Hello everyone! Welcome to this month’s devlog!

If you just stumbled upon this, I am Adrienne, also known as insertdisc5! I’m the developer, writer, artist, main programmer, etc of the game. The game being In Stars and Time, a timeloop RPG, which is also the next and final game in the START AGAIN series, following START AGAIN: a prologue (available here!).  You can find out more about In Stars and Time here!!! 

LET’S GET TO IT. This month is certifications updates, and a teeny tiny little teaser for a little something something that will be available sometime.

I’m very happy to say ISAT has passed certification for PS4 and PS5 AND Nintendo Switch!!! My devlog was stuck on “but we’re still waiting on Nintendo” for the longest time. But today (August 30th), we are free. 

 “Adrienne what in the hell do certification and lotcheck mean” Babe you’re so right to ask. 

So, when you want to release a game on consoles, you need to send your finished build over to the consoles, so they can approve it. And that process is called certification (for Sony) and lotcheck (for Nintendo)! This process means they’ll play the game, and make sure the build you sent them follows their specific terminology. So for example, if you have a tutorial, they’ll make sure you use “Press the O button” for Playstation, and “Press the A button” for Switch! If you fail, they send the build back telling you why you failed the certification, and you have to try the process all over again. Their goal also isn’t to get your game bug-free, although they might let you know if they encounter a bug (PS4 found a minor one).

Funny thing though. We did fail the Switch lotcheck once. 

“Well why on earth did you fail it? Did you forget to update the button names or something?!” No. We failed it because one of the visual options in the game is titled “Screen Shake & Flash”. 

“Well what does that option do?” It enables or disables screen shakes and flashes of bright light in the game. 

“And why is the title of the option bad?” They said the use of the word “flash” was, and I quote,  “problematic”. 

“What. What does that mean.” Well see here’s the thing.

WE DON’T KNOW!!! Everyone from Armor Games to our porting company Ratalaika is just a big ol’ ????? over this. Nintendo did not give us more details either. This is just so funny to me. Do they think this is an option where you can enable a character flashing you. If you turn it on the King shows you his pecs. I DON’T KNOW?!?!?! Anyway we changed it to a general “Screen Effects” and we’ll rely on the option’s description to tell you what it does. That was the lotcheck theater minute, thank you for tuning in.

In other news, uh, that’s it? Now that the certifications are done, we’ll be working on a couple of issues left, doing some playtesting, preparing secrets, etc. Yep, that’s it for sure. Nothing teeny tiny to show.

That’s all I have to say for today! Let me know if you have any questions, or if there’s any aspect of the game development struggle you’d like me to talk about! See you next time!!!

…Huh? What? I forgot the tiny little teaser? Oh, alright, fine. 

Here it is.

What on earth could this be…?

Alright, bye for real <3 AND DON’T FORGET TO WISHLIST THE GAME ON STEAM ALSO IT REALLY HELPS BECAUSE STEAM’S ALGORITHM IS MORE LIKELY TO SHOW OFF GAMES WITH A HIGH AMOUNT OF WISHLISTS THAT’S THE REASON WHY GAME DEVS ALWAYS ASK TO WISHLIST!!! OKAY BYE!!!!