6/23 Status Update

Sorry about the late update. This weekend has been pretty busy since I'm traveling to go to a friend's wedding. Could I have written this while on the plane or something to get it out on time anyway? Yes. Did I do that? No, so again sorry. For those of you who haven't quit the patreon in a justified rage over this update being late, let's talk about games and things.

The Carwyn Triumphent update is getting pretty close to being ready for a preview build. Most scenes have at least the bones laid out even if some still need their connective tissue. I will try to get something ready before the month is over. After that I'll finish the levels and flesh things out a bit more before the test build, and then after some tuning the update will be ready. I'm thinking end of July is pretty likely as a target release date.

One new development this week is a change in how I handled the Carwyn vs. Owain, Emrys, and Mordrid level. This was always a part of the route but had a big problem in that to win it you pretty much had to focus on leveling Carwyn and neglecting the other three. I really don't like routes to just become impossible to win if you don't play it right. So now if Carwyn doesn't win that, it's not a game over it just changes the scene that comes after. I think that the rest of the levels should be okay because even if you neglect leveling Gwen, Carwyn and Kobold Joe, Vivian joins the party pretty soon before the new levels split off. So she should be able to help carry the party if you decided to focus on leveling one of the characters that leaves the party on the Carwyn triumphant route.

The work on the Netoria 2 scene art has officially started. So that means early game routes and events are pretty much locked in. I think after the Carwyn Triumphant update is done it will be time to put Netoria 2 from pre-production into actual production. We're talking levels, scenes, mechanics, all that juicy stuff put into a working order you can play. I think I've got a pretty good setup so it's all about execution. Since the artist has started work on the scene art, let' talk about those.

One aspect of the Netoria 2 scenes that's more complicated than the first game is the different appearances characters can have when they're different classes. This has been accounted for in scene art with characters having different hair/clothes depending on what class they are at the time. For example, in the sketches below, Shahrazad has both the ponytail from her Assassin class while the Slinger has her hair down.




Some scenes will go further than this, with multiple sets of clothes, although that isn't the case here as both characters are nude.

Overall, the presentation will be pretty similar to the first game. There will be more variation in terms of things like different poses and facial expressions within a scene, but no big improvements in presentation like animation or anything. I actually wanted limited animation in these scenes, but SRPG Studio isn't capable of it as far as I can tell. Like you can't put text over an animation playing, it just won't let you.

That's the biggest thing that isn't changing in the sequel, I'm still using SRPG Studio. While SRPG Studio kind of sucks, as a sequel there're lots of improvements and custom plug-ins I already have made that makes re-using it much faster than jumping to something else. I wouldn't want to use Unity so I'd probably try out Godot. Factoring the learning period since I've never used Godot before plus having to recreate everything, it'd take a lot more time. Plus I figure that if you're playing Netoria 2 you probably could tolerate the interface of Netoria 1. It's at least not getting any worse.

That's all for this week. As always, thank you for your continued support.