Pre Release (v0.6)

After a lot of testing and bug fixing, the build is now in a very stable state, and I was able to do many runs without any major or game-breaking bugs. I've now sent the update to a few people in order to start the private alpha testing.

The alpha testing period shouldn't last more than a few days, because there shouldn't be anything major, since I have already thoroughly debugged the update. The purpose of the alpha testing is more so to ensure that everything works properly on other devices, as different framerates can sometimes mess some things up, and to give me a few more days to fix a couple more minor things, and finish the last few remaining sprites.

Alpha testing was supposed to start a couple weeks ago, but a few went wrong with the material and shader that all of the world sprites use which caused issues. What's even better is that the material/shader were complete, and hadn't been touched since they were completed, and thus nothing could've possibly gone wrong with them, yet somehow it did. Anyhow, a fix is now in place.

The good thing about those unexpected issues, is that in those 2 weeks the majority of the missing sprites were finished, so the alpha build is essentially complete when it comes to sprites and CGs, with a few minor exceptions. Enjoy that alpha testers.   

Another last minute thing that was done, was a lot of improvements in compression across a few POIs. This might lead to faster load times in some areas, but I honestly not sure, as I didn't make any comparisons. However this improvement does result in the update being slightly smaller than v0.5. Which is a pretty big win, considering that the update has around 1000~ more sprites than v0.5.

Now, as to when the update will move on to beta. The remaining sprites will be finished this weekend, and I'll definitely make the push to get all of that imported and working within Tuesday so that the beta build can be launched still within May. However some of these sprites are involved in routines, which means that there will be a tad bit of coding involved, so this might push it towards the first few days of June, but again, I will make the effort to get it out within May.

That's it for the time being Thank you for supporting the development of Hana's Exposure, and I'll see you in a few days with the beta build, shortly followed by the public build!