Writing Update; One More 0.9 Release On The Way (Patreon)

Greetings! Progress continues, and this week's post is mostly about the writing. But first there's a little to cover about the freezing and crashing problems some people are experiencing, so let's start with that!

Final 0.9 Release

First, I want to thank everyone who participated in the poll. Aggregating from both sites, it looks like the number of people experiencing problems is around 10%, and the problems seem to be almost exclusively with 0.9. The true number of folks experiencing problems may not be exactly that, but if it's anywhere close (and I think it is) that's a big problem. 

I haven't heard back from anyone on the test releases which aimed to address this problem, but for now I'm going to assume the lighting plugin is to blame (it seems the most likely candidate.) Solving it thus means getting rid of the lighting plugin, something I'd planned to do anyway because of compatibility problems it caused. Lighting really contributes to the look and feel of some areas - the nightclub, the Oracle's chamber, etc - so rather than getting rid of lighting altogether, I'll be replacing the current system with another that doesn't have this problem. Actually, calling this other one a 'system' is a little inaccurate - I've been using it since 0.2 or 0.3 to spruce up maps, but it turns out that with a little creativity you can use it for lighting effects too, so that's what I'll be doing. It requires more work on my end - messing around in Photoshop and such - and it doesn't look quite as fancy, but it may actually complement the retro look a little better.

This different lighting system will be the main change in 0.9.6, which will hopefully be the last 0.9 release. It'll also include a few bugfixes and such, but no new content. I'll begin working on it this week, and hope to get it out soon. The final 0.9 releases were supposed to be sort of a fresh start for the game, with much better performance and much fewer bugs, but it didn't turn out quite like expected for everyone :(  Cleaning up this mess is something I have to do for 0.10 anyway, so I figured I might as well roll it into a final 0.9 release. Hopefully it fixes everyone's issues!

Writing

A fair bit has happened since the last writing update... a lot of which involves chucking a bunch of stuff I'd already written because it wasn't any good. Or at least not good enough. But the good news is that I feel pretty positive about the paths it's going down now, and I think this will be an interesting and hopefully entertaining release.

For starters, I revised the Oracle quest... again. (But it's the last time, I promise!) The final scene is a pretty important one, and I wanted to make very sure I had it right. I wrote and then discarded a ton of stuff for this scene (Scrivener's snapshot feature was really convenient for this!) but now, finally, I think it's where it ought to be. When you see it you'll probably wonder what all the fuss was about... but getting it to that point was the point.

Incidentally, writing in Scrivener is great, but I think I'll save it for those scenes that are important and that will probably end up getting revised a lot. It has a lot of handy tools, but it also introduces some friction into the process - you can't see character portraits in it, for instance, and then there's the matter of exporting it into RPG Maker. For some scenes (like the Oracle one) it's definitely worth it, but others not so much.

I also ended up chucking a bunch of stuff I'd done for The Hell's quest. I thought I had a good concept for it, but as I was working on it it slowly began to dawn on me that it just wasn't what I wanted. So I went back to the drawing board and came up with something that works much better. I can still reuse parts of what I wrote before, so not all is lost, but many things could not (and should not!) be saved.

Like the recruiting quest from 0.9, The Hell's quest is a fairly long one. Unlike the recruiting quest, this one has a small dungeon. Not as small as the fish dungeon from Ned Danger's quest, but it's not anywhere close to The Dark Pits, and it won't introduce any major new mechanics. The next big dungeon extravaganza will be when you recruit Bloodfist, the raiding guild and last major group you need, which will probably be in 0.12. And in that one I am planning a Dark Pits-like level of complexity (though there will, of course, be an easy mode.) I learned a few lessons the last time around, so hopefully this one will be even better.

One mistake I made with the earlier version of The Hell's quest is that I didn't really use Articy:Draft, a wonderful piece of software intended for game designers, when creating it. There's nothing magical about it, but using it forces you to think about exactly how events will be sequenced, and exactly what a player knows/can do/cannot do at a given time. If you do it right, you basically end up with a model of the quest, which you can kinda sorta play through before you make it for real in the game engine. It gives you a pretty good idea what it'll feel like when someone plays the real thing, and it's very good at highlighting problems you may not have noticed before. Just to show you what I'm talking about, here's part of the model for the recruiting quest:

It can be a fair bit of work to map everything out (which is why I initially skipped it,) but it's good at helping you identify boring parts, parts where it may not be clear what the player's supposed to be doing or why, places where the plot doesn't make sense, that sort of thing. Often you'll make major changes once you start writing, but I've found it helps to start off with a pretty good plan for what you want to do and how you're going to do it. I only started using it in 0.8; I think maybe the earlier quests would've turned out a little better if I'd had it then. Anyway, lesson learned! Measure twice, cut once. There's now a very detailed model of The Hell's quest, and I think it'll be pretty entertaining. (Oh, and prepare to meet an old... friend?)

Some parts are already done, and other parts I'll be able to reuse, but it'll probably take a while to finish The Hell's quest. But it (along with The Oracle's quest) forms the vast majority of the release, so after it's done it's all downhill from there.

Conclusion

So that's where we're at. The next time you hear from me (which will probably be before the end of the month) will likely be when I release 0.9.6. Hopefully that will fix those weird compatibility problems once and for all, as well as the freezing/crashing issues some folks have. I'm also going to start work on Mystery Girl's Hair soon, but in the meantime there's a lot of writing to do, so I'm going to get to it. Thank you for your support!