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Studio Update Part 1: Flash Issues
🕑 Added 2025-03-28 05:41:58 +0000 UTCHey everyone,
I know it’s been a while since we’ve posted—it's been over a year since our last game update—and I wanted to bring you up to speed on what’s going on behind the scenes.
Quick Note for Supporters:
Anyone who supports us at the $7 tier and up during this development window will get access to the next update, even if your membership is inactive when the update goes live. This is our way of saying thanks for sticking with us.
This Will Be a Multi-Part Post
There’s a lot to cover, so we’re breaking this into multiple posts:
Part 1 (this post): Flash-related issues
Part 2: Our Unity transition problems
Part 3: How far we’ve come and what’s next
FLASH – The Challenges We’ve Faced
Over the past two years, we’ve encountered several unexpected technical hurdles that have seriously affected our development timeline. The three biggest pain points have been:
1. Crashing
Imagine the worst crashing you ever saw on a livestream from me back in the day—then multiply that by five.
This has been happening across all systems, and every crash increases the risk of file corruption, autosave or not.
2. Structural Asset Drift
As Unity continues to evolve, many foundational assets we originally built in Flash have become outdated. This created two major problems:
I could no longer export custom-sized PNG sequences from Flash that processed correctly in a 1:1 ratio.
We had to roll back to manual exports, which are extremely time-consuming and inefficient.
3. Graphics, Animation & Rendering Issues
In addition to system revisions, we’ve had to tackle unrelated but critical visual issues:
Because of the earlier problems, many old animations had to be reconstructed from their original components.
Frame-by-frame export was not an option, and Flash’s color PNG support was also failing, leading to poor quality output.
Every asset required manual cleanup—fixing line errors, anti-aliasing issues, and more.
Fortunately, this entire process has recently been replaced with an AI-driven cleanup tool, which has significantly improved both speed and quality.
Why This Has Taken So Long:
A big part of the delay is that these issues didn’t hit all at once. They popped up in phases, which meant we had to solve them one by one. That naturally slowed everything down. Some of the key bottlenecks:
High risk of file corruption with each crash, even with autosaves.
We’ve had to rely on constant backups, full restarts, and a lot of file juggling just to avoid losing work. It’s been a bit tragic, honestly.
Flash itself has become increasingly unstable.
It tends to run and export very slowly, with its own corruption issues layered on top.
The Flash Legacy Problem:
Beyond those immediate technical setbacks, we’ve also been dealing with the long-term consequences of Flash losing official support. Over time, this has led to:
Corruption of several original visual assets
A growing number of bugs and instability within Flash itself
Only recently have we been able to start restoring these assets, largely thanks to AI-driven tools that help us preserve the original animations and polish them for the future.
But this isn’t just about recovery—it’s about preservation.
If I don’t stabilize the Flash build, we lose it entirely.
So I have to take the time to stabilize and recover what we’ve made so far before we can fully move into Unity. It’s frustrating, but it’s necessary to move forward.
Why the Current Build Isn’t Playable Yet
Right now, we’re actively rebuilding core systems to ensure everything works smoothly before releasing anything. This isn’t just about functionality—it’s about avoiding future headaches.
While we know waiting sucks, releasing an unstable version would only lead to a bad experience, which helps no one.
To make things harder, we’ve needed to build both a:
GUI (Graphical User Interface)
Dialogue handler
…that are robust, self-contained, and don’t blow the budget. If we were only dealing with one of these things, it might be simpler—but we’ve had to juggle a lot at once.
What’s Next?
We’re making steady progress, and we’ll continue to post updates as we hit new milestones. Our goal is to ensure that when we finally hand you something to play, it’s going to be polished, functional, and worth the wait.
As a reminder:
Everyone who has supported us at the $7 tier and up from October until the next update’s release will get access, regardless of your status at that time. It's our thank-you for sticking with us through this dry spell.
Keep an eye out for Part 2, where we’ll dive into our Unity migration woes.
Thanks again for all your support and patience.
We really do appreciate you.
Above all, thank you for believing in this project. We COULD NOT do this without your support!
