Harmony Girls is getting a fundamental facelift and I wanted to inform everyone about it. This will be a longer but also very important update, so I’ll put a tl/dr at the end. As you all may or may not be aware, Harmony Girls uses the Ren’Py visual novel engine. It’s primarily meant for those types of games, but allows freedom for games like Harmony Girls to be made. Unfortunately, I encountered performance requirement issues well into development of the game due to the way Ren’Py caches images in memory. This issue caused the VRAM and RAM requirements of the game to skyrocket. I implemented the game quality levels to combat this, however doing so seriously reduced the animation experience at these lower quality levels.

Well, I’m proud to announce that will no longer be the case! Harmony Girls is currently under a core rework to the animation system, switching my image format from images to movie files. These changes will dramatically lower the requirements of the game while also keeping the animations full quality. The core changes will not be noticed by most if you’ve already been playing in high quality, but I have had to make another fundamental change to make this system work.

The movie system implemented in Ren’Py has some major limitations, one of which will affect the game. Movies cannot be synced and unfortunately the small camera angles which relied on that are being scrapped. However, they’re being replaced by full sized versions of those same shots! When you click on the camera icon in the bottom left, instead of opening a small camera, you’ll switch between different views of the scene. Personally, I like this new system even more as you get a lot more detail compared to the previous small cameras. Currently, I’ve finished building the back end changes necessary to facilitate this change but I’m waiting for my computer to render all of the new camera angles in full resolution.

I’ve been able to test the performance changes and am pleased to find a near total reduction in VRAM and RAM usage. In addition to that, the new format requires less disk space and will reduce the total size of the game by around half. As I no longer need to worry about disk space or memory usage, this allows me a newfound amount of creative freedom when creating new scenes and renders. Because of the promising results, I’ve decided to commit to development of this new system and announce these changes to everyone.

These changes are a necessary addition to the game, allowing Harmony Girls to run on nearly every system out there. It will also allow me to create a web build, as well as future versions for Android. I want everyone to be able to enjoy the game and this is the only way to make that happen. For those of you who played at full quality before, now you’ll get to enjoy the new camera angles and quick animation responsiveness. And for those of you who had to play at lower quality or were unable to play the game at all, this will be a massive upgrade in the quality of Harmony Girls. Either way, I hope you all will enjoy the new system and understand why I’ll be working hard to add it to the game.

TL/DR: Harmony Girls is changing it’s image format to movie files which will dramatically reduce memory requirements while retaining full animation quality. Small camera angles will be replaced by full resolution shots and the game disk size will be reduced by half.