The Snowman Update is Here!

Another little update from me :)

I just finished the latest update to Postcards, which converted the story format from Harlowe 3.3.7 to Snowman 2.02, as well as integrated the p5.js library. Unlike other updates, player facing changes are minimal by design, but on the backend, everything is completely different.

I'm planning on doing a deep dive into the process of converting the game at some point, as I learned a lot along the way, but that is beyond the scope of this post. I might do it in a series of tech discussion posts or in a postmortem after the final update, but regardless, if you are interested in any specific aspect of the conversion process or working in Snowman, leave a comment down below.

Changes

• The first change is a removal of the back arrow, which allowed you to go back and easily revisit passages. This feature isn't present in Snowman, sorry!
• While most changes are invisible, I fixed a couple of typos, changed how some ellipses and quotes worked, and maybe fixed the odd awkwardly written sentence.
• The biggest change is in the graphics of the postcard mechanic. Rather than being blue-text links to click on the body of the postcard, different options are presented to the side or top of the body of the postcard, which fills in as you click on them. This was my original vision of how postcard writing would work, and I find this implementation to be much cleaner looking. I hope you'll agree!
• Finally, all graphical glitches on laptop and tablet size screens should finally be resolved. Do note that there will be issues on mobile screens though, and I currently don't have plans to optimize for mobile viewing.

Future Updates

The long-planned Epilogue update is still slated to be released soon, ideally within a month. But I've been quite busy getting my newest game, and first attempt at a big project, up and running so Update 4 may slip into mid-March.

Further Context for Update 3