Dear friends,
After over one month of intense work, I am bringing you all a significant update to "Someday You'll Return". It's an update I wanted to do since we've launched the game back in May but couldn't do it for more than one reason.
Let's roll back to May. After an extreme time with no sleep and Covid-19 amplified crunch, we've managed to launch the game, and what followed, as you all know, was two months of improvement and patching of the game that brought our game to the state many of you played and enjoyed.
"Someday You'll Return" is a very important game to me - more than any game we've created till this date. It's very personal in a strange way, and I want to be sure that it is in the shape I want it to be, despite the current worldwide situation.
So what was happening this last month?
I sat down and, after months, did a full play-through of the game. The game is not short, and I was not rushing it, resulting in a few days of play and jotting down one too many notes. The result is this version 1.7.0s (s stands for Steam version), which I am proud to publish today.
Audio Overhaul
When I started my play-through, the first thing that hit me was that the in-game audio got somewhere during the final crunch quite broken.
It's something that you couldn't have even known because audio bugs are tough to trace. Everyone can understand if a character stands in the wall or gets stuck in the terrain. But the fact that music or sound effect doesn't trigger or doesn't adapt, or is too low volume, that you don't have a chance to hear it? How could you know if there should be silence or sound? To my horror, I found out that a considerable amount of audio is simply wrong. So I went and fixed over a hundred of such audio "bugs."
How could this happen? I don't know. I only know that I was dealing with thousands of issues in the final crunch and didn't have time or clean ears for a play-through, which I did right now.
But I didn't stop with this. I found places, which with my now clean ears, really asked for more audio-wise. I sat down and composed a lot of new music for the game and carefully implemented it to break the dull places where nothing was happening audio-wise while still being true to my original intention to perceive music as sounding objects over the forest silence.
I have to say that I am now pleased with the result, and this heavy boulder fell from my shoulders.
Speaking of audio, I've also found quite some sounds which I forgot to put in at all. They are in now.
The last category of my fixes in that domain is sounds, which are OK in isolation, but they get old fast when you play the game. One representative is "wall climbing finisher." I tried to civilize these sounds, so they don't turn into a cartoon fast.
I hope very much that you will appreciate how much this all changed.
Chapter Saves
One of the brand new features I've put in is Chapter Save. The game now saves automatically at the beginning of each chapter. You can access Chapter Saves in the Load Menu, and they are profile-sensitive. Of course, they will work best if you start a new game. The game can't recreate older chapter saves from your game-in–progress. But since the game autosave rotation made it impossible to go back in time, I believe that this new feature is an excellent answer to your needs to replay certain parts of the game.
Bug Fixes
I've fixed many bugs, small or big, some of them even critical. Ranging from proper controller (stylus, climbing) behavior if you invert axis to actual show-stopping bugs that I managed to identify, I've encountered many things on my big play-through. I fixed everything which was in my capabilities to fix without risking to break something else.
On closing
We are living in strange times. Our country is now the leader in COVID-19 infection-rate. I feel honored and privileged that I could have brought such an experience to you all. The game is weird in many ways and goes against the typical expectation for the main hero. Daniel doesn't have a pleasant personality, which you get to know from the get-go. I felt it's important to tell such a tale, and now, when I get a lot of emails from people, who understand why we've decided to go against the flow and bring you this kind of a story, I am happy that those five years were totally worth it.
I wanted to thank you all for supporting our tiny studio. We are deeply grateful for every single player who decided to support us and played our game despite the current insecure situation.
Stay safe!
Jan