REC/REW dev update 6 - web version available

Once again a lot of thanks to KeyboardKrieger for his really simple suggestion. Which lead to one of those "wow" moments I happen to experience every now and then (never had one? Do let life surprise you, it's fun!). I made a quick search on reddit and found out Ren'Py has a neat function that will generate a web-based build of the game.

Yeah, why haven't I put a web version of my game yet?

I mean, now it's exactly the right time for such a workaround: REC/REW is still relatively small, and I'm basically unknown. Why not putting a mean to let people play my game directly on their brower rather than asking them to install gods-know what kind of malicous SW on their PCs? I mean, I know my game does not contain anything nasty, but what about other people?

The day REC/REW will become a big hit and I'll be a renowned VN developer people will flock at me begging to download whatever I put online, but right now...

Just kidding, of course. But - hey, dreams come for free, don't you know?

Plus, it gave me yet another chance to see how a better UI is urgently required (already in my to-do list as I wrote... somewhere).

So, here we are. REC/REW, the web version. Right now it's just a link that will open the game in a new page. I will have to optimize the graphics (ie. doing stuff like converting all png files to webp and perhaps reasoning on the resolution of the game - presently 1280x720, I might decide to make it a bit smaller to shrink the game size, who knows...), but I'll leave that for another update. My workplace has a 2-weeks closure for Christmas holydays and I was just looking for a way to fill those days with something to do ^^;!

A final word of caution: back when I said Ren'Py has a function to generate a web-based build of a game I was not being... totally sincere. I should have said, Ren'Py 7 has an option to generate blah-blah-blah. The problem is, REC/REW was made with Ren'Py 8. I'm 99% sure no real life-threatening problem will arise from that - I had a quick run through the game and everything played out smoothly. I'm currently doing an in-depth check, I expect issues to be nothing more than a few characters not showing up correctly (I've read somewhere that Ren'Py 8 runs on Python 3 which in turns supports 8 bit Unicode, while Ren'Py 7 does not).

Should something go south I'll throw an hotfix as soon as I can!