Stranded v0.2.1 released + Ch.2 musings

Stranded v0.2.1 has been released! …I didn’t post about v0.2.0, oops. You may download it from our download page.

Changes

Chapter 2 adds many new CGs and continues the story after 1 year of development.

v0.2.1 adds translations for Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese and Russian, contributed by our very hardworking translators.

Things We Couldn’t Make Work

v0.2.0 was released on July 6th 2023, and after several dev builds, v0.2.1 was released 3 months later on October 6th. Sadly these 3 months weren’t enough to iron out all the bugs caught by our playtesters (who we really really appreciate!). An example of a bug that remains in v0.2.1 is shown above; in our character gallery, Owen appears to only be drained of color from the waist up in full-body view. This showed some clue of the inner workings of the sprite system; up to chapter 2 sprites were designed from the waist up, cut perfectly to fit those dimensions. This started proving difficult to adapt to when it was suggested that the gallery should have a zoom-out button to show the full body. At that time, the quick fix was to paste the upper body sprite onto a static image of a full body, but the coding for it proved very rigid. It was unable to change costumes, and whenever assets were programatically altered the full body would not follow as it wasn’t part of the layeredimage. This will be fixed in v0.3.0 hopefully, in which the full body will also be a part of the entire image.

Stay tuned for the next chapter! We hope to release it sometime around the end of the year, if possible…