Hello there!

Now, let's get to some technical stuff I've been able to accomplish. You can skip and go straight to release notes if you ware not interested! I want to be as transparent with you as I can be regarding development of the game. 

I used paper-doll like system used in many other games to reduce the size of the game - make animations less memory intensive and faster load times. Visual Novel parts of the game were also changed so each model had it's origin point (the anchor point of the sprite) be around the same place, near middle of the sprite. That let's me control faster and better of the positions as I no longer have to assume or calculate pixels on the screen (I might exaggerating a bit). That change required from me to go into every single event currently in the game and changing each event, adding basic positions of the sprites (so now it's basic character model, blinking on top of that and talking on top of that), changing the way blinking works (it's now universal for all characters), add background to animations and of course position everyone in the events, from the start.

I really underestimated how much events there is in SCC at this point and how much time and energy it will take to fix everything. 

You might encounter visual bugs (like eyes blinking at the side of the screen), I'm sorry for that, I tried to fix everything!

So you might be asking how much space did I save with that. My developer build reduced it's size from <10 GB of space to 7GB, but thanks to GMS PNG compression to QOI that was introduced earlier this year it translates close to 400MB for client builds. It doesn't sound like much, but at this point I don't think I can optimize the size of the game better without losing quality in frames of animations. And it's something that had to be done faster than later. And now we are finished with it. 

What about loading times? Loading times for big saves with unlocked stations and GH animations (on camera) didn't changed much, around 5-10 seconds for faster machines, around 30 seconds faster for weaker machines. But there is significant speed up for new game loading and for loading each individual sprite that wasn't pre-fetched beforehand.  

Here, there are definitely things I can to better to speed up loading times and make all important textures load in the background (and not everything at once while you are loading your save), but I was unsuccessful with doing that without stopping the game in it's tracks. I still need to figure this one out, but that's for the later date.

Other than that, previously mentioned changes to the food and drink icons and client's bubble icons! Now we have a more interesting variety in the cafe's menu with new food and prettier drinks! It should now better represent their price differences. Shop wasn't yet updated with the new names for drinks and food, so please keep that in mind! Will be fixed in the upcoming update next week!

Also, I've added 3 missing nsfw animations for backrooms. Now we have a whole set of them for each room!

I also used a different method of building game versions from GMS2. I had to do a whole bunch of gymnastics to make it work so I hope it was worth it. It should boost a bit more the speed (or smoothness) of the game. If you will encounter any serious bugs with it, let me know.

Secret Care Cafe release notes ver 0.7.30:

- 3 new nsfw animations added to cleaning closet (Rai, Cookie and Cynthia x Sergil)

- added 3 cgs for take out skill for Cynthia and two best friends (needs Cynthia's take out overlevel, skin variation of singular cg)

- added new food and drink icons and new need bubbles for the clients

- now all characters can blink while talking while in their VN poses 

- reduced size of the game and optimized loading times and animations

- optimized the way sprites are being drawn that should lower a bit the ram usage on slower machines 

- few small changes to existing events (positions, characters' movement, expressions, animations speed, etc)  

- fixed bug that let you see nsfw animations in backrooms while you were not secret lover with Cookie and Rai

- fixed bug in some events that prevented business client to play a speaking animation 

- fixed bug in few instances that showed random lines during animations if you changed the size of the window (if you see it again, report it and i'll fix it)

- fixed bug in gallery that let you right click to open an event when you were viewing cgs

- fixed bug in status effect, sometime they were on top of each other

- fixed bug with Student and Couple that was sometimes showing wrong favorite maid

- fixed Ame's summer skin cgs for take out (only 8 was available in gallery while all 12 were already put in the game) and descriptions of how to unlock them

- fixed a bug that checked for Rai's unlocked cgs in Ame's summer and christmas skins for special care and fixed number of cgs to unlock for Ame

- fixes and small changes to in-between scenes transitions that sometimes stayed even when they finished their action (lagging the game after some time)

- some more optimization work (a bunch of code changes)

- fixed a lot of typos (events and tutorial screens)

As always, if you will find any bugs or have suggestions, please do report it to me, either by comment, private message or on Discord.
Check out my Patreon page for Secret Care Cafe version 0.7.31, 5 new events (main, sfw and nsfw with client) and bugfixes, Patreon only NSFW Valentines harem event with 3 main girls and NSFW Winter solo events for each of 4 maids!

Have a great week!

Rare Alex