Hello, everyone! After long-winded promises and many dev-logs, today we are releasing the first fully functional Godot port of Identity. It is the culmination of many months of behind-the-scenes work, marking a significant milestone for the project as a whole.

What is Godot and why is it important for the game?

Godot is a fully open-sourced and lightweight game engine best described as an open alternative to Unity. We have picked it as a replacement to Ren'Py to support our game for a number of reasons, mainly for its better usability, ease of development and broad set of features. We have previously discussed its advantages and the development roadmap that brought us here in some of our past Patreon posts (here and here and here), so go check them out for more context.

What changed?

Quite a lot of things have changed. As this release marks the third major version of our project and the first wide release of the new engine and framework, we wanted it to make a good first impression.

We have completely changed the user interface of our game. Every single UI element has been adapted to fit the "mirror shards" theme we created with the redesign of our title screen. While the looks of some menus may still be improved upon with later versions, overall this will be the final UI style of the game.

All of the story content from version 0.2.8 has been imported into this new version, and we have also added most of the missing backgrounds across the board to "complete the picture", if you will. We have added the main theme of the game to the title screen, and brought several improvements and remasters to most of the existing background music (BGM) tracks.

We know that a lot of furry visual novels run on Ren'Py, which is why we have gone to great lengths to maintain a functional and behavioural consistency between the two engines in this new framework. For the most part, players will likely not notice much of a difference.

However, as nothing is perfect, you might experience bugs or glitches from time to time. We have made a list of notes which you will find below the changelog that should hopefully give more clarity into some of the most common issues and complaints. But feel free to report any bug you may encounter (providing the line or approximate location in the story when it happened would help us tremendously) and we will do our best to fix it in upcoming versions.

All in all, this is a huge milestone for this project. We're deeply thankful for all the support everyone has given us throughout time, and as such we wanted to make this first release public so that all of you can enjoy it. There will be a patron-only release coming later, likely in May. Until then, we hope you'll enjoy this late (or early) Easter present from us!

Changelog

- Changed game engine to Godot Engine v3.2.1.
- Ported all story content from Ren'Py version 0.2.8 to new engine/framework.
- Overhauled all game UI.
- Added 6 new backgrounds for Kovle's dates and 2 new variations of mindalu's kitchen for day 5.
- Added 7 new closeup shots for items you find throughout day 5.
- Added title screen theme and "saxy" bgm for day 1.
- Remastered most of the existing bgm audio to the same audio level.

Notes:

- (BUG) (Android) When loading the game from the load menu, pressing the load button on any save file will always load the game to the very first save in the list; pressing the save button will always create a new save; pressing the delete button will always delete the most recent save. To get around this, double tap on the save file you want to save/load a particular file instead.
- (BUG) (MacOSX) The game will likely crash at startup or when starting a new game. Edit: Bug has been identified and fixed and a new macOS version is now up for download from the mirrors below.
- (Windows) If the game does not boot when you run the executable, try right clicking the .exe and select "Run as administrator". Likely because it's an .exe from an outside source, Windows may not allow it to run by default. Also, the game can only run on Windows 7 and above, as those are the minimum engine requirements.
- The playable content in this build ends at the line: "Eventually, the prisoner drops to the floor and sobs.". There is no indicator for it except that new content won't appear when clicking/tapping the screen.
- Ren'Py saves cannot be carried over to this new version, so you will have to start a new game. You can skip previously seen content using the skipping options in the options menu.
- If you encounter crashes while skipping, lowering the skipping speed down to 50+ ms until you get past the point of crash might help.
- Some sprite transitions are not implemented yet, resulting in sprites snapping into positions instead of smoothly animating. Shouldn't impede gameplay.
- Text speed modifier is not yet functional. Dialogue will be fully revealed instantly by default.
- Sometimes audio may not behave properly, particularly when skipping. Simply save and load back up and the issues should be solved.