Alpha Preview Update (May)

5/31 Edit: Several bugs are now fixed! Please see my notes at the bottom of this post!

Hello, Zuko here! I bet you thought I wasn't going to update this month, didn't you? I pulled 18-hour workdays to make this happen! :D Click the link for lots of new content!

What's in this update:

• 29,000 words of new content (Total wordcount: 288,345 words without code)
• One route of Chapter 4 complete (SUCCEEDING not falling off the cliff; no Mekduk this time)
• Shop and strength boost added to day off hub in Chapter 4 
• Chase's birthday added to Chapter 4
• New Chandry and newspaper stuff added to the day off hubs
• New Trouble, Blade, Shery, and Chase day off scenes added
• Moonsilk drama

Notes to read before playing:

• Yes, I'm sorry; I meant to complete a Mekduk route first, but there were so many branches that it became simpler to complete the route where MC is a strong-ass warrior beast first. I am hoping that next month  I can fill one of the Mekduk routes in!
• If you want to play this chapter's content but don't have over the 50 strength needed to not fall off the cliff, choose to train in strength on the day off in Chapter 4. I've added a cheat (alpha build only) to boost your strength high enough!
• I know, I know, I said I wouldn't write more day off scenes so I could concentrate on the main plot. But it got very lonely down in the cave and I missed the characters, so here we are! Some of the new day off scenes (mostly Blade and Shery's) are very, very raw. I wrote them very late at night and I'm aware they're rough and needed better pacing and more content, but I'm just too tired! And at least I got the rough drafts out! 
• You will have to go back to Chapter 3 to play the new day off scenes. Sorry!
• DON'T select Riel or Tallys in the day off hub. Their scenes aren't written yet, so it might do something funky to your game. 
• As always, please be aware that this chapter touches on topics such as plague, quarantine, sickness, and death. Please read at your own caution!

I think that's it! Enjoy, and I hope to hear what you think! <3 Have a wonderful end to your May!

(5/31) Bug fixes:

• A looping conversation with Chase about nicknames has been fixed.
• A game-breaking error when talking about lockpicking with Chase has been fixed. 
• Tallys' second day off scene appears to be "missing." This is actually deliberate, as I've moved that scene to the third day off for the sake of pacing. You can still play it if you "visit" Tallys three times!
• Fairmath errors have been fixed. Some people were encountering game-breaking bugs when their stats seemed to go over 100. Some of these instances were due to the save plug-in acting funky, but some were also my fault for coding stat changes a certain way. If you want a technical explanation, see below. Please be aware that my fixing this has changed stat numbers throughout the game. If you replay, your stats might be lower than they were in previous playthroughs. I still need to scale stat checks accurately to these new changes, so if you start failing stat checks you once passed with ease, please let me know!

Fairmath explanation:

In ChoiceScript, there are two kinds of stat changes you can code: "regular" stat changes and "fairmath" stat changes.

Regular stat changes look like this:

• Say something nice to Trouble. (+1 Trouble)

If you had 40 Trouble before choosing that choice, you now have 41 Trouble.

Fairmath stat changes look like this:

• Say something nice to Trouble. (%+5 Trouble)

Instead of 5 points to Trouble's relationship, you receive 5% of whatever your current relationship to him is. This means every single person's stats will be different. A player who has 40 Trouble prior to picking this choice will receive 5% of 40 points; a player who has 80 Trouble prior to picking this choice will receive 5% of 80. 

Using fairmath prevents the stat from ever going over 100, but I didn't know that this requires all stat changes to use fairmath to be effective. 

So, in order to prevent these pesky errors from ever happening again, I had to change all of the stat changes in the game to fairmath. 

This means that when you receive %+5 Magic where you once receive +5 Magic, the amount will vary per player, depending on how much Magic they already have. 

This means that future playthroughs will likely see your stats being lower than they once appeared to be, which is actually probably good in terms of pacing out the gameplay. 

The one flaw of this is that I'll have to go through and calculate stat check thresholds again, too. For example, you need 35 Magic to do a certain thing by Chapter 1. I tested it out myself to ensure that this amount was achievable, albeit very difficult. However, with the values now converted to fairmath, I don't yet have the time to manually calculate everything again!

This may (or may not) lead to you failing stat checks you once easily succeeded in. If this happens, please let me know! It would really help and save me a lot of time. Rest assured, I will go through all 290,000 words (lol) and fix the stat changes someday. But I won't be able to right away, so please bear with any funky math you might spot in the meantime!

Thanks for reading this lengthy explanation, and enjoy the hopefully error-free update! <3