ambersquest
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Try the new demo
🕑 Added 2021-12-07 23:58:29 +0000 UTCTLDR: The game will receive updates at the end of each month. Please, check your selected tier to make sure you want to stay with it. The Discord server will get some love soon. If there are too many complaints about the WebGL version, I will switch back to building for Windows.
Now let's move on to the longer version. What was the cause of the hiatus and what is the progress? My personal issues aside, the main problem of the previous demo was that the program code at the core of the game was very lame. Unity is practically a bare-bones engine, and you have to program every little thing yourself. Since I was relatively new to programming (and still am), it was hard to know how long it would take to implement what I needed. And here, when people support me with their money, I can't just say, "Sorry, no updates this month, but, hey, I wrote 10,000 lines of code". Not for an entire year. I aim to provide visual updates. And to do it once a month. Only now is the project starting to meet this requirement.
Rewriting my code also enabled building the game for WebGL, so you can play in a browser now. Not without issues, but I’ll talk about them in another post.
From a visual point of view, the most noticeable change is that I gave up 2.5D and switched to 2D. The 0.5D we lost just wasn't worth the extra work.
I also changed my priorities in gameplay. Platformer aspect now is just a way to move from point A to point B with some extra challenges. Don’t expect much from it. The main focus now is minigames, quests, and dialogues powered by Ink, a very powerful dialogue engine for nonlinear story flow (the current demo features a bit of everything). Platformer aspect is taking too much time, not leaving much for 18+ content. There are thousands of platformer games over there, but we are doing the adult one, thus the different priorities.
Still, I took my time and improved on a few things for the platformer mode. Such as rigs, fluidity of animations, controls, visual effects, etc. So it’s not like I’m completely giving up on it. It’s just a matter of my limited resources.
One more thing we got is the village stage, including the interiors of buildings and a bunch of NPCs. Remember the 100$ tier featuring a commissioned character in a game? There are few characters that were commissioned and already implemented, like the tavern keeper, and the village chief. First few lucky patrons even got animated platformer avatars and non-generic adult side-stories. The number of such slots is limited though, and I have to be more thorough with adapting to make them fit seamlessly.
The background music has also changed. I can do a lot of things, including programming, animation and art, but music is one of those things I haven't been able to learn. Fortunately, a few years ago I got some important help writing BGM, but since then the atmosphere of the game has changed a lot, and the old compositions no longer fit in. My temporary solution was to get royalty free music temporarily. That was a year ago, and those BGMs are still in use, so the solution may be permanent.
Now about my plans. I’ll try to post some reports at least a few times a month, no promises about how often. Toward the end of each month I will update the game. If I don’t have enough visual content to update it, I’ll pause charging money like I already did before. I also don’t have any plans to charge upfront for now, except for commissioned characters maybe. Currently, the game is available to everyone, so the support tiers are meant to ensure the continuation of development, I can't promise much beyond that.
That’s all for the report. Please, try the demo. Tell me your opinion, I will be very glad to hear it. Besides a short closed beta test, I didn’t get any feedback, so any comments will be a valuable help.
