Almost eight months have passed since the last bugfix release of The Tragedy of Eiko. As announced back then, this new version no longer bundles Tsukundere – you will instead have to fetch it separately from Gitlab. I imagine this won't be too much of a difficulty for those, who already got this or any other of my novels running, but as there's still occasional complaints about them not running on Windows, I wanted to disclaim that here.

So, what changed? Let's start with the things, that didn't change: Despite switching to non-bundled Tsukundere, Eiko is still compiled to bytecode (unlike other novels of mine, which use the lazy approach of running the interpreted version by having Tsukundere manage the load-path). This means that Eiko unlike my other novels still needs to be installed before being run. The novel is also still translated to German, though the translation workflow is different.

Now to the new stuff. The first difference you'll see is the new title image, that's also been translated to German. Aiko's and Hana's assets were updated to their Newstyle versions, which Noraneko Games makes freely available (in terms of free beer). Some dialogue was changed accordingly. Noraneko's Nora now also makes an appearance to speak out some things, that needed to be said. Finally, a shorter third walkthrough was added, which again has two possible routes depending on whether you're cheating on Aiko or not.

There were also some smaller improvements under the hood. For instance, "eiko tragedy" is now a single module as with my other novels and the launcher uses Tsukundere's CLI, albeit via Guile.

Revisiting Eiko has been a decent amount of fun and I'll probably be drawing some lectures from it for Tsukundere 0.3.2 or 0.4.0.