Finally, I’ve got myself an absolutely new and really powerful PC. And that means I can resume the work on D’LIRIUM! And guess who’s to thank for that! It’s all of you, because it’s you who bought this game, stuffing my purse with money! Thank you so much for that! The new PC is a true miracle! If you’re curious, I’ll write down the configuration of my old and new PCs in the comment section, because it means little here. What means a lot is the fact that we finally have finished porting the game to the new engine! So, let’s talk about that…
What is the Early Beta-1? That’s porting the game to the new engine with some improvements. Remembering all that has been changed will require more than an entire hour, so, let’s mention the most important changes in comparison to alpha-12, and all that we can remember:
- New engine, unlike the old one, is written in C++, not in Delphi. It affects the process and result of building the code and compiling it into exe. Moreover, despite still being a bit unstable, it’s way more optimized. D’LIRIUM’s performance has grown multiple times. The game is able to work even on the old Pentiums (but that’s not verified)! And the most important thing is being able to support cross-platform!
- Steam overlay and screenshots have been fixed. No more black frames or cut-out menu.
- Volume settings. No more mixers!
- New sprites for the spells. Now you can easily tell what spells they represent.
- Walkthrough timer no longer counts the time of cutscenes.
- Chinese language! Both traditional and simplified.
- Waypoints. Now, the character is quite good at choosing the way to the destination.
- A complete rework of the save-and-load system. Save files will no longer break after another update!
- New design of the main character. For those who like old Ada more – don’t worry, she’ll appear too, but later.
- The background of the main menu and game over screens have been reworked. Not completely, but mostly.
- Achievements! Finally, we have linked the game to Steam. There’s only one achievement for now, for the test, but there’ll be more by the time of Early Beta-1 release.
- Activating panic mode has become much easier.
- Many of you complained about the game being too dark. With the new videocard I was able to notice that too. The game has become two times brighter.
- The levels have been optimized.
And that’s far from being the full list, only a few things that we were able to remember while writing this article.
A lot of the things we’ve described earlier are yet to be done, but some of them will appear in the future builds of the game. We’re still discussing what’s worth adding and what’s not.
Expect the Early Beta in two days, but the pre-release build is able for playing already, if you chose it in the game’s properties. If there are bugs and glitches (excluding the doors and the character that is visible through them) – create a discussion and describe the bug, we’ll be fixing the problem.
And one more thing. A request to all of the letsplayers and reviewers. Please, edit your video, put an exact version of the game in it. The final game will be quite different from what’s been in alpha. In the future, perhaps, it’ll get it’s own extra title, because the sequel’s name will be D’LIRIUM as well. The viewers might get lost in the versions, observing the different things with the same name. Oh, and do more videos! Thank you. ːfhappyː