DwindlingAway

Plan for the Immediate Future

Added 2020-05-31 06:16:59 +0000 UTC

Hi All,

I wanted to drop a quick message here to share my current thoughts on DA's development. The build quality has obviously suffered over the last couple of releases and I do apologize for that but the bugs *will* be fixed in future builds. One of the biggest challenges of having a game 'released' in an alpha state, even a game using the relatively simple architecture of RPGMaker, is that its difficult to build something that is going to both A) work well, and B) have flexibility for additions.

This isn't a problem unique to game dev, every software developer builds systems that they have to refactor later as the project matures. After more than half a year working on this project we've reached the point where the limitations in the way I've organized certain systems is becoming clear. Furthermore, at least one core system has yet to be added to the game: the relationship system. Events and tracking for the relationship system are going to be interspersed throughout the current game as well as all future content.

Therefore, even though there are some issues with the way things have been done up to this point I've decided its more important to get all the important pieces in place before spending more time fix all of the bugs. I realize that this sucks for those of you playing right now because it means the game just isn't as good. However, if I don't get some of the critical pieces of gameplay added now its going to hamstring the DA's development over a much longer time period.

In other words, a little pain now is what has to be paid to avoid a lot of pain later.

The quality of the demo is the target for the full project and I will do my best to get the game back to that point as quickly as possible- but you're gonna have to bear with me through the next 2-3 builds as I streamline how things work on the back end so that developing new content doesn't become a complete mess.

Thanks for understanding.