this might be a boring answer, but the main difference for me has just been financial stability. slarpg hasn't made me a millionaire, but it's nice that if we need to buy something for the house or my mom needs help with bills i can just pay for those things without a second thought. it's nice knowing that if my computer randomly broke i could just afford a new one without needing to run up my credit card. it's nice to no longer be in a perpetual state of having $150 to my name after paying rent every month. i've been extremely burnt out this year, but i'm grateful that the game has done well enough to let me take this time off to recharge before deciding on what to make next, instead of having to immediately jump into full-time commission work to keep the lights on

i can't say the kind of audience i've cultivated has really been at the front of my mind, whatever your definition of "the wrong audiences" may be. maybe things would be different if the game sold a million copies and inspired fandom bickering, but folks have generally been chill about it

my main fear was really just the thought of people playing it, talking about it for a couple weeks after launch, and then forgetting about it, and that hasn't happened. i still see people talking about it. i still get asks about the characters. i still see fanart regularly. these are not life-changing developments, but it's certainly more than what most zero budget indie devs get for their first commercial releases

okay, looking into this, i think i found the cause. some enemy events in the game have some overly cautious event scripting that saves your spot in the background music before a fight and then replays it afterwards, to make sure the music doesn't restart after every fight. (i can't remember how necessary this actually ended up being - it may have only be an error with mp3 files and not ogg files, like what the final soundtrack uses)

at that point in the story the beach doesn't have any music, just ambient ocean sounds, which are on a different sound channel from the music. so i guess the "save BGM" commands before these fights are doing nothing, and when it hits the "replay BGM" command it simply replays the music from the last time the "save BGM" command actually worked... which must have been in the basement dungeon

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