Well... with the current pandemic going around we are pretty much closed to our homes, I was pretty much working on my projects. March was a bit silent on my project since I was participating in a game jam and I was putting most of my time into it (building a 30-minute game in one month). Now that it’s over, I return to the game (even finishing part of the story as well). Speaking of the story:

Story Progress:

I can’t say a lot since this is spoiler territory, but as far the story goes, it’s coming along nicely. It takes quite some time to write the dialogue since there are times that I’m not happy with the dialogue I just wrote. But since I have a clear picture of how the story unfolds, I am getting closer to finish it.

OK. Time for a confession. When I started the game (back in 2014), I’ve done a big mistake by writing the story on demand. Ack! It seemed for younger me to be a good idea but now that I’m thinking about it, this has caused some headaches when writing the story. Granted, a major engine switch and re-designing the game’s mechanics also took development time, but I think this oversight caused some of the issues. Rookie dev making rookie mistakes. Not surprised, to be honest.

Some technical work:

While the story progresses slowly, I managed to put some quality of life fixes and improvements. One of these is to improve the reliability of the save mechanism. A flaw that I found in it was that it was looking for the save folder on the wrong folder at times. While the possibility of the bug to appear is still there, it was reduced. I have found a better way to find the correct folder, but I will need to work on a few things before implementing it. The next improvement is more user-facing. I’ve done some work so the battle UI will remove options if a state seals them or the resources aren’t enough to use any skill. This cuts some clutter, and it does cut out some of the guesswork since rather than having to open up an option to see what you can and can’t use, you can simply see that (for example) you can’t use Mystic Arts because Elena (in the case shown in the screenshot) was silenced. There is some work to be done, but I think this will improve the game-play a bit.

There are a few more QoL stuff in the works as well, but they're too minor to talk about. The only issue at the moment is due to some of the code requiring some extra information, this leads to breaking the saves. I’d prefer not to break the saves (since I had to do an engine switch for various reasons), but if the QoL changes overweight these, it will be at least worth the trouble.

What’s next?

For the moment, I need to get some funds so I can replace what’s left to replace. Sadly, a friend of mine couldn’t is pretty much busy with IRL stuff so I can’t get her to draw new images, so I’ll need to look up for a new artist to do the work. Since the pandemic has me closed up on my home, I can’t go to work to get money, but I am thinking of other ways to get some money. If I had the placeholder images replaced, Second Edition would already be stable, but until then, that’s gonna stick in the Beta channel for a while. At least I have some time to polish the game up.

That is all for now. See you in the next post.