itch.io

The download links don't work.

Some itch.io sites (bitingthebullet.itch.io, possibly others) are triggering an invalid certificate error in Safari.  The site is currently using a wildcard cert from Fortinet.  Your main itch.io site is using a different wildcard from a different CA, so I'm assuming that this is fallout from the Fortinet compromise a couple of months ago, and that somehow the certs on certain sites just didn't get replaced correctly.  Either that or someone is actively trying to MiTM me, but the former seems more likely.

Different medium?  I'm having a hard time imagining what that could be.  Still, good to see that there's hope for the story continuing.  It has been a long time since I read the last chapter, but my notes describe this one as "short, but good," so I think I must have liked it back then.   😆

Christmas present?

I definitely support the whole "release early, release often" mantra.  Splitting it into two chapters and getting something out the door will help keep momentum for users and keep them paying attention.  So thumbs up to that idea, not that my opinion matters that much.  😁

I've never understood the whole "force the Patreon model on Itch users" approach, regardless of whether developers do it by doing stupid things like creating new products for each version and charging each time or just do it by abandoning Itch releases as this developer appears to be doing.

IMO, all that is likely to do is make a lot of former users mad and guarantee that they never pay you anything.  After all, if we wanted to support something with continuous payments, we'd already be supporting you on Patreon.

If, instead, you just charged some reasonable percentage of the expected final Steam price to buy the next version and all future versions, from a financial perspective, even if every single person who is no longer getting it for free buys it on Steam, you'd still probably come out ahead by selling it for 2/3rds of that price now and investing the money, because it would grow to more than the final Steam price by the time you release it, and if necessary, you'd have that money now.

That's not even factoring in how many of the users will have entirely forgotten about it by the time it makes it to Steam, if it even does.  (Remember how high Steam's rejection rate is for AVNs.)

And speaking as a professional software developer myself who has an absolute "just say no" policy towards any software that even starts to smell like a subscription (including serialized content) because of the perverse incentive that it creates to dribble out fixes just quickly enough to make money without actually delivering something that is complete/usable, I'm forced to agree with the folks who say that this is as good as dead, at least as far as most Itch users are concerned.

If it doesn't take too long, maybe some of us will still remember it by the time it appears on Steam and buy it there, but I wouldn't count on it unless that happens a lot sooner than this last version's 15-month release cycle suggests.

I wish you the best of luck, but I don't think this will have the effect that you think it will.

I am not a lawyer, and more to the point, I am not a German lawyer, but to give strictly non-legal advise, at this point, I think it would be more than reasonable to contact a German lawyer to inquire about filing a civil suit against the police department for financial damages arising out of their repeated and unreasonable delays in returning your equipment or a copy of your data from that equipment.

Their delays are costing you actual money, their delays are far beyond what any reasonable person would consider acceptable, and it seems highly likely to me that a judge would agree with both of those statements and find in your favor.  If they can't clone a hard drive in under a year, then the only reason they're holding your drives is for a fishing expedition, which is illegal under pretty much every country's legal code, including Germany's, as far as I know.

And to be blunt, the longer they take to return it, the more likely it is that you'll end up suing them anyway to get it back.  But the doctrine of Laches (which AFAIK is also a thing in German law) will end up limiting the payout if you take too long to file such a lawsuit, because they'll be able to reasonably argue that by waiting to enforce your rights, you allowed the damages to accrue, so there's likely no advantage to waiting any longer.

There's no defense like a good offense.  Just go on the offensive and be done with it.  Enough is enough.

You need to find the earring just to the right of the girl in the grass (tiny and purple).

Related bug: The dog cannot be found, and the if statements are backwards, so if dog_found ever does get set to True somehow, you'd be able to keep clicking on the girl and getting a $1000 reward over and over again.

Also, arrows on the save screen so that you're not limited to a certain number of save pages.  Not an issue in the first release, but it will be eventually.

FYI, you seem to already be over your Google Drive download quota.  Any chance of an alternate download site?

