Update : extended demo

Hello!

 I feel this update is finally ready for me to release, it took longer than expected, and unfortunately is much more technical than I expected as well. So I was not able to add more content to the game. I have made significant improvements to the intro though, and now there is a bigger map to walk around. But hopefully the next update can move forward now that some of the underlying technical issues are mostly resolved.

Before I get too far ahead of myself,  here is the changelog over on my subscribestar.  In the future, I'm going to keep a post that I actively update with the current changes I'm making. And once the update releases I'll make that post available to everyone as a changelog.  So the future updates will probably be in a same format as this.

But to give the long and short of it, this update was focused on the tilemap. I have made it significantly more powerful and interesting as a narrative tool, and it's now more tightly integrated into the game. There are now npc's on the map as well as working doors, and stairs. I have created a map that depicts the entire prison which is roughly 3k tiles for one floor. But please keep in mind, creating the systems and getting the update to a solid place was what mostly occupied me, so it isn't the most well fleshed out at the moment.

With that I also took the time to revamp the intro of the game, now you really start out in a cell, one of many, and you get to watch from your dreary corner, as the guard and co approach you. So hopefully you can experience some of the potential of what I have planned. Still, I have to say the story so far is quite short. I look forward to making more progress on it now that I have the tools to do so.

There is one last thing. I had two main goals this dev cycle, the tilemap and save compatibility. Sadly I think that keeping saves compatible in these early updates isn't practical, but that doesn't mean I haven't been making progress on it. One of the other reasons why this update took so long was that, well, I rewrote the game.

It's probably more accurate to say I refactored it, but I'm now utilizing a more class based approach. There's a lot of technical weirdness about this, both because in javascript classes technically don't exist, but more importantly because sugarcube, the twine format I'm using, has some, let's say state issues when it comes to custom objects(classes).

But the important thing about this is that I've rebuilt a lot of the game's architecture to take some of these issues into account, And so I feel good about the chances of being able to, at some point, keep really solid save support. For example I've begun utilizing the setup object, which exists outside of the game's state, so in theory this means it's much more trivial to update a core system like for example the tile map system. I've also (as part of using classes in the first place) been utilizing the clone, toJSON and constructor methods. Again, the important part about this is, these are how save files are serialized and revived, so it means I should have finer control over how the game's state is handled between updates. This all leads me to feel pretty good about save compatibility.

Unfortunately however it means I spent a big chunk of time on an invisible problem that I feel pretty good about... but I also don't have save compatibility to show for it. It kind of sucks, but it is what it is. At least I can feel good though that I'm building a strong foundation for the game.