January Progress Update! (Patreon)

Happy New Year! 

This past month has been the first solid month for actual game content progress since I launched my optimization operation back in October.  By the 10th or so I was back in the saddle with the new rig fully operational! I'm happy to start the new year with a small preview of V0.06 content, including a new enemy preview that I’ve been working on for the past week! The rest of the team has also accomplished a lot, and we have new content for the reward downloads to boot, so read on for details!

Introduction to V0.06, New Artwork Prints

I gave the new workstation its first real trial by fire by making an animated story scene to act as the transition to the new area (it's a pretty big file, so give it time to display!).  This is the player's introduction to the urban dystopia that the majority of the game will be centered around, and therefore I obviously wanted to attempt something special. This idea has been in my head for a long time now (those of you that have been around the project awhile may recall when TK and I created the motorcycle). In order to make it happen I added support for animations to my render manager software, and I’m happy to say it’s working great! 

In addition, I made the detailed single frame version shown above (apologies to the IC crowd who saw this last week!), which is now available as an artwork print design for the $40 and $50 tiers (there is also a version that contains the logo at the bottom).  

New Enemy Preview

There will be multiple new enemy types in V0.06, and I just finished the preview for the first yesterday! Check ‘em out below!

Police – Version 1 

Police – Version 2 

As is suggested, I’m considering the possibility of having multiple versions with different skills / H attacks. I also painted up a quick photobash of a concept for a shotgun that I’d like to make for them to use, at least during story scenes. While I have a few ideas, please let me know if you have any ideas for H attacks! I’m open to suggestions!

Audio Guy (AKA New Guy’s) Progress

Audio Guy has been hard at work not thinking of a pseudonym, but thankfully he’s been churning out lots of great audio content for use in the game, including 12 new soundtrack demos and an impressive 46 new or improved sound effects to use or replace current ones with.  

Up till now I've only made custom sound effects when I can't find one in the RPG Maker library (some of those include the gunshots and heavy machinery sounds throughout the Access Tunnels map).  So, as it stands, the menu user interface sounds and a lot of others are either relatively low quality or just generic as hell and don't fit the tone of the game at all. Expect that to change soon! I have a pretty long list of stuff for him to work on (including promotional stuff since that’s part of his talent pool), but at some point I plan to have him start working on something the game really needs: H audio sounds!  

New Soundtrack Demos Added to Downloads!

Now that we have someone working almost exclusively on audio, a lot of content is being generated. With all these awesome ideas, I thought it'd be a neat thing to add a 'Demos' set to the $15 reward tier in addition to the official soundtrack.  This way patrons at that tier can not only grab the latest soundtrack, but also hear the evolution of new tracks as they are being produced as well as ideas that don't make it into the final game.  

A couple weeks ago we added 7 new demo tracks to the soundtrack download page, and I just added 5 more today!

APL’s Coding Progress

It’s been a really good month for programming progress! If you remember last month we left off with AltairPL having just created a prototype of synchronous battle actions (characters/enemies performing actions at the same time). He used that as a starting point to branch out from to tackle the rest of the battle engine overhaul.

Here’s APL’s list of his major accomplishments this month starting with the most recent!

• Almost finished revamping backend code for the hold system – still a few bugs related to struggling remaining.
• Improved enemy spawning, meaning we should have much more flexibility over when enemies can spawn in battle (basically, we have future plans for doing more detailed and interesting things similar to our little demonstration with the elevator battle at the end of V0.05).
• Created a draft design for expanding the options menu (since it's running out of room) and integrated his work from the battle overhaul into possible new options.
• Finished implementing things like simultaneous battle actions and variable active time battle speeds (and related variables are now easily configurable for testing/balancing through an .ini file instead of spread randomly across the engine).
• Added the option of using Manual Struggle with battle Wait modes.  Manual Struggle will now behave kind of like Escape does in Wait modes, meaning time will flow normally while it's active.
• Developed a rough design for a tool I can use for in-game animation previewing when creating animations. The idea would allow me to directly render animation previews from Daz Studio to a folder that the game would read, so within just a few clicks I could see the animation in game and test various sprite framerates to see how it would best look.  Currently to do this I would have to make a spritesheet and set up a unique test case in game (as I've done with every single enemy animation up to this point).
• One of our previous overhauls broke RPG Maker’s default shop system.  Unfortunately APL hasn’t had time to code a dedicated shop scene from scratch, so he’s fixed the vanilla one with some minor improvements for use in V0.06. 
• Finished basic handling of battle actions -- still more to do, but will be finished as he goes.
• Finished overhaul of battle time flow. The old system was working, but it wasn’t as versatile as we would’ve liked and had some potential flaws that may cause us problems sooner or later. The new iteration is much simpler, much more universal, and will allow even more intricate customization of battle timings 
• The results of actions will now be processed in realtime.  Beforehand, variables dealing with stats and what not weren't updated until the results were *displayed*.  This is obviously a major flaw for an active time system and has created bugs in the past.
• Created a prototype for the enemy targeting widget.  It's been planned for a while to have the target of an enemy skill displayed above the enemy while a skill is charging, thus allowing the player the chance to use strategy to defend against the attack as opposed to having to guess which character would be the victim. Keep in mind the visual representation is just a placeholder graphic, but check out the following screens for an example: Single Target Example, Multi-Target Example.

TK’s Map Artwork Progress

TK has been knee deep in V0.06 work all month. When not fulfilling my random character design related prop creation tasks, he has the huge task of coming up with and making compatible shit tons of quality city assets to use for map building. Early last month we posted a moodboard  for the Inner Circle to give an idea of the vibe we are going for with the V0.06 area. As you can see, it’s inspired largely by an aesthetic similar to the urban environments seen in things like Blade Runner, Akira, and Ghost in the Shell. Since then he’s put together a really big set of base assets  to use, and we have a whole lot more that still need to be broken down.  EDIT: Here's a *really* big image of the entire 3D tileset he's put together .  Zoom in :D. 

We have a pretty unique task here as I haven’t been able to come up with a good parallel of a retro styled RPG that features a (somewhat) realistically themed cyberpunk city as a location (let me know if you can think of anything we can reference!). The best I can think of is Final Fantasy 7, but since that used 3D characters we have some additional design challenges due to our relatively fixed/stylized camera perspectives. One of my goals therefore for this month is to get TK’s version of Maya set up again on the new computer, and he and I are going to go on an unhinged week-long (or as long as it takes!) map creation binge where we simply create and experiment with as many ideas as possible. We’ll take what comes out of it and will very likely have a much stronger grasp on how to fit my story ideas together as well as what is and what isn’t possible. 

What to Expect in V0.06

From the above you can figure out a lot, but I figured as a closing I’d make a clear non-inclusive list of things you can expect in V0.06!

• A “town” type area, including shops
• An urban hostile area with new enemies
• Humanoid enemies (and obviously new H attacks)
• At the very least, the improvements shown off thus far on the battle engine
• At least one animated H story scene
• The revamp of the Access Tunnels maps
• Improved sound effects
• New music

There’s quite a bit of other stuff related to gameplay on the agenda, but I’m holding off on details for now. I’m not ready to set a date for V0.06 yet, but the great thing about the new campaign format is that we won’t have to wait for the beginning of a new month to make the release. Since the new format is so flexible, a preliminary release to show off some of the new content is also not out of the question, especially since I know you guys have been incredibly patient as I took a good while with improving the development side of things. I really want to thank you guys for that! Trust me when I say we’re already seeing the benefits of that work!

Thanks again for your continued support!