Releasing 0.0.8 Public version here. I released this last week on my Patreon free tier.

This is the version where you can finally hold-and-skip text. I know, such a basic feature, but since I am still building the game engine and there was not THAT much content, it was not a big priority to me. It also could potentially cause crashes and other nasty race conditions. I did some mitigating of those, of course.

Additionally, I finally here get the game to work like it will in the future, in that there are people in locations within a room and you click and go to that location and can talk with them. It is not wholly finished feature at this point, but the game engine is getting closer and closer to having all the basic features I want it to have.

Anyway, here’s the changelog:

Version 0.0.8

Spine2D Conversion, Gameplay Changes + Adding Small-talk.

• 2025-07
• FEATURE: Added “skip dialogue” by holding CTRL down due to some feedback. You could always skip dialogue via spacebar, but it was per line and not something you could keep holding. I hope nothing unexpected happens, but so far in testing it has seemed stable.
• FEATURE: Character Portraits now appear in the location they are in, when you are in the ‘diorama’ view of the room.
• FEATURE: Character Sprites now appear in the location they are in when you enter the exact spot they inhabit. You can interact with them outside of story events and have ‘small-talk’ with them.
• FEATURE: Characters now have schedules and they move around the world according to their schedule and story events.
• ART: Converted Sonja’s Casual sprite set from flat images into a Spine2D atlas. This makes game smaller, and increases performance as well. Now about half of the ingame sprites are converted into Spine2D.
• WRITING: Clarified the rules/mechanics in the character creations screen, so that players know that Skills/Attributes change what dialogue you see and the messages reflect what stats mattered and where. Still very much a to-be-done page, overall.
• WRITING: Did a whooole bunch of typo fixing. For some reason I had forgotten to do a spell-check/second pass of anything I wrote in the last update. Oops.
• WRITING: Rewrote the intro background details so that it won’t say “skill failed”, when all it is doing is detailing the main character’s exact background. Now it will just say the skill name in green to inform you that you got this background detail because you have high enough skill.
• WRITING: Removed “failed” text from the skill checks. Now the skill/attribute will just show in green or red, depending on the status. This hopefully communicates that the skill mattered for this piece of dialogue, but doesn’t outright say you ‘failed’ at something – more that you got a different experience than with a higher skill.
• WRITING: Now Donaciana will refer you in subtly different ways depending on how she feels about you. This is not a huge difference, but should be noticeable if you pay attention, maybe. Maybe when there’s more time to move her opinion of you one way or another.
• WRITING & SCRIPTING: 1300 Words/131 lines, the initial set of Donaciana’s small-talk. All branches are related to your relationship with her, so choices are not really that meaningful here as you can go through these dialogues as many times as you want.
• WRITING & SCRIPTING: 220 Words/26 lines, barely worth mentioning, this is the minimal small-talk set for Sonja.
• CODE: The mechanics of Obsession are now decided, and it is in effect right now. Of course, since no one has any Obsession so nothing happens (yet).
• CODE: Modified the DialogueManager plugin so that now when you have smalltalk with Donaciana (or Sonja in future), you get a number of random options to choose from a set pool. This isn’t something the system supports natively, so I had to do some modifications.
• BUG: Encounters were triggering wrong when not in Debug mode. Uhh… I don’t think anything terrible happened, but without testing I estimate that you could re-do certain scenes over and over. Which wasn’t what was supposed to happen.
• BUG: Because of the added CTRL text skipping, you could easily crash the game with race conditions of various types. I did some mitigation on the many issues, here’s hoping it is enough.