Hello everyone,
I can finally say it: CHAPTER 1 IS DONE!!!!
It's even been tested from start to finish, which revealed two new challenges...
Optimizations
There's a catch to developing on a gaming PC with tons of RAM and a great graphics card... optimization issues only show up during testing.
This was a brand new field for me, and the goal is to make this not-too-complex 2D game run smoothly on any decent Linux or Windows PC from the last ten years.
So I set up a test environment with three computers: a gaming PC, a 2012 Windows laptop (🧟 you need some patience to test on this one), and a solid 10-year-old Linux office laptop. This helped me identify the main bottlenecks (maybe a few 4K textures were lurking around) and reach a working version on every setup. These improvements cut processing time by up to 50% and keep the game above 25 fps during gameplay, even on a potato.
The next step for optimization will be to detect lower-end configurations and automatically disable the more demanding effects, since some shaders still have too strong an impact on very weak setups.
Ending cutscene
I'm used to underestimating my timelines, but I'll admit the time needed for an animated, scripted final sequence was... badly underestimated.
In the early tests, the chapter just ended with a lore text card and a congratulations message. I wasn't happy with that abrupt ending. So now there's a cutscene, some gameplay elements, and most importantly a new (poorly animated) character: Mémé Cookie.
I'm really happy with this new ending and can't wait for you to see it.
Next steps
Now I need to:
gather as much feedback as possible on this first chapter to balance the difficulty and polish the various puzzles and minigames
prepare for the demo release, making it a smooth experience that's faithful to the full game's mechanics — but I suspect I'll talk about that again soon
Current assets
Here are the different pieces of Granny Cookie that let me animate her in that famous final scene.
See you in 3 weeks,
Le DoubleSept