Hi everyone, we’re back after recovering from Gamescom, and the stress that has been the release of our first game, with our latest patch!
This one took a bit longer to figure out, because we made changes to the save system, and that requires a ton of testing and consideration, to make sure nothing breaks. Plus, it seems like the life we’ve been putting on hold before the release of TB finally caught up with us! Two of our team members got married last month, and we all had to spend some much-needed time to take care of our personal lives, after the crunch-free but still very all-consuming development that was Tiny Bookshop.
Without further ado, let’s jump into what we’ve fixed and addressed with this update 🔧♥️
Fixed some UI scaling issues and some edge case problems with dialog bubbles
Fixed some item and book tags.
Fixed some more typos.
Improved Save System to try to recover saves automatically and support multiple users. This is a preparation for enabling Steam Auto Cloud in the future.
From now on, the correct directory of your save files is:
Windows:
%userprofile%\AppData\LocalLow\neoludic games\Tiny Bookshop\YOUR_STEAM_ID\Saves\
Mac:
~/Library/Application Support/neoludic games/Tiny Bookshop/YOUR_STEAM_ID/Saves/
Linux:
~/.config/unity3d/neoludic games/Tiny Bookshop/YOUR_STEAM_ID/Saves/
The save files will be loaded from old paths and will be automatically moved once you save. The game saves during any scene load during game play.
There is still the archive we introduced, and the Backup folder in your saves, just to make sure your files can never get fully lost! For this we introduced an automatic way, trying to recover the saves if something breaks. This should prevent some of you from having to deal with copying save files from one folder to another in case a save got corrupted.
We sadly can’t automatically port over the save files here, as this has to do with Steam deciding to default to Proton instead of Linux to run our game. Proton uses an emulated file system, so we can’t “reach” the previously created files from within the game. We contacted Steam Support about this, but we aren’t able to change the default behaviour ourselves.
Once we have cloud sync enabled, we’ll return the game to run natively on your deck as intended, but this requires careful consideration to make sure any save files created between the change Valve introduced, and the change back are synced using Steam Cloud.
Until then, we have two fixes for you:
If you want to continue on Linux this is the version we will support in the future (Recommended):
Select Properties->Compatibility and choose Steam Linux Runtime from the dropdown to run natively the Linux version on your device, as we intended.
If you want to stay on Proton and your save files are missing:
Enter Desktop mode, head to “~/.config/unity3d/neoludic games/Tiny Bookshop/YOUR_STEAM_ID/Saves/” or if you have not played on the current patch,yet: “~/.config/unity3d/neoludic games/Tiny Bookshop/Steam/Saves/” and copy the files there to ""~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/2133760/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/LocalLow/neoludic games/Tiny Bookshop/YOUR_STEAM_ID/Saves""
For those who are really into the tech side of things, we dug deep to figure out what happened the two times there were save shenanigans:
So we noticed the following:
We are using the Unity game engine, and noticed that its persistentDataPath is not actually persistent. The behaviour of the persistentDataPath changes on Mac if there is a different folder under a specific path available, which was the case after we tested Auto-cloud in development mode.
That this would happen despite setting the development mode toggle was not clearly documented on the Steamworks backend, but this led to the mac version reading from a different folder after the folder showed up.
We have fixed this by directly specifying the correct path across all platforms, so this should never happen again!
On Steam Deck, the problem lies with the Steam Deck compatibility review. By default, they only test using Proton, even if a Linux version is available. We noticed they had done a compatibility review, but wanted to hold off on publishing it, as we were still working on adjusting the text scaling and were pretty busy with everything else around release. Somehow, this review was published regardless. As soon as the review was live, Steam changed the default compatibility setting for the Steam Deck from “Linux Native” (What we intended, tested and support) to Proton (Which works, but is not being tested by us). Proton “simulates” the windows file system, leading to the game looking for save files in a different path. We’ll work with Steam Support to undo this default in the future, but only after we enable Steam Cloud for a bit, to make sure the saves between Proton and Linux versions on the Steam Deck are synced correctly.