Switching back to Renpy (Patreon)

Hello,

This isn’t this month’s progress report, but rather an important announcement that I feel is necessary to be honest and open about.

For those who don’t know, the original Repurpose Demo released in 2020 was made in Ren’py, so it’s the one one the backers are most familiar with. After this though we went through with moving engines to GameMaker 2 so that it would be easier to program the minigames I originally wanted to implement.

HOWEVER, that came at the cost of making the visual novel portion of the game much harder and MUCH more tedious to program for in comparison to Ren’py. And while this seemed promising at first, production behind the scenes began to fall apart. The cons of switching to GM2 started to outweigh the pros of switching. On top of that, I started having to take on extra work because other people failed to deliver on what they were paid to do, and a few others who did deliver needed most of their work re-done by me and my partner because the quality wasn’t up to the standards I’d already set with the demo.

Just let this be a cautionary tale for you all, don’t just hire your friends because they’re your friends, hire people you know will get the job done.

This game has been very taxing on my mental health and a huge learning experience. Many times I’ve wished I had a time machine to go back to 2020 and let myself know to stick to my original ideas, but I digress…

I initially had the idea of switching back to Ren’py back in November (perhaps even sooner than that?), but the ‘sunk cost fallacy’ told me that my instincts were irrelevant here, so we should just keep development going in GM2 since the ‘New Demo’ was close to being finished.

I’d say to take the advice to trust your gut, but that’s also more subjective and can be littered with bias. At least I’m making the decision now rather than later and that counts for something, right?

Does this mean the game is delayed yet again?

Well… No, but also yes?

I’m still going to strive for the June release date as promised, and it would be great if I can reach that goal! But I’d feel more comfortable saying the game will come out in “Summer” rather than specifically June.

“But Eros, doesn’t that mean you’re going to start crunching yourself and your team to meet the deadline?” -No! Of course not! Only me! Haha!

That is half a joke and half a truth, but that’s because despite the pain I want this game to be the best that I can possibly give. On top of that, if you’ve ever coded anything in Ren’py then you would know it’s actually fairly easy to make a visual novel with it, even with little to no programming experience. And in the coming weeks our programming is going to repurpose (lol) our automation program for GM2 to work with Ren’py instead, which means a lot of our coding work can actually be salvaged!

So at least it’s not ALL bad news!

To make a long story short, here are all the takeaways:

• Repurpose is moving back to and being built again in Ren’py
• The game’s ‘new’ release date is Summer 2022
• This is all for the better

I could have waited until the end of the month to say this in a proper progress report, but I’ve been holding onto this knowledge for a week now and felt it was better to say it sooner rather than later. Perhaps now my insomnia will go away and let me rest at night. Melatonin only works some of the time…

But that’s all I wanted to say for today. I will still make a progress report at the end of the month, rest assured. Please forgive me for all the inconveniences in development as the game director of this project.

Until later this month, bye!