Wow, it's been more than half a year since I've last updated. Time flies!
Things have been going on in my own life and I haven't had the time or drive in these past many months to work on Erisa and her quest for sweet college poon. Enough so that f95 even swooped in and flagged the thread as Abandoned! The shame, the horror!
Well, to be honest about things, it was always my intent to work at my own pace (even if that meant taking a long break), but it was never my intent to abandon the game. But I got damn close - mostly because it became apparent to me that RPGM is a pain in the ass to work with.
I've had all the renders done for months (since one of the last updates), but basically lost the will to live in RPGM at some point. It's a weird constant middle ground between pre-made assets and custom made assets that I don't think I'll ever be happy with. Not to mention the variable system is incredibly frustrating when you want to track events that haven't yet happened or try to build events based on multiple variables.
It was leagues ahead of ADRIFT, but I've gotten to the point where I want more.
But the real question was how to cross that bridge - and it was a question I didn't want to address, until now.
Essentially, over the past several months, I've been playing in Ren'Py on another game I've been kicking around in my head - prototypically named EveL and based around a girl who develops mind control powers and uses them for good or ill. I've been quietly developing that game and an engine that runs similar to many of the LOP games you'll see where you can click buttons to move between environments and interact with the surroundings.
It's coming along nicely, and I'm really happy with the way the engine is progressing, but the thought of Erisa's unfinished Day 1 campaign kept eating at me to the point where I feel the need to at LEAST finish Day 1 of Erisa's Summer before taking off with EveL.
So again, how to cross that bridge?
Well, I'm going to finish Day 1 in RPGM since the bolus of the work is already there. Then, if I decide to build out Day 2 and beyond, they'll be in their own Ren'Py system similar to the above. This just means that the variables in RPGM will only matter for Day 1, and if I ever expand into a Day 2 in Ren'Py, a few key triggers will be captured by user input on startup and then everything will be tracked there moving forward in perpetuity.
Now, how far along is Day 1's implementation?
Well, the shitty RPGM engine has taken me longer than expected to implement everything I've wanted to build out. I've been working on all events following the last publish release and have probably put in over 20 hours already. I'm at the point where I just have the build out the branches at the end of the day (which may take some time, since they're all their own full scenes) and do some playtesting to hopefully get around any bugs like the shitty shower issue the first 0.0e99 release encountered.
I'm not publishing a timeline because I'm not holding myself to a timeline, but I hope to have Day 1 done in the near future. Day 2+ will be in indefinite limbo once Day 1 is complete, but I'll publish details there as I'm able to - or as I decide to focus on EveL.
Anyway - cheers for reading! Here's hoping the next post is a release post!
