In Pursuit of Frivolity (Patreon)

hello! we have Done A Move

here are some Picture, featuring Cat Who Is Very Cute! we were a Nervous that she would not like the new place and would hide for three days in the smallest space she could possibly fine, but she has actually taken to this place like a Champ right away

I have a new set up, and thusly, she has a new favorite place to be:

Or maybe sometimes here:

... Maybe she still needs to hide sometimes:

But mostly, she's just very small and cozy and fluffy and pretty:

So aside from tying up loose ends from the move, I've been trying to fit a few pieces together. Some of that has been with projects that are yet unripe to be talked about, so let's focus on the other two.

Starlight

making game is hard
one thing i've come to appreciate about the random side projects i've been toying around with over the last few months is that i need to be able to just
fuck around with it
i think one of the hardest things about starlight has been, i want to make the game pretty. we clearly can make the game pretty. but doing so presents a mountain of work that is just not very conducive to the sense of frivolity that i feel like is necessary to Make The Game good... or, perhaps, at all.

the scope is especially daunting when it comes to combat models and animations. we clearly can make those work. we're going to keep working on them and trying to make them work as is practical. but i think i need to detach the progress on the combat scene from the progress on the game.
there was that post circulating a while ago about "we want more better games with worse graphics" and although i want to mak gam pretti, i agree with that.
so, i'm reshuffling priorities. 

so as for what this actually means, let's make some fire emblem comparisons.
normal combat is based off of these scenes:

instead, we'll just do this style:
...and the internet has failed me, so all i can find was a gif from the damn SNES games, but:

like, it's the same in later titles, okay?

even in the 3DS/switch games if you hold a button you can skip animations and they just play on the overworld. or, they often do this for objects which don't have combat models. or, for enemies fighting each other or something.

nothing about the intended rhythm combat or gameplay experience is changing; i'm just letting go of the visuals. maybe we can still fit it in later, but the resource burden is too high and right now focusing on the cosmetics is just not a good use of energy while i'm trying to get the project off the ground.

((this does mean the ARDA will not be getting a combat model. i'm sorry. i understand if the game is now ruined.))

cons to this change:

• less pretty/dramatic combat visuals

pros to this change:

• easier to make new units, maps, and characters
• we don't have to burn time on animations, backgrounds, alternate music, and combat models*
  * unless we want to
• story gets made faster. game gets to you all faster.
• more feasible to add weird-ass fun shit or play around with and experiment with the tactical system
• lighter system requirements
• gameplay is actually faster-paced

I'll talk about the last one in detail.
So, right now, and in the demo, there's a Tactical Scene and a Combat Scene and the two are distinct. Step one for removing the tactical scene is to make sure everything that happens as part of combat (i.e damage, rhythm check, hit detection) can function in the tactical scene as well. So, I've been working on shunting the entire Combat Scene to be part of the Tactical Scene.

We were considering doing this anyway because it reduces load times. When I sent up the flow of [Tactical Scene >  Combat Scene > Back to Tactical Scene] I was under the impression that the game engine would just set the initial instance of the tactical scene down and pick it back up again when it was done with combat. Turns out that is NOT how it works; we especially discovered that fact during demo testing when many weaker computers were just not able to Reconstruct the entire tactical scene after combat, and I was deeply distraught. We were able to optimize it a bit so it isn't redrawing the entire damn map every time, but it is still recreating everything BUT the map every time you come back from combat.
Also, that's to say nothing of the initial load of creating the combat scene itself, as well as the models.

So all of this is now going to work together as one scene. I'm sure there will be technical challenges with that too, but so far it appears to handle the loading seamlessly. There is a visual transition, but unlike before where that transition was masking the load timing, we can now make that much quicker to get in and out of combat. Like, we're removing the need to have combat visuals, but for if and when we do restore them, they will load in and out faster. 

And needless to say, not having a combat scene also plays faster.

This is a work in progress, and then figuring out how to make the overworld sprites look passable-- not pretty, just passable-- is going to be its own challenge. But no longer requiring everything to have models lightens the development load a little bit in the long term, and a lot in the short term. 

I hope the game will still be plenty enjoyable without them, and we hope to still be working on them on the side of core development. Like maybe it works out that the visuals are just intermittent and/or a few chapters behind new releases. We'll see.

Reborn

I said before that Rejuv releasing was the main obstacle to future updates. We all reworked our script backend and this was Rejuv's turn on the X-Box. Now that 13.5 has released, we can consider some fun things again.

Now, we have to finish the update ourselves. e19 kind of released in the middle of it, so we're most of the way there... but we don't know what all will have broken. Could be anything. Could be everything.

We've been working with Enumag (long time supporter and helper-outer, brought you such great hits as making line breaks not fucking suck, and making follower code actually work, among other things) on improving the updater and automating some processes as far as actually pushing out updates, so it's easier for us to do so now! I hear he's also been working on some more direct JoiPlay support.

But what I really need is, like... a group of people that can just... like, I don't know... play a copy of the development version or something. Like, just, mess around with it and let us know what's broken. If only there were folks who would want to just, support and play through the project.
...Does anyone know where I can find a group of people like that?

Once we get through some testing on the new scripts, Reborn will actually be in a really great place for just Fucking Around With. Wanna add a quick new QoL thing? Something annoys me? Feel like adding a sidequest to the setting? Boop, quick patch. When we're stable, I can just DO things, and the prospect of that feels Very Freeing.

I have some ideas that I don't want to talk about yet. Promises are not freeing and I have commitment issues. I am not interested in continuing to add content or expand the scope of the game, but I am interested in continuing to polish and improve what game we already have. One thing that is going to generally be very practical is integrating community mods. I've been talking to a few creators here and there about pulling them in (and will continue doing so as we have room for it). 

As an example, I teased the Follower Pokemon mod on stream some months ago-- that was Enumag's mod in the first place! Although it's not quite ready yet (and you all may be able to help out with that too in the near future...) I hope you can look forward to some new features joining the game!

We might hear from Enumag soon directly about some of his efforts!

In the mean time, what we're getting set up for you in the near future is some  t e s t i n g. Unlike past testing, this isn't going to have a set start and end. Also, as it is right now, there's no new content, so, lol!!!!
But there will be. Once we know the game is stable we can start doing Activities. We can also put some quests forward to you all to help out with things more directly. It'll be exciting and collaborative. I love excitement and collaboration.

Again, to reiterate, there will be no new content. The game is also probably going to be very broken and unstable, just like all of us after middle school. But if you have challenge runs, or are looking for an excuse to replay, you would be doing us a big favor by giving it a shot then. 

Next week, we'll start this out with the VIP group. At some point after that, depending on activity and stability, we will probably extend this down all the way to anyone with Discord access (for simplicity). Maybe some tiers and channels will get rearranged, I don't know yet. I'll give you the details later.

For now, thanks as always for being here for us <3