It’s finally done! After countless hours of converting pictures to videos, adding sound effects, changing code, and fixing bugs, the animation rework has finally been wrapped up. So let’s talk about how everything went and when you’ll all get it in your hands.

There were a few hiccups along the way, including a bug within Ren’Py itself that I was able to get corrected for renpytom, the lead programmer for the Ren’Py engine. It took many weeks of work, mostly due to the fact that Harmony Girls contains 497 animations, a truly mind boggling number. With the work complete, I have a lot of good news to report.

For those with slower download speeds or concerns over disk space, I’m happy to say that v0.4.2 has been reduced from 2.5GB to 771MB. This whopping reduction in space will also make a web version of the game run much smoother, as the game downloads assets as they’re needed during gameplay. Performance requirements have essentially been eliminated altogether, with each animation not being cached in memory. Animations load and play pretty seamlessly, an effort that took many hours to perfect.

Now that this endeavor is behind me, it’s time to look forward. I’ve got some work left to do on v0.4.5, but I’ll be trying hard to get that version out in a couple of weeks or so, with the new v0.4.25 being released to the public soon after. I’ve also moved the supporter exclusive content away from in-game benefits, meaning all of the dream scenes will become available to the public in this next release. Supporters will continue to vote on the scene for each update, but will instead be receiving custom 4k wallpapers released pretty regularly.

I just want to say thanks to everyone for being so patient with this release. Having such a large change to the content format of the game was an important undertaking, and one that I felt was needed before my next release. For my supporters, you all can access the fully tested v0.4.25 in the pinned post on Patreon and SubscribeStar. As for new content, it won’t be long until everyone has a new version of Harmony Girls to play! Until then, I’ll be looking like Lily in the teaser picture while I work myself to exhaustion.