Over the course of this past week, more feedback has come in from our GENBA no Kizuna beta-testers. And unfortunately, they’ve encountered a few more bugs… including one that would actually prevent you from completing the game, ahahah… “orz
Thankfully, that one was actually quick and easy to fix, so it no longer poses a problem! That said, while none of the other issues are as severe, there’s still some more stuff that definitely needs to be fixed or adjusted in order to provide players with a polished experience. So that’s what we’re currently focusing on!
Funny enough, someone recently also stumbled into quite an interesting bug in SHINRAI. After getting one of the bad ends, using the checkpoint and then getting onto the true end route, it’s possible to glitch yourself back into the bad end route… yikes!
But that issue, too, was quickly figured out and resolved by Natsu, so huge props to her, because I certainly wouldn’t have had any idea what to do about that, haha. So yeah, there’s gonna be a little update for SHINRAI soon, at least for the PC version. Since the console ports are handled by Ratalaika Games, we can’t manually update them ourselves whenever we want and have to talk to them first to get that done. Luckily, the glitch is pretty out there and very unlikely to be triggered (which is probably why it took nearly eight years for someone to stumble across it).
As you can see, this really was a week of bug fixes! Here’s hoping these were the last of them, though. After all, in about exactly a month from now, it’d be nice to have our new VN ready for release!
Now, one other thing we’re currently working on isn’t really a bug, but more something related to general user-friendliness and consistency. We’ve received a bunch of comments from players being confused by page counts in the DPA. Either because the pages are simply missing page markers or because the markers are difficult to spot. Thus, I’ve spent today trying to figure out how best to solve it and ultimately opted for a very simple solution:
As you can see, right about the “page flip” buttons in the bottom right corner, there’s now an indicator as to how many pages there are. We originally did have something similar here, but some players were confused by it and tried clicking on the markers themselves, rather then the arrow buttons to switch between pages… so this will hopefully make things more obvious.
Anyway, that’s how we’re gonna do it consistently throughout the entire DPA now, whether it’s the save slot menu or a DPA entry.
Outside of that, there are a few more things to adjust, even in regards to the script, but that’ll be next week’s task. It’s a busy time and I’m still a bit hesitant about making a huge release date announcement until we know for sure that we’ll no longer have to deal with issues like the ones thrown at us this week… but, as of right now, we’re still pretty much on schedule. And, as I’ve seen in our old blog posts from 2016… the SHINRAI release date was also only announced two weeks prior to it coming out, haha…
Now then, time for me to get back to work! As always, please enjoy the rest of your weekend and, until next Saturday, take care :3
