These symbols kept popping up when I was reading and really breaks the immersion would it be possible to get rid of them and also Abigail’s picture doesn’t appear when going to her profile and I’d love to post screen shots but it says I can’t
I’m sorry, symbols? 
If you use Discord, you can send the screenshots on After Dark’s server.
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I feel guilty about all the time I’m taking for the next update, but I’m really going overboard with the choices to provide the most immersive gaming experience possible. From when MC leaves his parents’ house until the end of the third day, there are already more than 200 possible choices. There are several huge possible outcomes based on one’s stats, choices, and personality; every single choice has some kind of consequence, just like in real life, and it is really hard to play two runs with the same outcome. There are scenes with less than a 1% chance of showing up!
Thus, I am very sorry to be so slow; I promise that I am taking so long only to provide you with the best of the best and the most I can do with the time I have available.
Thank you for your patience!
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Hey honestly choice games take such a long time to develop it’s completely understandable, especially with life stuff taking up a majority of the time we have.
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That’s true, luckily I got my master’s degree a month ago and now I only have my daytime job to keep me busy. It’s great to be able to devote more time to After Dark’s development, but I still need 48-hour long days! 
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Not going to lie, completely forgot about this WIP existence, nice to know its still being worked on.
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That’s fair and completely understandable! It’s my job to pop up from time to time and remind you all that I’m still alive and working on it 
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@Daleko This seems good but the only thing throwing it off is the plethora of random symbols at the beginning and end of many of the words.
Examples under summary (everything in bold):
Summary
You run away like crazy, without even closing the front door behind you. There seems to be a frenzy of rage on the street, but you’re not going to stop and think about it. Tears make it difficult for you to see which direction you’re heading—you run without thinking about the direction you’re taking, letting your legs take you as far as possible from the horrifying scene you have just witnessed.
“It can’t be real,” you keep repeating to yourself. “It can’t have happened for real.”
You need to catch your breath. You stop on a side street, having no idea where you are, or how much time has passed. The moon is high in the sky, currently covered in a thick blanket of smoke. You breathe hard, letting the air fill your sore lungs. You would like to stop and rest, but after a few moments you realize you’re not alone.
“Who’s there?” you ask hesitantly, without moving from your dark corner. You were hoping to sound more assertive, but your voice is panicked and your heart continues to pound.
As the silent shadowy figure moves forward a few steps, you can see it clearly in the cone of light of a street lamp. “No, no, no,” you mutter, slowly backing away. The man staggers like a drunk in your direction. You’re not sure he has already seen you—you’re in the dark, after all—and you’d rather not get seen at all.
Summary
The only thought you can formulate once you get out of the store is how much the town looks absolutely… normal.
The main street is empty, and it could almost feel like a normal morning with little activity, were it not for some misplaced things. Smoke still comes out of some windows, and a few cars and houses have been set on fire; on the asphalt there are stains of dried blood, silent trails of life that retreat inside the houses and other temporary shelters.
But then… you see them.
Mother and child, you assume. Embraced in what was perhaps meant, for them, as the last attempt to save themselves from their burning home, or perhaps from something worse.
The kid’s glassy, gelatinous eyes are turned in your direction. His mouth is ajar, his saliva glistening in the sun while the congested blood beneath him is dark, almost brownish red.
His mother, on the other hand, is facing away, and you can only see her long black hair scattered across the face of the kid next to her.
You feel the nausea violently squeezing your stomach, flashbacks from the previous night threatening to come back to your memory. Until now, it has been easy to stifle the brief, sudden confused memories in the dim light. But this, in the full light of the morning, is…
“Come on,” Michael murmurs suddenly. You are abruptly pulled out of your thoughts; you nod, your mouth too dry to answer with words, as you follow him. The back road appears to be quiet. You watch Michael as he takes out his smartphone.
“I can’t connect to online maps, but luckily my smartphone has a built-in compass,†he explains. You simply nod and tightly squeeze the shoulder straps of your backpack, following him in the direction he has chosen. Michael is quite tall, above average…
Summary
The city looks like stopped in time by a spell. Despite the breeze that moves whatever it can†the leaves of the trees, leaflets fallen from the walls, an occasional plastic bag—everything is extremely quiet, perhaps too much. You don’t feel very comfortable.
Summary
The woman is now in a crying fit. She nods, looking at you through her tears, but is unable to stop. “I-I don’t know what’s going on! I co-come… I come to town be-because I needed to†¦ t-to… and…” she keeps stuttering. Now that you’re closer, you crouch down a few steps away from her, and get a better look at her. As the woman wipes her cheeks with the backs of her hands, you feel a huge weight fall into your stomach.
In the end, it’s Michael who says what you’re both thinking.
"…oh my God. Please tell me you’re not due soon."
I would restart and screenshot every area with it; but it’s a great amount of them lol.
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Nah don’t worry, I’m already aware of it—it’s an upload issue on Dashingdon. I would re-upload the files, but at the moment I can’t do it on the public release as I’m adding/writing content on them.
I will work on separated files other than those uploaded starting with the next update, so that I don’t have to wait for the next one in case of problems like this.
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Oh okay!! Also,
About how old is Micheal? I’m picking up that he likes to make demands of the MC and MC just does what he says; as if Micheal is just Sargent of the Army. Is he older than Us?
Like I chose, I’m going to sleep, Mike can do what he wants… Ofc here goes Captain America telling Radi (my MC), that he basically has no choice and MC instantly switched up and agreed to take the first shift. Like Nahhh Radi, stand ten toes, if sleeping outside is the outcome so be it.
Lol like… Who does Mikey Boy think he is?
I think i’m going to make it my duty to annoy him at every turn at this point. I’m already down to 8% 
Hopefully Rain will make life a little better.
