For the last 2 days, I’ve been getting reports of SFX/images not loading. I’ve narrowed down the issue and I think I have found the reason why, which is one that I never would have thought of otherwise!

If you use Twine, you’ll know that the most common engines to create projects are Harlowe and Sugarcube. This particular instance uses Sugarcube, which means that all images and audio must be pre-loaded rather than accessed directly from the passage. This involves cache-ing all of these little pieces before the intended passage to make sure they are ready to load in said passage.

Turns out that I never even considered the possibility of… refreshing one’s browser.

Basically, there’s sfx and audio used in the very beginning of the game, and thus, I’ve set those pieces to cache on passage #1 so they remain for the entire game and can be accessed quickly. If anyone were to (not even hypothetical at this point) refresh their browser in the middle of the game, the media is completely gone and replaced with an error message. I believe that this is due to the refresh essentially undoing all caches - that first passage needs to be accessed in order for those bits of media to (re)appear.

I had no idea that this was something that could happen! It’s something I never even considered during play testing and development.

Sadly, I don’t think that I can simply outright “fix” this without cache-ing on every passage before one with audio/video multiple times. I’ll take a look into it, but for now, I’m very much busy, so I hope that this will suffice!

I’ve added the explanation on the official page so players are aware of this issue. Thanks to the players who helped bring this to my attention!