YOU CAN ACTUALLY PLAY FROZEN FORWARD NOW!!

If you didn't notice, Frozen Forward was various flavors of a mess for the first few days it existed on itch. I hadn't finished the project by the end of the RPG Maker Horror Jam, but, for reasons unbeknownst to me, I submitted an early alpha version of it anyway. This version was missing a lot of graphical elements and almost all audio; I hadn't even made a custom title screen or adjusted the pause menus yet. If you paused the game at any point, you would see the internal names of the Actors like "Clara Hoodup Largest Hands" alongside standard RPG stats like HP and TP. (These mean nothing in the game, by the way. There aren't any battles.)

A day later, I finally had a version of the game with most of the audio I wanted to add. I deployed a browser and Windows build, uploaded it to itch, updated the page to make it a little more enticing, had a friend play through it, and...

I mentioned it on my Bluesky, but there were game-breaking bugs that only appeared on completely fresh saves of fully-deployed versions of my projects in the second half of the game. It started with a very innocuous "YouWin.ogg could not be loaded!" error message, which went away and played the sound effect normally if you just clicked retry. This minor error was a harbinger of doom, though, as I discovered (after spending a day changing the entire audio system in Frozen Forward) it was caused by a precache plugin that I used for a LOT of assets.

For some reason, most of the assets that I chose to be precached simply weren't loading. If RPG Maker itself failed to play a sound effect, it would just throw an error and play the sound anyway after hitting "retry." The problem came with the fact that I was using plugins to manage both my audio and pictures, and if those plugins failed to load an asset... they just wouldn't load the asset. Music wouldn't play correctly, images wouldn't exist when they needed to, errors would be thrown up any time timing-sensitive sound effects needed to play... It was miserable for a game like Frozen Forward, which relies heavily on its visual storytelling and audio design. I was heartbroken when I learned I'd released a version of the game with some of my favorite scenes completely mangled by these problems. According to itch's analytics, I got at least one rating and a few views on this release, so I know there's a handful of people out there who just played a really bad version of something  I poured my soul into.

I spent a lot of time yesterday fixing this problem. I installed a plugin that stores audio in a cache after it's been played, and I adjusted my code to play important tracks and sound effects at 0% volume in any scene before they show up. This took a while, as Frozen Forward is a decently-sized game, but so far it seems to work really well. At least well-enough for the current version of the game to be something I'm comfortable showing people.

I'm sure some minor issues will still show up here and there, and there are still a few features I'd like to add (it's not even v1.0.0, after all.), but for now, I'm finally done. I really hope you enjoy it.