Macroville! New Engine! No more Quest! Also playable on Android Devices! Out now! Surprise! (Patreon)

Hello everyone!

Okay, so, before I go into what this is all about, let me preface all of this exciting stuff with a little bad news. There will be no A Tiny Furry In A Huge World Plus preview build this month. I have done a fair bit of work on it this month, just - nothing is really finished. The good news here is that the preview build in February should be a little bigger than usual. Hooray!

The big stories that I talked about are going to come a little late too, probably, but if all else fails I will post a preview of one (that'll be about 30000 words long, so, pretty good!)

The development time that I was going to spend on finishing up this month's scenes and writing those has instead been spent on... well, this. Basically, this is this month's game preview build. 

It's Macroville but in a brand new engine. That new engine that I keep talking about, you know, the one that's going to let me make games .exes instead of stupid .quest files and also, also, publish games to Android phones so you don't have to play them on your computer if you don't want. Also... things just look nicer. Quest can look pretty ugly at the best of times.

It won't be going public for a little while... there's one or two kinks that I want to iron out first. So consider this a pretty feature complete preview build of the final product. A beta or something, maybe - just a very nearly finished one.

Anyway, here's the short of it:

MACROVILLE IS SUPER SHINY NOW
BRAND NEW ENGINE
DON'T HAVE TO USE QUEST
YOU DON'T HAVE TO DOWNLOAD ANYTHING BUT THE GAME
SERIOUSLY DON'T HAVE TO USE QUEST I MADE IT IN SOMETHING ELSE
BETTER UI
NEAT LITTLE ANIMATIONS (sometimes)
ALL CONTENT EDITED/REWROTE/JUICIER
YOU CAN PLAY IT ON ANDROID PHONE/TABLETS
OTHER THINGS I'M FORGETTING MAYBE

Here's the long of it:

This is very exciting. Or at least, it is for me. You know that I've been talking about breaking out of the shackles of Quest for a long time now? About how I know full well that I can't use the program forever? About how I've sort of been hinting that I have a new engine in mind?

Well, here is some proof that I have been working toward that. Over most of last year, in my free time, I was experimenting with a couple of engines, and the one that I decided to invest most of my learning time into was Game Maker. Game Maker is responsible for making a bunch of indie games that you may or may not know about like Undertale, Hotline Miami, Shovel Knight... the list goes on.

Obviously those games aren't text adventures - but it turns out that the software is pretty good at slapping a text adventure together if you get a couple of extensions for it and, well... learn how to use it.

I wanna make it clear that I'm not planning on moving away from text adventures or CYOAs or whatever you wanna call 'em - at least, not for the immediate future... if ever. My intention here is to be able to create a clean game that you can run without downloading Quest. A game that you can run on Windows with no issues, a game that can be ported to phones easily, a game where I don't have to worry about someone else's program breaking down on me or limiting me.

I have not learned all of the ins and outs of this program. I am not claiming to be a master - far from it. You would only have to look at the source code for this project to see that it's been made by an amateur. But what I made works - really well, I think. It looks nice. It runs well. It's cool.

Anyway... onto what I made. I remade - or sorta ported, I guess - Macroville. As you can tell by the title of this post.

I started on Saturday - like, five days ago. It was meant to be kind of a chill little project. Work a few hours on it, then chill and watch some television or whatever.

I ended up working on it for twelve hours that day.

On Sunday I worked on it for twelve hours more.

On Monday I should have gotten back to work on both A Tiny Furry In A Huge World and my commission backlog - but I was like a dog with a bone. I couldn't stop chewing. I wanted to see it finished. I wanted to put one of my games in a little .exe file that you can download and play without having to download Quest. I wanted to. Desperately. It was like a fever. So I worked on it for another twelve hours.

Same on Tuesday. More work. If I sound like I'm trying to make it agonizing or something, I'm not. I genuinely enjoyed putting the hours in.

And now here we are, Wednesday night, another twelve or so hours later and... it's done. I finished it. It wasn't the most impossible thing in the world but it... well, it took almost sixty hours to do if not a little more.

You might ask why it took so long, and... that's simple. First - I had to rewrite every single line of code. Game Maker does not understand Quest language. They are incompatible. On top of that, Game Maker works entirely differently, so I had to... well... figure out how to make things that worked in Quest work in Game Maker. At the best of times, this wasn't too bad... but at the worst of times it meant tweaking code for a good few hours.

