Hey all, Akabaka here!

Excited to say that the Chromatose team and I have released the 2.0.0 demo! 

Before we got back to developing the remaining scenes and battles, I wanted to take about a month to stop, rebuild, and implement every feature requested by backers and followers, and here it is: 

Firstly, the entire game has been rebuilt to 1280x720, so in addition to every shot and CG being 200px wider, you'll have a wider view of each level, which I think not only helps the immersion, but also helps you see the 'bigger picture' version of each room a little better, and helps things not feel as cluttered.  This involved me manually redrawing pretty much a thousand something assets, but the difference is absolutely worth it.  Also, there is a fullscreen toggle feature available from the settings menu!  It has a few minor texture bugs related to it, but it should be fine to use.  (I still recommend using the windowed 1280x720 since it's the game's appearance as I specifically designed it)

Second, there were some concerns about the blandness of the pause menu and the noisiness of the set deck menu, so I overhauled the pause menu with all sorts of juicy goodness, and re-tuned the set deck menu to be a little more stylish and a little less visually noisy.  

 (GIFs are kinda big so they might take a while to load)

One of the most dramatic changes I made is toward optimization.  There were some complaints about lag and a few times where peoples' computers couldn't handle draw-on-demand type asset loading.  Chromatose is an art-intensive game, so I put a good amount of effort toward streamlining and art prefetching to get the game running as smoothly as possible outside of loading screens for 2.0.0.  The results are dramatic -- take a look at this 'Race to the phone' comparison between the 2.0.0 and 1.6.6:

Same goes with the battle system -- the performance boost is ridiculous. 

In the midst of the 1280x720 overhaul, I also took some time to polish many of the sets from the demo to bring it up to the quality I expect from the rest of the game.  The most dramatic changes are to the Sinking Schoolgrounds, Isaac's room, and a few other hallways and rooms. 

Primadonna's locker room looks like a locker room now

Isaac's room is more tonally appropriate and feels on-level with the amount of polish in Lilith's room now.

The Sinking Schoolgrounds look more like sinking schoolgrounds now.  

But going back to other requested features, we have a BUNCH more that we implemented also within the last month:

1. Skip function.  Hold S and it'll quickly skip through dialogue.  Useful for when you get bad endings or as I continue to release patches!

2.  Functional in-game log: hit L and scroll through the last 50 something lines of dialogue!  Really important feature since you need to pay close attention to what is said.   

3. Settings menu: Change the VN text speed, toggle fullscreen, and change the volume of audio groups! The sound mixer will prove incredibly useful for those looking to do any sort of recording, be it sound isolation, Let's Plays (especially if you're doing voices, I'm looking at you, VAs), or if you ever just want to stop and take in the view with some ambience.  

4. Characters have descriptive names until you learn their real names:  Just an immersion-boosting feature that was requested. 

The rest are just quality of life/polish fixes not worth individually noting (like the new VN dialogue box) or organizational changes on our end to keep things running smoothly.  

All in all, the Chromatose team had a very productive month.  Can't wait to get back to working on the terrifying Yellow Arc story, which is coming up next!  It'll be the last public release, and after that it'll switch over to Backer beta access only ($25+).  

Our backerkit is over here for preorders by the way (if you've already pledged, don't worry about it unless you want to upgrade)  https://chromatose.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders 

You can grab 2.0.0 from our itch.io or Game Jolt!

 https://akabaka.itch.io/chromatose 

 https://gamejolt.com/games/CHROMATOSE/397553 

Remember to leave a rating!

Happy hunting,

Akabaka