Hi folks!

Beta testers have access to the v0.13 build now. Follow the instructions here to get it.

Here’s what’s new:

• The 32-bit art style is here at last!
• Four new dungeon bosses, bringing the total to eight. Each one has a second form you’ll only see if you encounter it in the second half of the game.
• Spoiler

  Three final bosses

• Massively rewritten story.
• You can now equip 3 items in addition to a sword and either a shield or spring.
• Improved game controller support: it now automatically recognizes when controllers are attached/removed, and it’s no longer necessary to manually configure the button layout.
• Various little bits of polish: camera movement, faster world generation, a new CRT shader, etc.

Join us on Discord to talk about it! Beta testers, please remember to keep discussion of spoilers to the #beta-testing channel!

For now, this build is only available to our existing beta testers. But you can wishlist the game on Steam to get notified when it releases.

Press, streamers and youtubers can email press@bytten-studio.com to be put on a list for preview access.

Two art styles

While the 0.13 build comes with both art styles, we don’t yet have a built-in way to switch art style. Currently, you will need to open up launch-config.json with a text editor, and remove the “assets/advance/” line.

Note that there are still one or two places where we lack art for the 32-bit style. In those places, it’ll fall back to the original 8-bit style.

What’s next? When is it releasing?

We’re waiting for feedback on 0.13 before we nail this down, but generally we’d like to do one more pass over the core gameplay. We have some cool ideas for secondary uses of the lighter and missinglasses, and there are a few simple ways we can improve enemies, caves, etc.

Steam Keys

Since our lovely beta testers have been asking…

We currently have an extremely limited number of keys we’re planning to give out to members of the #beta-testing channel on our Discord server. Valve has provided us with these keys for the purpose of helping us to test the game’s integration with Steam.

After the game’s release on Steam we’re planning to request a larger batch of keys. However, you should be aware that Valve has the right to deny any request for keys, and they do change the rules from time to time!

A few words on OS support

You might have noticed the Steam store page doesn’t list the macOS system requirements. That’s because we’re dropping official macOS support. We’ll continue providing builds for Mac users, but note that you may need to apply some workarounds to get the game to work… And that at any time, Apple may release an update that kills it entirely.

Why?

If you’ve been following tech / indie game news lately, you’ve probably heard about macOS Catalina’s gatekeeper. If not, suffice it to say that Apple are raising the walls of their little walled garden, and now the only way for developers to get into it is to repeatedly jump through several utterly pointless burning hoops, in a process called notarization.

This isn’t the only time Apple has taken a direction that has made their OS difficult to support in Lenna’s Inception. Recently they deprecated OpenGL, leaving their graphics drivers in a perpetually-broken state. If you played any earlier betas on macOS and had the game launch into a black screen, you’ve been affected by this! I spent over a week this summer investigating that issue, one cause of which was a lack of support for NPOT textures. NPOT textures have been a core part of the OpenGL 2 standard since 2004! (Version 0.13 has a fix.)

And besides that, every new version of macOS brings in weird new idiosyncrasies for developers to work around… Like for instance the OS intercepting long key presses to bring up a menu that steals all keyboard input, which (for some reason) is invisible in Lenna’s Inception and causes the game to randomly stop responding to key presses. (The workaround for this is to run a command in the terminal.)

The rate at which Apple are introducing massive breaking changes is terrifying. Everything I’ve listed above is stuff that has been introduced to the OS since I began work on Lenna’s Inception. Apple aren’t very open about their roadmap, and nobody knows what they’ll do next. Without being able to plan for the future, it would be dishonest and irresponsible to claim to be able to support this OS.

If you’re a Mac user who has already paid for the game, I’m sorry this has affected you. As mentioned, we’ll continue providing builds and workarounds where possible. If that ends up not being possible, well, currently the game runs well in Wine, and CrossOver should work too. Desktop Linux is also looking really good right now… 😉

What about Linux?

We’re not dropping Linux support. Linux distros tend to be much better about preserving backwards compatibility. Furthermore, we see considerably more wishlists from Linux users than macOS ones–about 20% of our wishlists come from Linux users! Lastly, I use Linux to develop the game, so dropping it would be silly and pointless 🙂

Ubuntu 16.04 and SteamOS will be officially supported. YMMV with other distros!