Dev Blog #70 – Increasing Legitimacy

Greetings everyone!

Today’s development blog won’t be the longest one I’ve posted this year, or even this month, but there’s still some fun things I’m excited to share with you so let’s just jump right in!

Update 6.1.1 Release Date

Why don’t we just get this one right out of the way, hm? Update 6.1.1 will be releasing to backers next Thursday, June 6th, and a public build will follow on Thursday, June 13th. This update will include the completed set of outfit commentary from NPCs based on how your character is dressing, a new debug menu accessible via cheats, and new cheats!

Additionally, the character creation process has received a tune up and all the game’s events, dreams, notes, and conversations have been moved over to a new back-end system that allows for more flexibility and expandability than ever before!

Finally, this update will be introducing base level support for character-specific image packs, as well as better image pack detection via JSON utilization. At the moment, the functionality will be relegated to testing and hasn’t actually been implemented throughout the game itself, but the more code savvy among you who download the local version of the game will be able to check out the new .js files to get an idea of how things will work. Everyone else will get a minor taste of this through the new image check at the start of the game. No more stupid checkmarks!

New Hosting, New Headaches

What follows is what might be the most exciting piece of news I’ve been able to share in a long time, and comes with one great bit gotcha!

For those who don’t know, thanks to the outstanding support from all of you, last year I officially registered Westane Digital Entertainment LLC, or if you’re into the whole brevity thing, Westane Digital. Since then, very little has come from the new banner, but that’s all about to change.

I’m currently in the process of finalizing a new hosting solution for the company, as well as The Company, all tied to a single domain. What will be provided is a one-stop-shop for all Patreon posts (with Patreon tier integration), the hosted Play Online version of the game (No more NeoCities) and a dedicated bandwidth-cap-free download server for the local version of the game and image packs (no more Mega)! I’m still doing a little housecleaning and, more importantly, securing the remaining SSL certs, but you can expect to the service officially go live within the next couple of weeks.

And of course, what’s a company without a mascot?

In’t he great?

This guy’ll show up on the company’s landing page and replace former best-bear Monokuma as the face of Westane Digital.

Now about that gotcha…

So remember how I said save compatibility is going to be much better moving forward? Well that hasn’t changed, but once we switch over from one host to another you’ll quickly notice that all your saves are… Gone! Well, they’re not “gone”, gone, they’re just… somewhere else. When the cutover happens, and I’ll be given plenty of friendly reminders from now until then, you’ll need to export your save file from the current online version of the game and import into the new one.

The process itself is fairly straightforward…

First, make sure the sidebar is open, and click SAVES.

Then, simply click Save to Disk to export your save file to a local .save file, then repeat the process at the new host using Load from Disk to import the .save file. Simple!

Note that this functionality is inexplicably missing from the mobile version of the game. I’ve found that forcing your browser to view the site as Desktop Mode allows this to work, at least on Chrome.

Of course, those playing the local version of the game don’t need to worry about this at all!

Looking Ahead

Next week will see the release of Update 6.1.1, as well as moving into development for Update 6.1.2. As stated in last week’s very long development blog, Update 6.1.2 will have a somewhat longer development cycle due to what can only be described as an unholy amount of writing that will be going into it. After the public release of Update 6.1.1, I’ll be going into more details on what exactly the update will be doing for The Company, as well as how I’ll actually be going about getting all that integrated into the game.

Additionally, Marketing Associates should expect to see more previews coming very soon!

That wraps up this week. There’s a lot of exciting things coming down the pipe and none of it would be possible without all of your continued feedback and support. Thank you all so much!

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