What took the most time though was porting all of the text. It wasn't a case of copying and pasting it over because, again, this can't be done. Even if I boiled it down to plain text it would still need to be formatted so that Game Maker understands how to print it properly. So... I rewrote every single word by hand. Yeah. Every single word. And while there aren't nearly as many words in Macroville as there are in Tiny Furry or something, it was still a lot of words. This is why I didn't write any new scenes for it.

Rewriting the text was pleasant, though. It allowed me to go back to it and kinda... improve it! Spruce it up a little. Remove a few commas that I'm oh-so-fond of. Restructure a couple of sentences. Make it punchier, juicier. So, while there are no new scenes or anything... every scene has been completely rewritten. It's kind of like a Director's Cut or something.

In hindsight - after learning a lot more about the engine - I have come to the realization that I probably could have gotten away with boiling it down to plain text and kinda copying and pasting it in with a few additional tags so that Game Maker understood it. However, this is in hindsight, and, even then, I am glad that I went back through Macroville and rewrote everything.

What I am really glad about though is that I have managed to break one of my games out of Quest. It's an amazing feeling. Truly liberating. No longer do I have to say... you need to download Quest to play this. At least, with Macroville.

I am not sure what this means going forward. I am not sure what I am going to do with A Tiny Furry In A Huge World - whether I'll port or not - and I certainly have no idea about A Tiny Furry On A Huge Quest. I am going to take a little time to think about it. 

I am also going to see what you - my community - think of this first. I might run a poll or two, or open a feedback form or something like that. If people want me to keep on making games in Quest instead of worrying about things like .exes and Android phone ports, then... well, I will. I'm here because of my community. I am not going to do anything that they don't want. Expect me to talk about this a little more over the next few weeks, basically.

Macroville 2 will be made in this engine though. It feels right and it's where I want to do it.

The PC version is pretty simple. Download the zip file, extract it, and then open macroville.exe. That's it. All you gotta do. It should run on most any computer as long as it's not running like, Windows XP or whatever. Then again, maybe it would work on Windows XP. I dunno.

The Android version is a tiny bit more complicated, sorta, so I am gonna do an FAQ on it. I will also do a general FAQ for a couple of other things.

Also - if you haven't played Macroville and have no idea what I'm talking about - here's a general description.

Welcome to MACROVILLE!

You are NOW the proud owner of a brand new type of pet!

Meet the Jepis! Two inches tall, glowing blue, and made entirely of tasty jelly, they're the worlds first micro society!

All you need to do is throw down some patented JEPI powder, sprinkle on a little water, wait ten minutes, and...

SAY HELLO TO BRAND NEW LIFE!

What is Macroville? It's a civilization builder. Sort of. Played from a macro perspective, you grow a civilization of micros on your table in your living room. Think an ant farm - or, ugh, Sea Monkeys. You can either care for them, or you can cull them. Caring for them includes such joyous things as picking them up and dropping them onto your sensitive bits. Culling them revolves around various ways of putting them inside of yourself... or, heck, just stomping on them!

In other words, it's more of a predator-orientated game than my usual prey-orientated stuff. Don't feel discouraged if you aren't a fierce predator though! I've been told by prey-orientated people that it's still quite fun and super horny even if they aren't predators themselves, so...

FAQ TIME.

GENERAL FAQ

When I run it, Windows Defender says that it might be unsafe. Is it?
Nope! It's just because Windows Defender refers to a database of commonly known apps. Since macroville.exe hasn't been run on any computer but mine, it is not a commonly known app, therefore it flags it as 'suspicious'. You have a cast-iron promise from me that there is nothing amiss, though.

Fullscreen looks weird!
It does, yeah. It's not unreadably weird or anything but you might notice a little stretching. I will fix this in future because this won't be the last release I do of this game anyway: see below.

How do I save the game?
You can't, sorry. I thought this would be an easy thing to do at the last minute but it turns out that coding a save game function for your game is kind of a complicated nightmare. I will be figuring it out over the next month or so though and I will code it in and do an additional release. The game isn't super long anyway so this shouldn't be a huge issue.

HERE IS A CHEAT IF YOU WANT TO UNLOCK ALL THE SCENES RATHER THAN PROGRESS THROUGH THE GAME EVERY TIME YOU WANNA READ THEM

Click the top left hand corner of the screen five times. This should work on any screen after the intro. Doing this will award you with 250 Jepis which is enough to unlock everything in the Cull and Care menus.

Where the Mac version at?
It's possible for me to export to Mac with Game Maker, but... drum roll, please... you need to have a Mac to be able to do it. Yeah. A whole Mac running MacOS.

I don't have a Mac, so, I can't do it. If there is a big enough demand for it I will look into buying a used MacBook or something over the course of the year. There's also the possibility that there might be a weird workaround for this somewhere. I'll look into it.

