Update - And Game Performance (Patreon)

Greetings!

This week I finally completed the Ned Danger quest I've been talking about, and I'm now at work on one of the remaining 3 quests. One reason it took so long was my usual underestimating of tasks, but another is that this quest takes Alex back somewhere they (and I) haven't been in a while. I wanted to get a fresh sense of what that area was like the first time (among other reasons), so I did a complete playthrough of the game.

It was pretty instructive; I identified a lot of stuff I liked and a lot I could improve (including several bugs). I wrote a long list of notes, and also took the opportunity to remove a large number of exclamation points! Somehow they started creeping into my writing around 0.4, reached their exclamatory zenith in 0.7, and were still quite copious in 0.8. I think the game is still pretty exciting, but now the characters might not sound quite! so! excessively! excited! all the time.

I now have a pretty good list of notes and ideas for the early-game revamp project I want to tackle later (probably in 0.10 or 0.11.) I'm not going to change anything else I noted from my playthrough except for the dragon cookie quest. Man, I'd forgotten most of what I did there, and even I was lost trying to figure out what I was supposed to do on that thing. I always thought it was a fun quest and never understood why I saw so many complaints about it, but now I do. I believe "bad conveyance" is the game design term for this - when your player doesn't know WTF to do next - and the cookie quest was an excellent example of it.

Game Performance

As some of you may know, RPG Maker MZ, the next version of RPG Maker, is coming out soon. Like MV, it is built on nwjs (and thus Javascript,) but they've substantially rewritten the engine, updated their versions of node, Chromium, AND Pixi, and it should offer significantly better performance than MV.

MV is cool and all, but one thing I've never liked about it is its poor performance. I get weird jankiness sometimes on my machine, and mine is a pretty decent one. I usually play H-games in a virtual machine, and I especially notice it there; MV games are sluggish in a way that other games - even fairly demanding ones - simply aren't.

Since this game is heavy on reflex-oriented minigames, performance is particularly important, and I've thus been seriously examining the idea of porting the game over to MZ. If I did, it probably wouldn't happen until 0.10 or 0.11. Not only do I have to wait for the engine to come out, I also need to wait for a lot of plugins to be ported over - many (all?) MV plugins won't work, and I may also need to rewrite some of my own. I doubt it would be a lot of work to rewrite my own, but I use a pretty vast library of Yanfly plugins, and I think it'll take quite a while for all the ones I use to be ported.

I've read reports of a few people manually updating MV games to the newest versions of Chromium and Pixi. The Pixi update - Pixi.js is the graphics library MV (pixi v4) and MZ (pixi v5) use - is where most of the performance increase should come from. The only thing is that they changed the API a little bit between Pixi 4 and Pixi 5, and this seems to break a number of things in the core engine (and likely some plugins.) I could try to Frankenstein something together, but I'd want to be very careful about that since I'm worried about introducing instability into the game. 

Anyway, not something relevant to 0.9 (and probably not 0.10, either) but it's definitely something I'm thinking about. That's all I have for now. Thank you for your support!