I need a new engine

Just wanted to give a quick update.

Been having some (more) issues with Tyranobuilder lately. I've been trying to figure out how to transfer saves between game versions, and it turns out that you just can't. Which threw a considerable wrench into my plans for current and future projects.

It should be fine for smaller standard VN projects like Teach Me. It will probably be a little annoying having to skip through, but it shouldn't take too long. But for bigger projects like A Perfect Ten, it's just not feasible. I don't want people to have to restart the game every time there's an update. That would be a nightmare for an open world game with steady progression. I've been doing my best to figure out a solution, but there doesn't seem to be one. Unless I learn to code and basically reprogram Tyranobuilder or create a program to rewrite the saves. Which I have no idea how to do, which is why I'm using Tyranobuilder in the first place.

From the beginning I had the possible idea of making A Perfect Ten an RPG Maker game, so that's probably what's going to end up happening. It kind of sucks that I put all this work into learning how to do exactly what I wanted with Tyranobuilder and create what I think is a pretty solid base, but progression is too incremental and too many things are interwoven to force people to do it multiple times. 

Tyranobuilder is easy to use and it can do a lot, but I'm getting really tired of running into these weird issues that shouldn't be issues. I don't know why they made it so that just copying a save file from an older version to a newer version makes the game close with a popup saying that it's a "modified" save file, rather than just trying to read it. So yeah, I'll probably be switching to RPG Maker MV for open world games, and make them more exploration based. I'll have to rebalance A Perfect Ten a bit to account for a big change like this. Since it will take a lot longer than a couple of clicks to get anywhere and I can't have people do something 10 times when it takes 2-3min to do it, when before it took about 10 seconds. But on the bright side, I can take all the planning and transfer it to RPG Maker relatively smoothly, and a lot of the assets I should be able to transfer over as well. The most time consuming part is going to be making all of the sprites and maps. As for Teach Me and the next possible follow up game, that'll still be Tyranobuilder for now. For the bigger game that was supposed to come after that, I'll probably have to switch it to RPG Maker though.

Speaking of Teach Me, the first version is almost done! I just need to add in one more scene, a couple more polish renders, and then do some bug testing. I've decided to cut the Halloween event from the first release though. I thought it would make for a big fun intro to the next update, rather than being the end of the first. The Halloween event is going to be pretty big as well. There's going to be a lot of choices and branching paths. It may end up being it's own update.

I also may start releasing more VAM looks more frequently. It seems like that's what gets the most support. It depends on what happens after the initial version of Teach Me is released. It will make development on games a little slower, but it's either that or I'll have to work more elsewhere to make money, which would make development so slow I'd probably shut down the Patreon since there just wouldn't be enough updates or content to justify it.

Anyway, that's all for now, I just wanted to give a quick update on what I've been doing and what I've been dealing with.