fault's New Direction (Mostly a Third One) (Patreon)

Vilserio -

There’s so much Ive wanted to say these past few weeks; thinking of theatrics and clever ways of presenting this info, but the amount of work has been quite overwhelming so I believe I’m just going to do the usual and go the candid route. 

Starting from MS2b, fault (specifically the milestone series) is going to shed its Visual Novel shell and become a proper adventure game. This means you’ll be able to control a character and explore various environments, talk to other characters and progress the story... you know, like a game! The StP series will stick around in VN format following the format of LIGHTKRAVTE.

Behold, the walking Ritona.

Many of you probably remember but this idea is not new. We were suppose to go this direction initially with StP (though we never intended to have controllable characters!!) but now with things like Esoteric Software’s Spine for character animation with great shaders that can integrate 2D sprites into 3D worlds pretty seamlessly and with a proper dedicated programmer (I’m gonna keep harping on this) on the team, I think it’s finally time we get back on track and push forward with our original plan.

We are finally... finally able to take advantage of the many functions of Unity (or basically any proper game engine that’s worth a damn) and really go for the style of game we at AiD has always wanted to make. Environmental, atmospheric storytelling. Pretty exciting stuff.

At the same time I can also understand if some folks are apprehensive about this move. We were a VN group first and foremost, what do we know about proper game dev? And you’re right. Even though the story is pretty locked down, this will be our first serious attempt at telling it in this brand new manner... but I’m pretty confident we can make this interesting. We’ve been thinking about this for quite a while and we don’t plan on flying too close to the sun. So no crazy action maneuvers, no strategy or grinding, most of the game will be conversations and explorations of environments that push the story forward. 

Even just the basic stuff here that you are looking at is/was a complete bitch and a half to get working. 2D sprites really do not like working in a 3D environment, lights and shadow casting/receiving particularly being a massive headache, that’s probably why we don’t see too many games taking this route.

Running all of this on a Nintendo Switch has been a nightmare as well... but that’s something we can touch on later when we actually mange to get it running at a respectable frame rate.

Anyways, thats it for now. There’s so much more I’d love to share but we’ll do so when the time is right. Please stick around folks, MS2b is going to become seriously something special, I can already feel it.

-Munisix