re:Dreamer Alpha 0.20.0

Click here for the download links (currently only for Sustainer and Backer patrons).

I was gonna try to say something clever here but honestly I just want to get the update out after a frustrating bit of debugging and the results of the poll speak for themselves. Is "results" plural here? The sixth anniversary stuff was a landslide for a free release, but that... bah, I'm gonna go batty trying to hyperfixate on determining the wording.

I kind of did the previews already, but here's a bit from the update I liked a fair bit:

Ai is pretty fun to write at times.

re:Dreamer (0.20.0) feels like something I made in limbo of poor health, but it's here, it's kind of queer, and its writer is too cooked to say anything smart about an update that took a year:

• The morning of Keisuke Day 2 has been entirely rewritten. I have a much better idea of who these characters are now than when I wrote that years ago, and it now not only showcases that better understanding through writing that is much better in every metric and which gives the route a stronger trajectory, but it reconciles a few worrying plot holes created by the route's rewritten first day and prevents the creation of many future ones, the two most important being:

  • Severely reducing the odds of Zach getting pregnant that Zach and Keisuke having unsafe sex in a chlorinated swimming pool without a condom on isn't an unbelievably stupid idea.

  • Giving Zach confidence in the knowledge that if he and Keisuke ended up having sex last night, it was only because Keisuke got hypnotized due to Zach's illicit obtainment of the re:Dreamer app and how he's in a very unique situation because of how he got it and how he has already used it.

• I know re:Writes aren't a particularly exciting prospect (especially after a delay of almost an entire year) but this was writing that needed to happen. A single read-through is a bit over two hours of new content, but this revised section is designed from the ground up for replays with stark differences to the events based on C.H.E.A.T.S. and the choices made the previous night. It's 114,631 words long, and while precise estimates of reading time are impossible due to how the route variances are structured, I could easily see someone spending six hours on it and still not finding everything.

• Ren'Py has updated to version 8.4.0 and should have much better performance at the cost of needing Windows 10 or later to run.

• I have hidden some of the more personal developer commentary of the last two years behind menu choices at the start of an update's chunk of writing or within the story jump menu where I let readers choose whether or not they want to see those venting and self-therapeutic blocks of text alongside the more pertinent Author's Notes. I am offering this choice isn't simply because it's distracting from the story, but because much of it is really embarrassing and personal shit I shouldn't vent onto a captive audience I am emotionally holding hostage, but I am not wholly removing them as I am trapped between my urge to seek privacy when it comes to such unflattering details I shouldn't have volunteered in the first place and to be an OCD historian who preserves for prosperity all that I overshare as part of a stress response. It might have been a form of lifeline in some dark times, but it no longer serves that role.

• As much as I love being the weirdo with a design document bible (and storing things in my head), the game has now gotten large enough and my memory spotty enough to make such a system unwieldly and slow, so I've made close to a dozen new functions to standardize and speed up development of common tasks such as:

  • Sanitizing text tags from the history menu that would break it.

  • Timing animations more precisely based on a user's text display speed and autoread speed by internalizing sanitizing it of text tags to give a more accurate character count of the shown text.

  • Creating a system of animations that will work in-between interactions (such as Zach taking off his sunglasses and being able to open his mouth to talk if he's still in the middle of the animation when a line of his dialogue starts).

  • A more robust method of making audio change on a delay in the middle of an interaction (such as making footsteps only start fade after a certain point and adjusting the volume of a sound based on where Zach is in relation to its source as he moves around; you don't want to know how stupid the hack I came up with is).

  • Bulletproofing how I read the current position of any playing audio file so that it will return a safe value that won't crash the game if the audio is stopped.

  • A method of "holding" current variables so that I go back to a prior bit of writing to add or change something without having to worry about whether or not I broke anything by overwriting any variable I'd use later, avoiding the tedium of labeling what each temporary variable does in inline code comments that can take a while for me to parse if I'm returning to that branch of text after a long time.

  • A system to track hex colors within the game way, way easier to parse with a near-effortless way to standardize things across files.

  • And bunch of new ways of juggling all the text variants with less effort because this game is nothing if not excessively layered.

• I made Britney's namebox color a brighter and more vivid yellow of #FCE274, partly to differentiate it more from Keisuke's pale bleached yellow, but mostly because I learned that there's a flower called Texas yellow star and that its color more fitting for her (although I had to mix it halfway with her old #FFEB99 color as it was too harsh on the eyes otherwise). Personally, I really wanted her color to be #1C1CF0 (bluebonnet) as it's an amazing blue, blue is Britney's favorite color (and my own) and has a deeply important personal meaning for her, and bluebonnet is the state flower of Texas, but blue has so far been only for male speakers and it'd be too rapid of a departure to give her by far the most blue color in the game so I'll settle for the second-place personal choice.

• I've slightly expanded the arcade date with a few small extra section after winning the stacker game without noticing Ai's cheating. Not only is this a small reward for players who can clear that condition that makes things flow better, but winning it no longer idiotically gates off the content of Britney getting Zoey a choker. I like that scene, and I like these new scenes, and if you haven't checked out either, I think they're work the bit of extra effort to get to them. Lord almighty, though, I forgot how bad my coding is for those files, so it was a hassle to fix things without breaking even more things, even with my better modern practices!

• A link to the Britney's route outline has been added to the current end of her route's content.

• A few visual bugs in Britney's route have been fixed.

• I have hopefully squashed a bug with the Day 1 intro that could see Zach venting about his mom in the same way twice.

• Finally fixed the C.H.E.A.T.S. numbers being misaligned from the letters on the menu screen after the engine's somewhat recent change to text shaping. My local developer sandbox version hides those from me because I find them distracting, and it took way too long to notice the issue.

• There were many small tiny edits from almost a year that I don't have any real way to track them, but a bit more polish has been applied to almost the entire game.

As always, the full changelog for every release can be found at https://justpaste.it/rdchangelog

I'll be putting up a "what the fuck happened and why did this update take a whole fucking year?" post in the coming days (and a poll about what the sixth anniversary release will focus on), but as I've said, it's honestly as simple and boring as "the cat scratch fever I got from my apartment's flea infestation in early October 2024 had a shorter incubation period than the mononucleosis I also got from the same infection vector, so my heavily weakened immune system meant the mono virus dug much deeper into my body than it normally would have and combined with my other health issues it took a major toll on me."

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got two (former) fleabags who want me to play with them and then snuggle, and I'm going to pass the hell out with two cats.