Update 2 is Now Live!

Update 2 sees a fairly large expansion to the final city, Venice, which was previously very short because I simply didn't have time to develop it properly during Ludum Dare. To give you a spoiler free idea on how much this update adds, both the word and passage count have more than doubled compared to the previous update.

Yet the length of a play-through remains about 20-25 minutes. Why? Because Venice is built around branching options and player choices, making it far more interactive than the earlier parts of the game.

As before, some choices matter in big ways, others in smaller ones, but all are meant to allow you as the player to do what feels right to you on this journey.

Venice

• Each of the two major paths through Venice has been expanded considerably.
  • Previously, there were two ways you could encounter Venice when you reached it, each with their own ending. Now each path is its own version of Venice, and there are many different ways to experience each.
• A third, hidden path has been added, accessible through either of the other paths in Venice.
  • This path is considered a third major ending to the game, though there are technically a few different “ends” based on choices you make.
• The postcard mechanic returns in miniature for one of the paths through Venice.

Replaying

• Upon reaching The End of the game, you have the ability to replay from Amsterdam, Luxembourg, or Venice.
  • This fixes the replay bug from previous versions of the game, and is meant to make it easier to explore Venice fully and experience different endings to the game after your first playthrough. If you want to see everything in the game, expect to replay multiple times.

Other Prose Edits

• Made minor changes around references to Ludum Dare and other indie dev terms.
  • This was an action item from my original development roadmap, done in the hope that people less familiar with these terms could still understand what was being mentioned.
• In Paul's first letter at the beginning of the game, his final words have been moved into a postscript.
  • Because they are referenced later in the game, I didn't want them to accidentally be missed.
• The postcard from Luxembourg has been adjusted so that you can only tell Paul you were offered a lift if you were actually offered a lift.
• Other minor prose tweaks for flow and consistency.

Graphics

• Added a background visual for the city of Luxembourg.
• Improved the background visual for Venice.
• Added backgrounds for a note you can write in Venice.
• Remade the Luxembourg Postcard front. (comparison image included in this devlog)
  • The previous iteration had a lot of little issues that bugged me, so I completely remade it with a new technique: essentially making a diorama in Blender, doing a line art pass, tracing the render as a bitmap in Inkscape, cleaning it up and replacing it on the postcard's background.
  • If you played version 1.1 of Postcards, you'll notice something is missing—I'm my excitement trying to figure out this new technique, I forgot the train! Oops!

Known Issues

• Resetting more than once fails to reset visits properly, meaning you'll see some links in a purple sort of color. 
  • While this can be useful to make sure you click on links you haven't seen before, I had noticed that sometimes the wrong links are different colors, as if you'd clicked on them when you actually didn't. My workaround seems to only work for one instance of resetting through. This is a visual issue only; it doesn't break gameplay, and will be fixed in a future update.
• The graphical issue from last update concerning the Luxembourg postcard backside, seen when playing on screens less than ~15 inches.
• A similar graphical issue for the background of the note written in Venice. Both are slated to be fixed in Update 3.

Looking Ahead

• I am planning on trying to move the story over to Snowman 3.0 for Update 3, with with an earlier version of Snowman, or a different story format all together as fallback. This will mainly be a backend change that will make the code prettier but should also allow me to fix some of the minor issues mentioned above. I originally slated it for the end of 2023 in the Postcards Roadmap, but sometime early 2024 is looking far more likely due to the new version of Snowman and while I start up work on my next project, code named Project Airship.
• Update 4 is expected to be the final update, with small epilogues for each ending, and should be ready within a month of Update 3.