Oh god... Okay, please try to restrain yourself to a small amount, or at worst a medium amount of hype until we release. *nervous laughter* This is going to be great, but there are some things that we know people are going to complain about so... Yeah. We had some tough choices to make. Here's a simple example... (please don't tell me about naming or image issues with these screenshots, we have a list of bugs and these pages have things that aren't fixed yet):
The description of some items show up in multiple places. When I did my string wrapping fixes, I checked two screens - the Item Screen (far left) and the Synthesis Screen (middle). Things fit perfectly, as the screens are roughly the same size. Then, after spending more than 30 hours fixing all of the string wrapping issues with the items (including weapons, key items, etc, not just the synthesis stuff) someone else noticed that the item descriptions also show up in the Imagen Raising Cage (far right) and that the screen size there is way smaller and that lots of descriptions don't fit nicely. We tried changing the size of the box behind the text on that screen, but the game crashes with an image bigger than what it expects in some places, and this fun screen was one of those places. SO. Option 1 is to re-do all of the string wrapping work which is frustrating and tedious and annoying, OR Option 2 is to just not care about that one screen for now, and maybe we can fix it in some future release. You can see the text well enough, and honestly I just can't bring myself to re-do all of that string wrapping any time soon just for one screen that isn't used very much.
There are other things about the game that we are leaving, too. In some places the game does have auto-text wrapping, but it is only a couple of places and it acts on text that *does* get wrapped in one place but *doesn't* get wrapped in another, meaning that it looks dumb in one place and not in the other because the wrapping was designed for Japanese text and we can't (within all reasonable definitions of *can't*) fix that part of the code.
You get the idea. SO. We know that some people won't see this fun, informative post explaining why that text looks like crap on the Imagen Raising Cage screen. And there are other places where we made similar mistakes, or made choices that bought us extra lines of text for dialog which is very helpful, but cause a number of places to have text that looks like it is shifted up a few pixels from center because it is shifted up (as mentioned in a previous post).
Hopefully these examples show you a few things:
(a) Look how pretty things are! Wow!
(b) Look at those few bugs that are probably obvious to you! (But don't tell me here, seriously, I know. Or, if you must, send me a PM about it)
(c) There are things that aren't so pretty and are not going to be fixed, or can't be fixed because we sacrificed pretty in some places for functional in others.
(d) That hype is all fine and good, but don't get carried away with it. This is not an official release of a game by a developer with the source code and people who are getting paid to work on it. This is a volunteer project with people blasting bits at a binary ROM and making magic happen, but magic with limitations.
Thanks for your excitement, encouragement, and support! We do appreciate it! Just don't send us hate mail about the choices we have made, please, because trust me they were all made after lots of experimentation with alternate solutions and debates about which approach would be best for the whole game as opposed to one underused screen (or hours of work forgetting about one stupid screen. ugh.)
In general, I'm really happy with how all the riddles are shaping up (especially the ones that rely on the Astram language, aka Nazcaan in PS3 lingo), and while some might be too easy and some might be too hard, I'm hoping you'll at least appreciate being able to track them down in the PDF pages that we will release alongside the patch at some point before 2020.
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Xdqwerty:
