The Ditty of Carmeana
Option to fix the economy
In addition, a bunch of typo fixes, an update to the game controller DB, and a new item.
Annoying notifications you can't shut off
That's right, the Ditty of Carmeana now has Trading Cards. Surreptitiously delivered to you whether you want them or not.
But hey, once you've waited it out, that's fifteen whole cents to put toward your purchase of Naked Mole Rat Simulator!
Or, if you're one of them, you can buy and trade cards and create badges or whatever.
Of course, if you don't already own the Ditty of Carmeana, you'll need to buy the game to get the cards HINT, and since it's on sale (or soon will be), now would be a great time.
NEW BUILD
While I'm making an announcement, I might as well mention the I recently put up a new build (1967) so you might see an update. It's mostly typo corrections, but I did add one bit of voice acting that I hadn't added when I released.
Ditty of Carmeana on Sale
Now is your chance to stick it to the mean ol' imperialist capitalists! This week, The Ditty of Carmeana is on sale, and when you buy it on sale, that means less money going into the pockets of that evil union-wrecking mega-corporation, Tampered Evidence LLC. So let's stick it to the corporatofascists and buy the game, and then we can all frolic in a Utopian world of love and harmony and flowers as we play The Ditty of Carmeana!
Disclosure: Capitialism doesn't actually work that way.
The Ditty of Carmeana is officially "Playable" on Steam Deck
The funny thing about this is, Steam sent me an email in what I would call a subtly admonishing tone about how a few things about my game prevent it from being "Verified". Yeah, I'm like, I'm a single indie developer who never once tested this on a Steam Deck and didn't really do anything specifically to make it compatible with Steam Deck. The fact that it's "Playable" with no effort on my part is pretty good actually.
The reason it is "merely" Playable are a few minor controls oddities, like you have to bring up keyboard to enter your name, and sometimes it shows keyboard/mouse controls, and text that's a bit too small for their threshold on the small screen.
Another funny thing is that Steam chose to review this for Steam Deck, I didn't request a review (that I can remember). I'm guessing they chose this minor indie cult classic to review because I had a native Linux build and a fair number of Deck users.
Typos
Also a minor change that probably won't help fix a issue that I sometimes see where mouse clicks don't register. Also, maybe, a new limited sneak preview of something I would like to add to the game, someday.
Pre-Valentine's Day Discount
OMG What better gift for your lover on Valentine's Day than The Ditty of Carmeana? On sale the week before Valentine's day. Squee!
It's the greatest love story of all time. A really cute boy from a backward farm town goes on a mission to Rescue the Princess™, but I have a feeling he's gonna find love with a certain Info Booth Girl. So buy the Ditty of Carmeana see if I can reel him in!!! <3 <3 <3
New achievement, and bug fix
Background: There is enough information in the game, somewhere or other, to be able to pass the final exam for Bowtudgel History at the University of Chingaim. However, most people who pass the test don't actually scour the kingdom looking for scraps of history (which was my original intention for that achievement), since it's quite obvious you can cheat on the test, in game. You don't even have to look on-line for the answers. It's an interesting story of how one feature of a game was sacrificed to improve another feature. But I still wanted something like an achievement for actually digging up the answers, and this is it.
To get the achievement, you need to visit all the places, or do all the things necessary, to collect the information needed to pass the test. For instance, if information needed to answer one question is found in a book, on a sign, or as part of a conversation, you have to do that thing, andfor every question. Then, in the same game, you have to pass the Bowtudgel History test, without viewing a corrected test.
Also, fixed a bug for crashes that can occur when you have very extensive save files.
Some fixes to frame rate issues and other exciting improvements
FRAME RATE FIX
It turns out that for certain people, the game would slow down noticeably if they turned the frame rate above a certain value (the exact rate the slowdown occurs probably depends on the monitor and graphics settings). I figured the slowdown was because I wrote the game in Python, which is not exactly a fast language.
I had also supposed that if a typical gamer turns up the frame rate and notices the game is slowed down, they'd know to turn the frame rate back down. So I didn't consider this to be a very important issue. Apparently I was wrong.
So, this week, I begrudgingly went to implement frame rate throttling to help people not play the game in slow motion. But when I did a bunch of testing, I found that the code was perfectly capable of running full speed at 120 fps even on fairly old hardware (like my old system with a non-Ryzen CPU). The slowdown was actually caused by a timing issue that caused the game to skip a vsync, resulting in up to a 50% slowdown.
The good news is, I don't have to implement throttling. But the game does now limit the actual frame rate to the monitor refresh rate. (As in, if you set the frame rate to 120 but the monitor's refresh rate is 60, game will run at 60 fps. It would be pointless for the game's frame rate to be higher than that.)
No, I did not and have no plans to make monitor refresh rate adjustable from within the game. If you find that your Ditty of Carmeana Experience is ruined by viewing it less than 120 frames per second, and your equipment supports it, there is probably a graphics driver utility that lets you override the monitor refresh rate when playing the game in full screen.
DIALOGUE UPDATES
I've updated the dialogue of one or two characters to make it easier for the player to find various things in the game.
You still have to read it though. If you just blow the dialogue this change not going to help.
A NEW APP
I added a new app to Tabitha's touchscreen. This app has no effect on gameplay but does reveal some minor trivia about how I came up with certain character and place names.
In order to obtain this app, you need to cook up the following recipe with an alchemist:
- 4 eyes of newt
- 2 scales of dragon
- 7 teeth of wolf
- 5 maws of shark
- 1 root of hemlock
- 5 galls of goat
If you beat the game with this app in your inventory, the app can carry over to the next game, which is helpful because there are some things it reveals in the opening cut scene.
A new "Controls Help" app
Therefore, I've added a new app, Controls Help, for people not to notice. The Controls Help App just shows the cheat sheet, and it appears in your inventory retroactively.
Also, fixed an issue in DNA Replicator mini-game where it runs too fast if you increase the frame rate.
Bored update, meaning I decided to update the game because I was bored
Also, this update contains the long-promised change to make the Speed Boots quite a bit less annoying.
Finally an update to the gamepad db.