Where the Linux version at?
This one is more feasible since I'd just have to install Linux and since that's free I can do that at any time. However I have been working really hard for the past few days so I kinda just wanna post my game and relax for now. I'll look into it.

Chances are if you're running Linux you can boot into Windows anyway, so you should be okay.

Where the iOS version at?
Game Maker can export to iOS but the app has to be approved by Apple (and posted on the app store) before you can install it. Macroville is a smutty smutty porno game so Apple would not approve it. Not much I can do about this one.

Where the Sega Genesis version at?
I'll be doing a Windows, Linux, and Android version of the game. Maybe a Mac version sometime down the line. No other platforms.

Are you going to port A Tiny Furry In A Huge World?
No idea. I need to think about it and I'd like all of you to think about whether it's something that you might like after playing this. It would be a considerable amount of work.

Is this Macroville 2?
Nah, that'll be a lot cooler. Or that's the hope.

ANDROID FAQ (if you have issues look here)

Woah shit, it says it's an unauthorized app when I try to install it. What's that all about?
It's an unauthorized app since it's not on the Google Play Store (or any store for that matter). Getting Google to verify it is a little out of my reach right now. Your phone will let you install it but you have to enable the installation of unauthorised apps on your phone. This varies depending on what Android OS you have, so, Google around and you'll find the answer.

It's not going to make my phone explode though right?
I can't guarantee that it won't but I haven't coded anything that would make your phone explode so you'll probably be good. In other words, the app is completely inert. Nothing malicious to be found.

Okay cool. Will it run on this old phone that I have from 2005?
I don't have a clue. I know it works on my budget phone from 2019 flawlessly.

The screen resolution is kinda weird!
It is. Sorry about this. It's far from a perfect port, mainly because I am brand new to porting things to Android and... using Game Maker in general. It's playable, though - more than playable - so I'm quite happy with it. Over the next couple of weeks I am going to think about how I can improve the Android port a bit. 

This will include the screen resolution thing but it will also include stuff like making the Continue button a little quicker because it was kinda hard to tap on my phone. Or... maybe I'll just make a press of the screen move the text forward. That's not a bad idea actually. Basically, expect there to be a couple of fixes for the very minor issues you might run into.

You might notice that there's a slight delay whenever you enter the Cull, Care, or Build menus for the first time also - like, maybe a quarter of a second or so. This is another thing that can be ironed out fairly easily. It doesn't help that I was dumb and gave the buttons a million frames of animation instead of being clever and using frame skip.

Again, I'm learning. I'll get better at this as I go. Android development is something that I haven't touched before and it's a lot different to making a game for a PC. It's way better than playing it in your phone's browser on textadventures.co.uk, though - trust me.

I do want to make these games completely and comfortably playable on a phone, though - it's kind of a little dream of mine - so, like I say. Expect me to get better at this as I go on.

BUG FAQ

Are there bugs?
Not as far as I know. I tested the game thoroughly but I might have missed spots because I want to get it out because I want to get the bone out of my mouth that I've been gnawing on for five days now.

The game worked from start to completion five times on my computer and three times on my phone, though. So I think it's 99% bug free. Might be one or two things here and there, a typo or six maybe, but... I'll iron those out when I add the save game feature. 

The game bugged out. How can I tell you about it?
Submit a bug report for me via this Google Form right here. Try to give me as much information as possible.

The game won't work on my device. How can I tell you about it?
If you're trying to play on phone, give it a few seconds to load. It only took a couple of seconds on my device but if you're running on older hardware it might take a bit longer. If that fails, though...

I am not sure what I will be able to do, but please use the feedback form above and I'll try to help you as much as I can.

FAQ END

Can I...
It's over. No more questions for now.

That's it!

I have typed a lot and I would like to type a whole lot more about this - as in, potentially changing over to a new engine - but, we'll leave that for another day. I have some thinking to do.

Tomorrow there will be a poll for this month's bonus ending! I will be continuing to write A Tiny Furry In A Huge World in Quest for now. This is a big decision so I don't want to leap into anything. Besides, for the next week or so, I really need to knuckle down on getting those big stories out. So, hey! Not thinking about games for a few days over here anyway.

There will be a story also, but... give me a few days on that one. I'm a little behind thanks to being obsessive.

I hope you are half as excited as I am for this. Not just for Macroville, but... for a new and better engine and all of the exciting possibilities that can maybe bring.

I think I'm gonna go get a pillow... or a bottle of whiskey. Not sure which yet. Let's see which one finds me first!