Still Alive, and Update (Patreon)

Greetings! I’m still alive and working on the game, but I’m afraid the release still isn’t done. My best estimate for when it will be is toward the middle of next month. My track record for estimating these things is notoriously poor, but that’s my best guess as of right now. As always, if you’ve been a $5+ supporter at any point since December (!) you are entitled to the release when it comes out, and I’ll do my best to get it to you. If for some reason I don’t, please hit me up on the messaging system or via Discord and I’ll send it to you.

I apologize for not posting in some time. As before, the reason is that I didn’t feel I had anything substantial to report. Most of this month has been spent “breathing life” into the long quest - doing movement for various scenes, writing dialogue for all the various NPCs and what have you. From various feedback I’ve gotten, it seems that people enjoy being able to walk up to random NPCs and have a funny or interesting conversation, and have their reactions change as the circumstances in the quest do. I like that, too - I think it gives the game a more immersive feel, like you’re really there and what you’re doing matters to the people in the game.

I really liked the recruitment quest from 0.9, and I tried to replicate certain elements of it in 0.10’s long quest - specifically, having a town with interesting characters milling about, who generally react appropriately to whatever’s going on. I now think this was a mistake, since there are a ton of characters in this quest - including all 7 members of The Hell. Having that many characters just creates way too much work, especially since you’re not likely to see most of them in the future. Still, I’m too far along to do anything about it now, and I’m almost done with this part anyway. Lessons learned!

Doing movement for the cutscenes also takes quite a bit of time. Making sure they’re looking at the speaker or some otherwise appropriate place, emoting, moving while they talk, making sure they don’t run into objects/other characters when they move, making characters start moving before they’re supposed to be somewhere so the player doesn’t have to wait for one character to do finish doing something before the next one can - that sort of thing. Animating 2-3 character scenes isn’t usually too bad, but some of the scenes in this quest have a very large cast - up to 25 in some cases - and the quest is pretty heavy in cutscenes. I’ve seen a lot of RPGM games that don’t seem to worry about this kind of thing too much, but I think it adds to the experience, and is also key to the humor sometimes. But boy, did I bite off too much here.

In the future I’m going to try to avoid having tons of random NPCs in one-off quests unless there’s something very specific and important I’m trying to do. There will continue to be some places with tons of random NPCs - like Chapter 10+/11’s Commercial District and World 2’s hub city - but the effort spent injecting interest and quirkiness will be better spent there, since you’ll be interacting with those folks for a lot longer. I can even continue building on that interest/quirkiness in future releases. But for one-off quests the reward-to-effort ratio just isn’t there most of the time.

I’ve been doing other stuff, too - implementing the rewards, revising pieces here and there, writing various little bits, adding/fixing logic, etc - but the bulk of my time has been occupied with the stuff I wrote about above.

I probably sound kind of down writing about this, and I am kind of down, but it’s solely because of the fact that it’s taking so long to wrap this release up. I’m also a bit concerned that people won’t think it was worth the wait. There’s definitely good stuff here - many times I’d laugh out loud while reviewing stuff I’d written so long ago that I’d forgotten about it - and if you like the game so far, you’ll probably like this, too. But it isn’t the best thing since sliced bread, and it probably isn’t worth the wait. But still, I do think it’s good.

Anyway, that’s all I have to report. I think this coming month will finally be the one that sees Chapter 10 released. I’ve said that before… but I think it’s true this time. As I said above, though, you won’t have to stay on as a supporter to get it. I’m sorry for the lack of communication; I didn’t have any milestones to report, and it gets sort of dispiriting to write yet another “It’s not done yet, but...” post. Hopefully this will be the last of those. Thank you for your patience and your support.