Long time no see, everyone! It's been a while since we last had some big news on Up All Night. If you aren't already following our Twitter, we announced that we would be heading to Steam soon. We hope that more players will be able to discover our game this way, and we'll be sure to let you know when the page goes live for wishlists.

We've also made the decision to port the game from the TyranoBuilder engine to Ren'Py, a more maturely developed visual novel engine, in preparation for our Steam launch. We originally chose TyranoBuilder because none of the team at the time had experience with programming, but we're aware that the game has the occasional hiccup that interrupts enjoyment of the script. To that end, we've hired BáiYù to help us build a more polished experience in Ren'Py, as well as add a few bonuses to the game for completion to complement an artbook and OST we'll be packaging along with it.

For those who are curious to know about the process behind transferring a game from TyranoBuilder to any other engine of choice, do continue reading!

Due to the way that TyranoBuilder functions, it's not practical to go through and manually extract a script, as each line of dialogue and narration gets its own section. While this does initially give developers control over how the game looks and plays, it makes it extremely difficult to edit quickly in the event that typos manage to slip through (which, considering UAN was developed for a jam, of course they did). Ideally, the game script is written and fully edited in another document, but game development tends to get messy and that's not always the case...

The best workaround for this issue is to utilize the Tyrano Translator tool, which is of course designed for localizing a script to a different language, but will be able to extract the entire script. Although, not perfectly in our case.

Unfortunately the names of speakers for lines of dialogue are not extracted, nor are branching paths marked, as the tool is designed to work with the base game itself. Still, this does save us some time from going through each individual section to get the majority of the script.

Something that is convenient with TyranoBuilder is the asset viewer within the engine. From here, you can click to view the folder locations of your assets to extract. Simply copy them from within the project folder to a new location for use in your new engine.

[screenshot of new Config menu]

So while transferring a game from TyranoBuilder will take several steps, there are ways to make it easier. We hope that you'll agree that the results are worth it.

That's all we've got for today! And remember... stay fiendish!