Development Update: May 6th, 2019

Fan Art Gibbering to Oneself in a Padded Cell

I know, I know. Sinpai posted this a while ago, but I kept getting caught up. Well no more!

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You can see the whole sequence on Sinpai’s DA gallery. It’s Mary from Doll Manor becoming a clay girl! I like the third frame the most, while Commissioner and Foe of Marsupials Klaysee said she liked the second frame more.

Pandemonium is Going W I D E S C R E E N

As a consequence of other things, I was looking at the Steam Hardware Survey and noticed that the number of users on 4:3 aspect ratio monitors has dropped so low that I think we can safely stop targeting that hardware.

Back when I started development on this engine, 4:3 aspect ratios were about 25% of the Steam userbase, and the Steam userbase is going to be somewhat biased towards better PCs since it is a gaming service. So I figured it’d be best to target 4:3 since I didn’t want to leave any users behind, and it doesn’t do much to a widescreen user to have some black bars on the sides of the screen.

Well it’s been a few years and 4:3 has basically vanished from the market. A few percentage points of stragglers still have them. The only places I see 4:3 screens are the ancient computers still running Windows XP that are at the local grocery store. So I may as well update Pandemonium’s engine to target widescreen ratios.

If you are a 4:3 user then do not despair. You will still be able to play the game so long as your display is larger than the default 1366×768 virtual canvas, there will just be black borders on YOUR screen instead. But since that’s practically nobody at this point, I’m talking to myself right now.

For everyone else, it means that you’ll be able to see more of the world at once and that there will be more space on the UI. Spreading it out a bit means combat and dialogue are a little less cluttered, but that’s basically it. We weren’t hurting for screen space.

Monster Prom Weirdness Poll Results

Result 00

So it seems that your profanity-laden opinion was the same as that of the artists, and this is going to be happening… whenever the mod tools come out. It will probably be a few months, as the team is going to be Kickstartering the tools (from what I understand) and that coincides nicely with us wrapping up Chapter 5 and Doll Manor.

Also, please don’t swear like this, people. Pandemonium is a game for all ages…
Right? It looks so innocent! It has corgis!

Result 01

Pandemonium officially has the world’s worst fanbase why do you keep doing this to me?

That’s right, once again, on a critical vote there has been a #%^@#%^#6ing TIE. A three-way tie no less, with golems coming in 4th trailing by one vote. Wow, thanks everyone. Super.

I suppose it will be up to the artists which of the three they want to make, and knowing Chickenwhite as I do, she’s going to want to make more than one. And that means I’m going to have to write a lot more scenarios. Geez.

Result 02

And Zoe takes the win, with the vendor Valerie behind by four votes.

I mean, nobody should be surprised by this. Zoe is a super-nerdy eldritch abomination older than time itself and also writes shipfics of everyone so she fits in perfectly with Pandemonium’s demographic of insane people.

Now remember that this just means that Zoe will feature prominently in the mod-character’s storyline, not that she will be the only character. The only character that will absolutely not appear is Liam because I hate Liam, Hund hates Liam, Chicken hates Liam, everyone hates Liam.

Result 03

Das Kapital was Karl Marx’s treastise attempting to describe and critique capitalism. Written over the course of his life (and left uncompleted, the second and third parts were released posthumously by his friend Friedrich Engels by putting together his notes and manuscripts) and published in 1867, the tome had a massive impact on world history and serves as one of the pillars of socialist thought.

And for some inscrutable reason, Monster Prom has several references to socialism, so much so that it came up multiple times when Klaysee and I were playing it. Because they knew.

This was a joke question. But since we got 18 yes votes, I might just do it. As a joke.

The Actual Game Update

On the programming side, I have completed the mainline story content for the Biolabs! Yes there is backfilling to do (writing variations of cutscenes with different forms and without SX-399) and probably bugs, but that’s the usual. The point is that the Biolabs can now be played start to finish.

This week I will be doing that backfilling and upgrading the UI to widescreen, which mostly consists of changing a bunch of constants in the code and moving the assets around.

Chicken got sick and is a little behind, but has completed the gala emotes for both Sophie and Christine. Patrons will get to see some this week! Urimas is making miscellaneous sprites for me, including the humans who live in the Biolabs. Hund is back to work on emotes after having completed a bunch of concept art for… things you will see later…

Oh and Mario has been asking me odd questions about Rochea. It’s almost as if he’s writing the Alraune story. Except he said he wasn’t (yet) when I accused him of that. Strange.

Here is a discussion thread. Fight!

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