twee files! This results in a couple changes:

1. I no longer have to manually package things into base64 - Tweego does that for me! At some point in development of 13, I started using files outside index.html, and decided I would just deal with itch.io and zip files. But, thanks to Tweego, a lot of assets have been converted into SugarCube media passages and merged back into the index.html at build time.
2. I can split my source code into multiple files, something that feels great for me coming from programming. This also makes the code easier to navigate.
3. The index.html file is larger now. It went from about 25 MB on load with ~15 MB of audio being cached after the first load, to just under 30 MB in one file. I consider this acceptable for now, since this new structure allows you to download one file and run the game just like that. I hate to ship web apps over 1 MB, but hey. People love TikTok, and an hour scrolling is roughly 1 GB of data.

Act 0 Rewrite

The opening part of the game where you escape the burning Nightingale has been rewritten to be longer and more detailed.

Act 0 was fine to teach the player the basics of the game loop (you know, read, make a choice, read some more), but I felt it had not quite measured up to what it could have been. I've also adopted a new naming scheme for passages. The one you see used to be called "Your Room (?)", but I renamed it to "a0_b1_intro2" (Act 0, Branch 1).

That's it for now. Version 13 coming soon.

Maybe.