Quick request: under

screen choice(items):

could you please add

on "show" action Function(renpy.hide_screen, "say")

to hide the textbox?  When the textbox opacity is nonzero, it hides some of the choices on certain menus.

Thanks.

I think that the boolean variable roxy_i is being interpreted  backwards the second and third time it is referenced in the new chapter, and that the second and third 'roxy_i != 1'  lines should both be ==, unless she's deliberately trying to mess with the MC or something.

Hoping you'll eventually get around to continuing this story.  It has potential.

0.16 is still the same price as 0.17, which is... weird.  :-)

If you have HomeBrew installed, just do "brew install megatools" and then use "megadl https://mega.nz/..." to download from the command line.  Or use Chrome, which doesn't have the 2 GB limitation, but megadl works better.

Having trouble with 0.99.  It won't load any saves from early in version 90 onwards with the error "AttributeError: 'absolute' object has no attribute '__dict__'".  Basically, every save from September of 2023 onwards is failing.

Any ideas short of mass nuking everything from the last year and starting over?

I'm enjoying this story very much.  Solid writing, good plot, funny dialog, etc.

One bit of technical feedback for future improvement: When users enable a non-transparent background for the dialog, it can get distracting to have that visible when there's no dialog.  It often blocks important visual elements, makes it hard to see menu choices, etc.  This is particularly noticeable during cutscenes, where the text box is just in the way, and when there are choices, where the bottom choices are half obscured behind the text box (which can't be hidden without also hiding the menu).

Just adding "window auto" goes a long way towards improving the behavior (as verified by typing it in the developer console), but there are still a bunch of stills with no dialog where an explicit "window hide" would be beneficial.

That (probably) minor tweak would be a big improvement.

I always just download a recent version of the Ren'Py SDK, drop the AVN into its folder, double-click the Ren'Py app, and run it from there.  Pretty sure this one is based on Ren'Py 7, so for maximum compatibility, use Ren'Py 7.x (current is 7.7.1, I think).   That also saves you the hassle of dealing with Apple's Quarantine behavior.

Unzip in Terminal, maybe?  Or maybe your download was truncated somehow?

Ah.  I was getting load failures when running it from the 7.6.x SDK, so I jumped straight to 8.2.  (I don't run randomly downloaded RP apps as-is for paranoia reasons.)  I didn't even know they released a 7.7.  :-D

Well, I guess it isn't quite that simple.  Four spots in the code are expecting None (in my_events.rpy, 01_asara.rpy, and two spots in worldmap.rpy), and should also be adjusted to check for 0.  But that's probably a better fix than trying to handle NoneType everywhere that a numeric value would normally be expected.

Had to change to sys.stdout.write to actually see the log.  Eileen is the culprit, and specifically, story_6.  If I execute the code in that function by hand, it fails at Check_Req(ev_var) in line 90 with self.story == 6.

Digging in further, the call to player_inv.qty(AliceOutfit) returns None, rather than 0 as one might reasonably expect.

I suspect the fix is as simple as

        def qty(self, item):
            for i in self.inv:
                if i[0] == item:
                    return i[1] # returns quantity
            return 0

unless there's some reason to return NoneType instead of 0 for that function.

At least that keeps the exception from happening.  I'm assuming that it will eventually get added to the inventory as expected when I do whatever thing I need to do.

Ran into a bug when loading existing saves:

While running game code:
  File "game/myscripts/my_time.rpy", line 3187, in script
    $ AllAvailableEvents()
  File "game/myscripts/my_time.rpy", line 3187, in <module>
    $ AllAvailableEvents()
  File "game/myscripts/my_events.rpy", line 80, in AllAvailableEvents
  File "game/myscripts/my_events.rpy", line 90, in AvailableEvents
  File "game/myscripts/my_events.rpy", line 217, in Check_Req
  File "game/myscripts/my_events.rpy", line 204, in Check_VarReq
TypeError: '>=' not supported between instances of 'NoneType' and 'int'

Not sure if ignoring is safe or if I'm going to end up with weirdness.

