Version 0.22 is finished and now in the hands of play testers. In this update we focused on overhauling our menu systems, GUI, and redesigning everything in a way that fixes support for controllers and handhelds like the Steam Deck. The Android experience has also been improved with a more polished interface with special made assets instead of just rescaled assets from the PC version. In the story we focused on expanding and refining Eryn's romance path, although the changes are part of a broader overhaul that isn't yet complete. The total play time has increased by about 10 minutes, but this includes major rewrites to existing scenes so a significant amount was removed. Like the last update, this version will require old persistent data to be deleted, so if you have weird bugs on Windows check in your appdata folder (C:\\Users\\[your username]\\AppData\\Roaming\\RenPy\\RefugeOfEmbers\\) for old persistent data files that could be causing issues.
Based on user feedback we slimmed down the textbox and choice buttons in the redesign to increase the amount of screen real estate for artwork. The mobile version has the biggest difference by far since it was huge in our old GUI. In the past we also had an issue with dialogue and choice text sometimes extending outside of the text boxes on mobile. This was because the mobile font and text boxes weren't both the exact same percentage larger than the PC version. Now they're both the same, so if it looks good on PC it'll look larger but otherwise identical on mobile.
We also found a better approach for the quickmenu, which are the small buttons at the bottom of the screen. We ran a poll to see what buttons were used originally intending to slim down the list to only the most popular buttons, but we realized that was unnecessary and ultimately decided to turn the number of buttons into a menu option. Under video settings you can now toggle between the standard 5 button panel, a full 8 button panel, or just disable it entirely. There's a weird screen jitter when you change the setting for now, but we have a plan to fix this in a later update. We've also added a setting called film grain which adds a really subtle film grain effect. We were trying to go with an old anime kind of a look to really work well with the animations and we both think it really adds a lot of visual flair, but it's an expensive effect for performance so if you're on older or lower end hardware and suddenly the game is really choppy go ahead and turn that off.
The screens and logic are all working, but the sprite viewer has been temporarily removed and will be returning in the next update. We're also missing the new journal and achievements screens this time around but they'll both be making an appearance soon, likely in version 0.24 or 0.25.
Eryn's path is expanded in the prologue, but still very much incomplete. In the next update we'll be adding to her festival scene as well as a new animated h-scene with her on her romance path. A lot of the writing for her reworked festival scene is in and it's in the second to last draft, but there's a lot of artwork missing so we just reused what was in the game before as placeholders. We did manage to add in one of the new scenes minus the animation just before release, but it's incomplete and the final rendering for it will be in the next update.
Version 0.23 will be out much faster than this one was and will have a lot more story content, but 0.22 has a lot of necessary changes. Under the hood we've reworked a lot of the code for the screens and gui to get rid of as much tech debt as possible. There are still some remnants of the old screens and systems in there that need to be sorted out, but with the extra time we've spent this should still turn out to be a very stable and bug free update. The early story is still cut up and scattered with the rewrite, so that'll be in flux for a bit longer. I think everyone will like the direction things are heading in with Eryn's path though.