Time for another update. We’re slowly approaching the more stable end of the engine… it’s not this version, but 0.0.15+ things are starting to solidify. This update had a whole bunch of additions to menus, fixes, and most significantly dropped back to Compatibility renderer in Godot, since godot 4.5 has a bug that it doesn’t always drop to OpenGL if Vulkan doesn’t work… which means the game won’t necessarily work right out of box on some older hardware or wonky Vulkan drivers.

Since I wasn’t utilizing the Forward+ to full, anyway, I dropped back to compatibility layer. So, this should be the most compatible version of the game so far. Although not as stable as I hope, it should hopefully also work.

A long standing bug was found out during development of 0.0.16, which makes it so that CTRL skipping is risky. In general, try to avoid it? Once you’re IN a dialogue, you can skip, no issues. But if you have CTRL pressed down when you stard dialogue – depending on your hardware, things can go wonky.

I had no idea this was possible, until I found it during testing. So, yeah… be careful with the CTRL button. It’s powerful. Hah.

Changelog is as follows:

Version 0.0.13

New Save/Loading Screen, New Book Browsing, Dynamic Book Covers, Quest Log Now Works, Expanded/Rewrote Nalara’s Dialogues

• 2025-11

• KNOWN ISSUES listed at the bottom of the Changelog.

• GODOT: CHANGED BACK TO COMPATIBILITY renderer. The game should work identically as before, but I’ve gotten bunch of reports that it doesn’t start at all. And I’ve found out since that Godot 4.5 has an issue in falling back to the compatibility layer. I’m not using the Forward+ fully, so might as well go back to compatibility mode. Hopefully this will fix all the issues people have had with the game.

• GODOT: Updated the game to run on Godot 4.5.1. Basically just some stability and bugfixing updates. Should not show up to the player as anything. It barely did anything for me either, to be fair. Just figured I should try to work in the bug fixes whenever possible.

• FEATURE: Now you can browse any book that is within the user:// folder. Right now your bedroom bookshelf contains ALL the books in the folder, whereas Donaciana’s bookshelf contains only some of them. The books each have their own generated covers.

• FEATURE: Quest log is now more than skin deep static piece of text. From now on quests have names, descriptions of them, several stages (and associated hints for Patrons), and in general can be marked completed, or active.

• GUI: Touched up the “starting new game” screen a bit, very minor changes.

• GUI: Added new Save/Load screen.

• ART: Did the art for the Save/Load screen, which was a major project, considering it is ready for animation and isn’t typical piece of art for me.

• ART: Added a shader to make the lights pulse in to the Kitchen Background Scene. So that it mirrors the rest of the house.

• ART: Added generative book cover art elements into the game. There’s 4 borders, 10 cover patterns, 4 ‘center’ illustrative elements, 3 top illustrative elements, 3 bottom illustrative elements, and of course book cover color. Some of the elements also have the option of not having the element at all. Additionally there’s a separate small possibility of each of the border, top, center, and the bottom elements being of gold-foil variety. So some ultra rare books might have all of the four elements be gold foil.

• ART: Created a gold-foil shader. It’s kind of hacky, but it looks good enough? It was created by cribbing together code from a bunch of guys who actually know how to work GLSL. Which I really don’t. I can just about barely read it.

• ANIMATION: A work-in-progress animation added to the background figure of the Save/Load screen, basically it should look like she’s breathing. I’ll add more movement later on. Should be easy now that the SpineSprite is integrated into the game and the animation is already playing. Just need to change the animation and export.

• WRITING: Rewrote and added some bits to the Nalara introduction, mostly just clarified her characterization and other small details.

• WRITING: Added new topics to her small talk scenes, mostly to clarify that the shifting slang and style is a feature and not a bug. Still not certain if it is really working, so I might have to do some more rewrites of her later on.

• WRITING: Nalara Smalltalk is now up to 3923 Words/358 lines.

• WRITING: Revised and rewrote a lot of the older interactions with the world. Nothing anyone will notice, however. Primary goal of the rewrite was to hide the “meta-fiction” layer (if you’ve noticed it, that’s great, if you haven’t it’s not that important) from those with 5 or lower Mind.

• GUI: Added a bunch of additional fonts that are mostly used in the Quest Log, but will probably propagate to rest of the game some day.

• GUI: Added a book browsing interface for the books. This is still unfinished and kind of rough around some edges, but it is 90% where it needs to be. The book reading interface is still unchanged, for now.

• MUSIC: Composed and added one (1) new song, which plays when you’re in the Save/Load screen.

• CODE: Created a generative book cover system for the books, they all now use the few basic elements I have added to generate an “unique” book cover depending on what the name + author of the book is.

• CODE: Rewrote the Book system, although reused most of the reader stuff. Now the whole thing is decoupled the book system from the game logic and state, it is basically a plug-in now.

• CODE: Refactored the skill check and relationship success/failure message injection system to be more consistent between the two. This is in preparation for some distant future day of making it into its own global system, rather than just be distributed across the codebase.

• CODE: Refactored how Smalltalk system works. Technically it’s much more performant, but more importantly it is now future proof. In theory the old system could have started to lag on slower computers, as it was relying on DialogueManager’s parser – now loading of correct dialogue files is implemented within GDScript as an intermediate step.

• CODE: Added start of a system that each girl will have their own Font in their own name, to give some extra personality. First just need to find right fonts for them.

• BUG: Wall art was not working, as in 0.0.12 I changed the root CharacterPanel class, and I always forget that “Wall Art” is a character, at least from the perspective of the game.

• BUG: The option “that’s not an answer” to Nalara didn’t work.

• BUG: Because of the above bug, there was an unseen bug in Sonja’s posing when that line of conversation was happening. The whole branch works now as intended.

• BUG: There was a chance that the game could get stuck after saving a game, because of race-conditions, this should be fixed. Cross your fingers.

• BUG: There was a visual bug with Sonja’s Warpaint/tribal outfit, in some poses the upper body was not quite attached to her lower body.

• Known Issue: There are lots of locations that the girls might be at, or are in, that you will not be able to have small-talk dialogue with them. This is because there’s just no graphics to show for that location. When the location becomes more relevant, I will add it into the game. Don’t worry, you are not missing anything critical. All plot relevant discussions are unskippable, you can’t miss them.

• Known Issue: If you are loading an old save from version 0.0.12 or earlier, the quest “I’m an Eldritch Monster?” may display the incorrect stage description. This is a cosmetic issue only and does not affect gameplay. The quest will function normally, and the stage will update correctly as you progress. New games are unaffected.