Patch v1.07

• Fixed issue where goals that gave you an egg would not actually give you an egg.

• Fixed an issue where display dogs could try to die from old age, causing errors to spew (and slowing the game down slightly).

• Massively reduced base memory usage. The game should use way less memory now. There still seem to be some slight memory leaks when switching scenes, and I'm still going to investigate this further, but reducing the base usage by this much should massively help reduce issues for people who have been having them. Not only that, but the game should now load more quickly for everyone. Hilariously, this also means the Unity splash screen now shows up before the game starts (at least on my computer). It was always there, but the time it took the game to load everything in memory when it launched was often causing it to get skipped.

My strategy for reducing memory usage so far was twofold. The first issue is that I was using AssetBundles to load all the in-game objects dynamically. I've been working on this game for so long that I don't remember specifically why I decided to do this originally, but at this point in development it doesn't appear necessary any longer. I was still having the asset bundles point to assets that existed in the build itself, so the main things it was doing was adding an extra step to my build process, and storing redundant data in memory. This was likely left over from an old system and just never got revisited.

The second issue, and I'm more than a little embarrassed to admit this, is that none of the game's audio was compressed. Doing so just a little bit resulted in some pretty massive savings in memory. Although I've been making games a long time, I've never been the sole person implementing things in one this large, and it's been a while since I released anything on my own. It should've been done at launch, but it honestly just slipped my mind amid everything else. In any case, these assets are compressed now! The drop in audio quality should barely be noticeable (if at all), but if there's any particular asset you're hearing issues with, file a bug and I'll look into it! You can also always buy the soundtrack for some lossless copies of the songs themselves :')

As always, I'll be monitoring things closely to make sure this patch didn't break anything new. Tomorrow I'm going to be looking into helping folks out who have been having framerate issues. I might not be able to fix that entirely, but I think there are a few options I can give to help out on the GPU side at least.