Greetings to all.

Chapter 2 is now available for everyone:

Internally, it's version 0.2.3 (I've changed nomenclature from the previous version numbers which were whole numbers as it was misleading players into thinking this is a completed game. I'm trying but it's not completed yet.)

What's in it ?

Next part of the story

The next large chunk of the story till the end of Chapter 2, but only on one path. (I've highlighted in this previous blogpost what choice at the end of chapter 1 that is. ) There is another - slightly similar beginning with a different ending path that will be in the next update.

Introduced a few RPG elements: - see linked previous blogpost for some highlights of said features.

                Day/Night Cycle – Introduced a broad tracking of the time of day – that’s simply Day or Dream, in either of these, you are able to explore either the Prison Facility and its different buildings or The Dream world which has a warped version of prison as well as a few other places.

                Inventory – You’ll begin collecting objects that will be a mix of important quest items, sellable items, puzzle items, and other items that you don’t really know what to do with for now like people’s underwear ;). Obviously, you can’t access your inventory in the dream world. You’ll have a completely different inventory there.

                Stats – This is a work in progress. This is something you can interact with and see a description of how they work but they do not affect gameplay yet.

                Threads – An organized view of what stuff you’re involved in. Basically “Quests” but not all of it are quests you need to accomplish so we’re going with “Threads”.

                Highlighting Main Quest objects: Maybe you don’t want to explore the map for side quests. Maybe you just want to focus on the Visual Novel portion, the Main Quest – so to speak. No problem. Turn this on, and the next person, place, or thing you need to click on the map that advances the main storyline will be highlighted – a pulsating orange color. In this patch, you’ll get to play up until the very end of Chapter 2. (As mentioned in the previous blog post, you’ll need to choose a certain option in the end of Chapter 1 for your gameplay to reach the end, otherwise, you’ll stop halfway, for now.)

                There are a few more. Basically built a mini-rpg with some puzzle solving and going around clicking stuff kind of gameplay.

START A NEW GAME:

                Absolutely start a new game. Ironically, this is so your new saves will work with future versions of the game and so you don’t have to keep starting a new game. I’ve done a sizable change to the game’s script and how I’ve handled a lot of elements in the past in order to maximize the chances that your saves will be compatible with future releases. Any saves not in this patch will produce an error.

ISSUES FOR MOBILE DEVICES:

                While playable on Android, a huge chunk of the new content in this patch involves exploring a terrain environment (point and click gameplay) with a UI that was not built for mobile devices. There are large issues that came with this that I’ve only found while testing the game today.

                These include:

•                 Speech Bubble dialogue too small. This isn’t a simple fix. As previously explained the bubbles had to be manually placed per line. It’s a fairly recent renpy feature and unfortunately lacks stuff like automatically resizing based on what’s inside, or being able to globally set its padding. So I think I will have to change it manually this time.
•                 UI elements too small and difficult to click on the maps.
•                 Skipping feature cannot be turned off while on the map. Must press Back to stop it.

These will be updated in an android focused patch later.