Inner Circle Update for February 17 2017! (Patreon)

Hey guys!

The heat is definitely on for me! That’s okay though, because while I’m super eager to get something tangible out to you guys, I’m absolutely on fire with my progress on the game’s story. This is going to be one of those updates where I’m ecstatic about how much progress we’ve made this week, but admittedly it’s bittersweet because I don’t have the V0.06 design document ready for you yet as I had hoped.  While that is definitely on its way, I have some good stuff to share with you involving all of the work that’s been done on the story this week.

Story Progress

Last week I left off with the intent to merge my story notes with the existing story document and to immediately jump on filling in the details for v0.06. Well, that first part opened up Pandora’s Box, because for the past week I’ve been vomiting really solid ideas on how to improve the story. Basically, leaving it to marinate for a year was great, because now I can approach the rough draft that I had with a clear and critical outlook as opposed to the tunnel vision I developed when I banged it out originally. 

When I began this at the beginning of the week, one of my first obstacles was remembering all of the critical details hiding in the 32-page story document.  One of the things that helped me to do this was to visually plot the story. While trying to think of how to properly do this, I remembered these xkcd comics from awhile back that showed visualizations for the plots of some popular movies.

Well, as it turns out, someone actually created an application  called Plotweaver for generating these “narrative charts”. It took a day, but I hammered out one for Malise and the Machine. This was meant entirely for my reference, but I made you a relatively spoiler free version highlighting only the part you’ve played through (up to V0.05).  It should at least show you the scale of the main story of the game. (It should go without saying, but in case there are misconceptions: the rest of the game is going to be completed at a faster rate than the early parts)

After working through it and being able to visually see the story with the chart, not only did the details come back to me quickly, but solutions to previous problems I had (as well as ways to improve weak points in general) started to become clear.  Unfortunately, the solutions involved some major story surgery. At that point, I could have chosen to put off making these changes in order to get v0.06 out a couple of weeks sooner, but the obvious choice for me was to go ahead and get it done now so that there are no conflicts later. So, aside from the past day and time spent working with AltairPL, I’ve been writing for 10-16 hours a day since the last Inner Circle update. Unfortunately, without driving you straight to spoiler town I can’t elaborate too much, but I’m really excited by what I’ve done so far, and by extension I hope you’ll trust me that it will pay off. 

That being said, a couple significant changes have been motivated by the story rewrite that I can talk about. The biggest one is the likelihood of a third playable character :D. We’ve tossed around the concept since I wrote the original draft, but pulling the trigger on it allows for some of the major story changes that weren’t viable before. Another thing we are looking at is changing the way skills are tied to body armor/outfit. Locking skills to the outfit created some difficult situations when characters can be forced into different outfits for story situations, so we’ve taken the suggestions from some of you and are looking at a way to maintain the gameplay aspect while freeing up the outfit restriction. The current idea is actually to tie skill loadouts to the character’s equipped weapon type instead of armor. This is something a lot of games have success with, and will also alleviate another issue we were having with story segments where the lovely ladies are… indisposed. By that I of course mean we can now have unarmed combat (and still have skills), making battles a possibility during story events where the characters aren’t armed. 

I want to mention that both of the above ideas weren’t really up for consideration a year ago because of how much busy work it took to render out and process a single character portrait. Because of the optimizations we made earlier in this cycle, additional weapon types and event-specific battle outfits are much more plausible now. 

Anyways, the plan is to continue on with this story overhaul and once things are mostly solid I’ll finalize the V0.06 content and get the design document ready. For the last week in this month though I intend to drop whatever I’m doing and work on H artwork. I really want something tangible to show off for the next monthly update since everyone has been super patient while we knock out the less-than-sexy stuff!

AltairPL's Progress

APL’s side of things is getting really interesting. Please keep in mind that everything below is extremely tentative since APL is in the early stages of experimentation. To guard against misconceptions, I’ll say that the awesome features mentioned below aren’t promises, but are simply possibilities with the direction we want to take things :D.

It's probably no surprise by now that the game has been growing out of its skin.  As I mentioned last week, APL has been investigating the possibility of using new tools to remove the need for using RPG Maker. The primary reason we’re looking at this now is that RPG Maker has some problems that will require significant work to get around for a project the size of Malise and the Machine. Secondarily, our access to things like video, audio, input and how we package the data are all heavily limited. Therefore, since reason #1 means a lot of work has to eventually be done anyways, we’re looking at alternatives that will not only solve these problems but also provide other benefits such as performance and improved visuals.

What’s currently grabbed our attention is a library called SDL_gpu, which is an open source library for high performance, modern 2D graphics that utilizes OpenGL and is based/dependent on SDL. The most obvious benefit here is that it’s hardware accelerated, meaning it actually makes use of your graphics card as opposed to only the CPU.  The potential in that alone is great, but for now the goal is to build up sort of a branch project to a point where we can evaluate whether or not SDL can do everything we want while improving/maintaining performance with what we are using now. For this week that means APL has been working wayyyy low down in the nitty gritty on figuring out things like basic rendering, resolution/scaling, color blending, and its spatial coordinates system.

What benefits could possibly merit such a big change? Here are just a few off the top of my head (this is the part where you shouldn’t get too excited too soon… but that won’t keep me from doing so anyways):

• Improved resolution (potentially even HD)
• Variable aspect ratio (widescreen, yay)
• Customizable resolution settings
• Fully configurable key/button mapping for controls
• Versions for non-Windows platforms
• 64-bit version

Again, no promises yet, but all of these things would at least become possible once the switch is made. 

That’s about all I have for now! Also, if you are particularly talented in the realm of 2D game engines and have any input on things we may want to look at, please let us know!