Oh, and does the demo end at the
Take abby to the shed/ go back with Micheal option?
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Haha, he’s 17 and he’s your standard “paladin” kind of person (pro tip: you can check the characters’ FriendBook profiles to get or review info about them!)
Luckily, other people will have different personalities/behaviours, and being strongly liked or strongly disliked by them will result in… well… but this was almost a spoiler, wasn’t it? 
I’m not sure where the current version ends, but it’s around that choice, yes. Feel free to join the Discord server to ask things/chat about it as well!
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Ah, one of my favorite character archetypes!
My nerdy MC is head over heels for him already 
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Game updated!
Yes, I’m still alive. I finally made it! Now let’s cut to the chase:
- The story is now playable to the end of the second chapter;
- All the characters from route #1 have been introduced;
- Secondary things added, collectables, a weapon system to be further developed, various stuff;
- Prologue and other parts rewritten and expanded;
- Some graphic changes;
- Last but not least—fixed bugs, lots of bugs, too many bugs.
Okay, that’s it. Have fun!
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Hey love the game and its take on the apocalypse, also love the mystery behind the ghouls (as my character opted to call them). Congrats in your masters! I just played and loved the demo but wanted to bring a few things to your attention (below there are spoilers and I’m not sure how to blur them on mobile)
(1) it’s my understanding that Michael essentially persuades Abby to bury her child with her partner at her home, but the story afterwards doesn’t reflect this? Like I’m still allowed to “check on abby and her baby” and she’s talking about feeding her baby even after that scene.
(2) there’s an error after Rain meets up with me and we decide to head for the water. The scene where the group is attacking two kids? It doesnt allow me to go beyond that scene no matter which of the two options I pick. The error reads “routeone line 8236: invalid@{} at letter 16; ‘maxgen’ is equal to 0 which is not a positive number”
(3)Some of the scenes with rain are a little confusing for me. It’s my understanding (with my bi mc) that Rain is a girl who used male pronouns online. Is that telling me they’re trans, or is Rain a girl who simply prefers using male pronouns? Because afterwards in conversation Rain is referred to as “he”. Maybe a conversation where Abby/Michael asks about Rain can be used to clarify?
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Thank you for the info! No, there was some problem during testing whereby some numerical values were reversed (so live/dead child, male/female Max, male/female Rain). I thought I had solved the problem but it turns out it’s more extensive than I thought, I’ll get back to work on it now. In ten minutes everything should be working properly though!
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So, I think at night in tobaco shop where mc meet Abbie I think when I choose option to loot the shop it takes me back to the beginning of 2nd chapter could’ve a bug please fix that.
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Uhm, no, it can’t happen—I just looked at the code. If you can recreate the bug, could you please post here a screenshot of the choice and where it leads you to?
Thanks!
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Nice to have you back!
So, bugs - I noticed two: in the offeribg the trade scene Kay called us by our sibling’s name; and if you choose to fight the zombie in the house at the end of chapter 2 and choose to arm Div and yourself, the game will offer only an option to choose the weapon you give and will say that you don’t have a weapon, making you step aside, there will be no option ti choose your weapon like if you choose to only arm yourself.
Also I’m personally peeved by 1 use sunscreen bottles. Like, there is a lot of product in them and if you wear clothes you need little. It makes sense for us to be properly clothed, we spend the first night in the clothing store. Maybe it will help a little to count not bottles but uses? Like you found a bottle with like 3 portions left, tough luck. And reapplying it too, you kinda have too if you spend a lot of time outside.
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Hi. First of all, those bugs are very odd. I will check them out as soon as I get home. Thanks for the report!
I also wanted to thank you for the suggestion about the sunscreen. I will definitely work on that for the next update!
@Anarore_Kriptih I should have fixed the bugs. You can test it and see if the same thing happens again, but it shouldn’t.
If you’re curious about what happened, open the spoiler!
Bugs explained
The first bug was the weirdest one, because the sibling’s name could never have appeared in that scene. In fact, I think you named the sibling the same as my placeholder name, because that’s what I had accidentally left in!
The second bug followed the same pattern as the vast majority of my mistakes (I’ll never learn from them, dammit). To make it simple, the game would first test if you had at least one equippable weapon, and then once you had equipped one, it would test whether you had none available, overwriting the first test result (in the case you only had one). Now I’ve reversed the procedure so that it first tests if you don’t have any weapons, and once it’s determined that you have at least one, it goes ahead and tests which ones you have.
It’s probably a bit confusing explained like this, but the summary is that now it should work as intended! 
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You’re welcome! Thanks for the quick reply and fix, I’m gonna go and finish my playthrough rn 
I did have a similar playthrough issue to @Anonymous5, except it rerouted me back to the last 2 scenes before chapter 2 and occurred after Rain arrived at Abby’s house. It also wouldn’t let me load my saves to circumvent the error. But then I refreshed the demo page and played through from the beginning and it didnt happen the second time.
Edit: just tried to load my saves (which i had made when the party had agreed to go to the water) and now when I try to load them it just sends me back to the 2nd to last scene in chapter 1. Maybe these two are related?
Secondly I’m not sure if this is intentional or not just thought I’d let you know that when my mc first starts walking with Michael and they find that first house, mc gets option to choose a rusty metal pipe or a dustbin cover as a weapon. Then later we can pick up the walking stick as a weapon without dropping metal pipe and the lines are essentially the same, saying my mc is carrying metal pipe and walking stick by her side as a weapon
Edit 4: building on the sunscreen suggestion, would it be possible for you to add the option for darker MCs to use it? Melanin provides limited spf protection, so they would also need it. Perhaps a metric along with the hunger and thirst to let our mc know they’re getting from usual skin tone to tanned to sunburnt?
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