Relationship Plugin, and Upcoming Bugfix Release (Patreon)

Greetings! This month I completed the relationship plugin and got most of the way through a complete playthrough of the game. I'll have a little more to say about both of those below, but the main thing to come out of it is that I will be issuing another 10.2 release - 10.2.2 - which will address a number of bugs and issues uncovered by the playthrough. The plan is to have it out next month sometime. For details on the new plugin and the problems 10.2.2 will fix read on!

The Relationship Plugin

Early this month I completed the relationship plugin, which is something I expect to use a fair bit in future releases. Why create it? What's it supposed to do exactly? Well, this game has a plot which is slowly coming into focus, but what it's really about is the characters - your companions who are stuck just like you, the friends you make along the way, and the strange and occasionally interesting folks you encounter on your journeys. As far as the main story goes, this game is kinda "on rails" - a deliberate decision to avoid an ever-growing number of paths that would quickly overwhelm a solo dev. Even so, there's a lot of different ways the minor events can go - a huge number of the game's quests are optional, many have different possible outcomes, all the H-scenes are optional, and there are often different ways you can choose to interact with a character or react to a situation. If the game is supposed to be about people, it's only natural to wonder how what you've done with, for or to a character in the past should affect how they treat you in the future.

To help the characters and world seem more alive, and to make your decisions feel more meaningful, I would like to incorporate more of this history into your interactions with them. Because this could easily turn into another case of infinitely multiplying possibilities, I have to keep limits on it, but I do want to have some variation. What would this look like? For a few major characters, I'd like to have different relationship paths - friend, love, lover, frenemy, and so on. For most major characters, I'd like to have them treat you slightly differently depending on your past with them - different conversation options, or different dialogue for example. I'd also like to use your relationship to gate some quests or activities with a character - maybe if Shiri's feeling particularly pleased with you she'll try to drag you to the astrologer, or maybe Ana will want to take you to one of her favorite spots in Zameroth.

This aspect of the game will probably develop slowly - a little bit in one release, a little in the next - but over time I hope it will build up and make the game a more meaningful experience. The challenge in making this happen - from my perspective - is that there's a lot of this data about your past choices, and it's often hidden in weird places. To make this aspect of the game easy to develop, this data needs to be easily accessible and in a useful form. This is the problem the relationship plugin is intended to solve.

I basically want two types of data - granular and aggregate. It would be useful to know whether you did Val's Quest, for example, and what the outcome was. It would also be useful to have a rough idea how she feels about you based on all the things you've done (or not done) with her. To accomplish this, the relationship plugin records events that could affect your relationship with a character, the possible outcomes for that event, and the criteria for determining what happened with it. Each of these events and outcomes have unique names in the plugin, which allows me to easily test for specific things, and each of these outcomes have romance, friendship, and attraction scores associated with them, which are then used to calculate aggregate scores for that character.

The beauty of this system is that these scores are calculated when needed - as opposed to being stored in a variable - so existing saves will work just fine. Also, if I later realize I forgot to include an event or gave the wrong scores to an outcome, I can just make changes in the plugin as opposed to telling you to go back and redo certain parts or doing some wonky save fix. And if I decide to start tracking your relationship with an existing character, I can do it easily on the fly!

In order for the plugin to be useful, however, it needs to be populated with information about all these events. That's where the next part comes in...

The Playthrough (And 10.2.2)

I wanted to do a full playthrough to help get back into the characters before starting the actual writing for 10.3, but the relationship plugin gave me another reason to do so. Basically, I have to identify all the things that could affect your relationship with a character, determine how they'll affect your relationship, and then put that information into the plugin. I've been doing that, and I've also been taking a lot of notes - things I like or dislike, things I might want to change later, little details I'd forgotten, and ideas for new things spurred by seeing old things again.

I've also taken note of bugs and other problems, and found quite a few. Some aren't really bugs, they're just things that didn't happen as intended - for instance, when I gave Tal'thelas a theme song during your second encounter with him, I went back and added it to your first encounter. I screwed something up when doing this, though, so the music is now all wonky in what should be an amusing scene, detracting from its comedy value. I also apparently screwed up something with the lighting in your first encounter with The Oracle, which can lead to a weird tint to the screen after your leave her temple. There's a lot of little stuff like this.

Game balance is also screwed up. Extra equipment slots were added in 0.9, as well as default items for some of these slots. More equipment means more stats, which means more powerful characters. While the later encounters (e.g. Dranax) are balanced around this, the early ones are not, leading some fights to be much easier than intended. The Stone King fight was a particular disappointment - beating him on hard mode should feel like an accomplishment, but now it's almost trivial.

And then there are the crashes. I'd seen people complain a little of late about the game crashing on them, but I thought it must've been relatively rare (because I never experienced it.) I added the autosave feature to help address these concerns, but otherwise worried about it no more. Well, I've had the game crash on me 2 or 3 times, and sometimes had the screen freeze, neither of which I recall happening before.

I think these problems have to do with the new NWJS (the engine the game runs on) versions I switched to in order to improve performance. I switched versions pretty frequently for a while, which I now realize was a bad idea. These new versions seem more performant but less stable, which gets the priorities exactly backwards (especially for a game like this.) For testing I'm now using the version that ships with RPG Maker MZ, which is quite a bit older than some other ones the game has used, but which will hopefully be more stable and battle-tested.

This is a long way of saying that the latest version of the game has some problems, and I want to put out another release that addresses those problems. That's the next order of business once the playthrough is complete, and I plan to get it out next month.

Conclusion

So that's where we're at. I expect to finish the playthrough this week, then I'll start fixing all those problems and get 10.2.2 out. And after that, I'll finally be able to start work on 10.3's quests - and start putting that relationship plugin to use! Thank you for your support!