Mac Mega link is invalid.  Typo?

For a quick workaround, edit options.rpy and add

define config.developer = True

Then quit and relaunch the app.  When you get the problem (whether by progressing in the story or by loading from a save file), just hit Shift-O, then type:

stop sound fadeout 5.0

and hit return.  Hit escape to get back out of developer mode.

Something very weird is going on in this build.

All saves from previous builds are broken, saying that they can't find a place to stop rolling back.  I'm not seeing any missing labels, so I have no idea what's wrong with those.

But I tried restarting from scratch, and as soon as I quit and relaunch, even *new* saves from the last parts of Chapter 7 are failing to load.

I think maybe the rollback buffer size is way, way, way too small, and there are way too few jumps or statements that count towards Ren'Py knowing where you are.

I changed config.rpy to add this:

define config.rollback_enabled = True
define config.hard_rollback_limit = 300
define config.rollback_length = 500

and now new saves are working as one would expect.  The right fix is probably to put in more labels and jumps, I guess, but upping those limits from the current number (which is apparently not high enough for this AVN) will at least make it less fragile.  *shrugs*  Either way.

Seconded.  Spelling/grammar nits are generally rare and minor, the pacing is comfortable, and it has solid storytelling with a compelling plot, interesting characters, a good sense of humor, etc.  It is well worth reading.

I can only say that about roughly 6.2% of the AVNs that I've read or started to read, and most of the other titles on that short list are the sorts of titles that get updated once or twice per year, so I'm really impressed at the velocity you achieve without tanking the quality.  😁

+1.  It drives the plot forward, giving a reason for the wife to leave the husband, which I'm assuming is going to happen at some point, and the MC isn't dating the wife's sister, so there's no hint of NTR there at all.  If you want to change it, fine, but you shouldn't feel compelled to do so.  Some people are fragile and will complain about everything, but if you cater too much to them, you'll end up with a story that's shallow and boring.

A couple of typos / nits:

- "good to know *you're* on my side" (rather than "you")

- A few lines later, no comma needed after "Call"

- Next line should have be a period and uppercase letter after "Will do."

I might also quibble about "continue on", but I could go either way on that.

Weird punctuation nit in the latest update: "Now and then" is a common English idiom, and at one spot, you used a clause ending with "now" followed by "and" to start a compound predicate beginning with "then", which makes it look like you're using that idiom.

But then the sentence unexpectedly goes on afterwards.  When readers realize it wasn't intended as an idiom, they can get very confused (because the remainder of the sentence is unparseable at that point) and may be forced to go back and reread the entire sentence to figure out what's actually going on.

Even though you don't normally use a comma before a compound predicate, this is one of those spots where it is *really* needed.  Changing it to "...the address now, and then make..." would greatly improve understandability.

Yes, I'm arguing to violate Chicago or whatever, but adding a comma between those phrases isn't strictly wrong, and improves readability in this one weird edge case, so...  yeah.  Or you could just repeat the subject and make it a full compound sentence.

According to the description, the Steam version has some extra scenes.

And for this kind of game, it therefore helps to set it in Tennessee or Texas, for obvious reasons.

Seems to be broken again.  :/  Low-end shared hosting starts at about $10 a month, so maybe you should just bite the bullet.  :-)

This demo version seems to no longer exist on Mega.

No, there's a gallery.  The GP wanted a galery.  Presumably that's some sort of room that blows their skirts up.  😁  Sorry, couldn't resist.

I'm assuming that the author meant an "Underground Railroad" by the Civil War meaning — as in helping slaves escape to freedom — rather than an "underground railroad" by the modern meaning — as in a subway train.

In that case, my guess is that maybe they fixed some sort of core voltage management bug in the firmware, which might mean that the problem is fixed, or it might mean you're being slightly throttled because of an inadequate power supply.  :-)

FWIW, not every update.

No idea.  I'm on Sonoma; it could be a difference in what python modules are installed.  Try

pip3.9 install urllib2

and see if that helps, or if not, try turning off analytics.