Devlog: Getting Ready for Public Release of Version 0.3.0

Hi everyone!

Version 0.3.0 is almost ready for public release, and you can expect it by Wednesday.

I had to migrate all my websites from Namecheap to Cloudflare last week because my hosting was about to expire, which delayed things a bit. For the first time, I'm using Local (https://localwp.com/) for all my WordPress-based sites and exporting them as static sites to host for free on Cloudflare. I absolutely love this workflow and will be using it for all projects that don't need frequent updates or multiple people with backend access.

Another less visible thing I spent time on was video file optimization. For a while now, I've been getting reports of videos not playing properly or at all. These reports always confused me because I never had any issues on my end. So I finally dug into it and discovered that the most likely culprit is Final Cut Pro exporting with 10-bit color (yuv422p10le pixel format), which isn't supported by many browsers' hardware decoders. After analyzing MindWare's media files, I found that around 150+ files have codec or format issues that could prevent playback in some browsers.

To fix the video playback problem, I converted all media files to web-standard formats. The conversion bumped up the total file size by about 100 MB, but everything should work now. Going forward, I'll be adding a media compatibility check to my build script with automatic conversion of potentially incompatible files, so this shouldn't happen again. If you do run into playback issues even after 0.3.0 (Public) drops next week, please let me know.

As for the transition from Chapter 1 to Chapter 2, I've finished tying up several loose ends that would've inevitably caused problems down the line, like quests that could be accepted but never completed. I've also refactored the first few hundred lines of code and kicked off the process of moving the codebase to its 4th version.

The 1st version was basically me learning the ropes of Twine/SugarCube game development. The original version was such a mess that it got almost completely replaced by the 2nd version, which stuck around until the UI redesign. The 3rd version stripped out most of the horrible UI code I'd written trying to customize the default SugarCube UI before replacing it with the custom one we have today. Unfortunately, I'd often rush ahead and introduce all sorts of nasty hacks or even implement the same thing twice because I lacked proper documentation and standards—which is exactly what I'm looking to fix in version 4. This will be a gradual process, but I'm confident it'll pay huge dividends for development efficiency down the road.

Finally, I've beefed up my Discord server's defenses against spam and learned more about server management and moderation, so that's something I want to focus on more once I hit a good rhythm with Chapter 2 content development.