Blowing the dust off

Hi, I'm real!
So, firstly, wow, I apologize for the radio silence. I took the better part of last year off for personal reasons. Still, I should've made a post here sooner than this. Not doing so was deeply unprofessional of me, and I don't really have an excuse beyond the general sense of not having my shit together. People have been wondering whether the project has been dropped. Absolutely not.

As part of my break last year, I did set all my expectations down. I had to look honestly at myself and ask if making this game was still something I still wanted to do. The answer was and is still "yes; I will literally go insane if I don't". I have been wanting to make a tRPG ever since I first played one. That wasn't even the case for Pokemon. If I ever drop this project, I will be dropping a part of myself, and something will be very wrong.

Although I would love to hop in here and point to all the progress we've made when I haven't been on break, I cannot do that. If I could, I probably would've posted sooner, haha... Actually, it's the opposite. As part of my consideration last year, one of the things I had to come to terms with is the graphical scope of the game is definitely a significant impediment to the pace of development. Or, to say it more reasonably, making all those fancy combat animations is a pain in the ass, and if I'm always waiting for those to be done, we're never gonna get anywhere. So, I've made the decision to step back from that commitment.

So, in the demo, every fighting character had this style of animation for combat, right:

As of our changes, now not every character has to have that. In the long term, we'll probably spare ourselves from making full combat models for minor enemies (such as the snack cart in the demo, which we otherwise would have had to animate in order to make it attackable). In the short term, we may release some community/test versions with notable characters lacking models. For those familiar with Fire Emblem titles, this functions much the same way as it does when you skip animations or when NPCs fight-- it is just a small animation on the overworld.

To contextualize this with the demo, let's talk about Nova and Veivax. In the current demo, Nova is programmed to be untouchable. I would actually like to make her beatable, but have Veivax come down when she's defeated to pressure the player out instead. The reason we didn't do that for the demo is because we needed Veivax to have a combat model for that to work. With this change, we could have released the demo with no combat model for Veivax, while still letting her participate in the battle. Either way, we would hope to eventually get a combat model for her, but at least this way progress and gameplay do not have to be tied to depending on it.

Cons of doing this:

• We had to refactor a lot of shit
• Maybe less cool immersive combat art scenes, sucks

Pros of doing this:

• This lightens the strain and prioritization of development
• Combat models can always be added in later as we get them
• The aforementioned refactoring sped up the pace and processing of battles a lot.

To elaborate on that last one, in the demo battles and combat are fully separate scenes. Whenever you move to combat, it has to load and draw the models and entire scene, and when you are done with combat, it does not simply restore the existing battle scene (as we expected when first programming it); it has to recreate the entire thing. For a while during demo testing, this meant it was recreating the giant entire map after every combat, and this led to a lot of weaker computers crashing. We were able to fix map-redrawing during demo testing, but recreating the battle scene was still a notable strain. As of the above refactor, combat and battles happen on the same scene-- we just hide the battle behind the curtain of the combat background. This means that there are fewer mid-battle load times, and we can snap in and out of them faster than ever.

Between this, the previously mentioned switch to Spine models, 1080p resolution, and various other refactors both large and small, it is sort of feeling like we are rebuilding the entire engine from the demo. This was not supposed to be the case. In fact, it was explicitly supposed to not be the case. But the demo version was never going to be scalable or stable despite my hopes, and it has served its purpose.

Since returning to the project, another focus I've had has been on making the eventing tools we've had easier for myself to use. For instance, in Reborn, if I want to have one character face another, I have to manually know where they are relative to each other and account for the difference in positions. Or, if I want to want have a character walk to a specific part of the map, we need to know exactly where they are positioned and specify the exact path that they will follow. We also generally need to know what ID numbers said characters' events are assigned to, and those are always arbitrary. So for Starlight, I've spent some time improving my options so I can now say things like "please make whatever event is named Aulyra face whatever event is named Raine". Or, "please have whatever event is named Star move as close as she can to whatever event is named Karus". This is much easier and more intuitive to work with when blocking a scene, so it helps keep the pace of development moving.

I've done the same thing with the display of characters and message arts in conversations as well. In the demo for starlight, I had to manually specify (by ID number), when each character should open their mouth, or close their mouth, or look in a certain direction, or so on. Especially the opening/closing.... this was not sustainable. Also, all of those character images were pre-rendered.

Now, we are able to compile character arts on the fly. I have set up the message system so that when one character starts talking, the other characters stop. This is also done automatically by name, so my work with eventing message cutscenes is halved. I can also say "have Raine face Aulyra" for message arts, and they will automatically correlate the ID number and positions and just take care of that for me. Also, we've been able to implement some requested qol features for message scenes after the demo: Characters that are not talking are now slightly dimmed, to give focus to the speaker, and the speaker will slightly move to help feel the flow of conversation.

With all of these improvements, I would desperately like to say that we have made progress on the content of the game, but we have not. Reworking the systems has taken the majority of my effort since returning to the project. While we are starting to get on top of the initial art debt, and we are in better shape than ever to start moving forward, there is still a mountain of work to be done. More suffocatingly, we now suffer the inevitable slings and arrows of, uh, every single other thing being broken post-refactor.

C'est la vie. The dev life.

Regardless, we'll still be cutting a path forward as best we can. I've still got the determination for the long haul. Thank you so much to everyone who has kept interest in the project all this time, it really really means a lot to me to have people patiently caring about this. I don't wish to promise a post schedule for now because I'm still working out my personal routines, but I sincerely hope to never have anywhere as long of a gap again.
Re: Sidebar. It is not forgotten. I'm not reviving it just yet ( after all, the current post is only three months old :] haha yes ) until I'm confident in a balance of rhythms between that and patreon, but we'll get there.

As always, much love to everyone here, and everyone who's helped keep us going <3