First off I work on a farm as one of my jobs. As such I'm ALWAYS very, very busy during the summer, to the extent that I did work myself sick twice recently. For most game devs this would be bad news and excuse not to work on a game, but for me that's fairly good news. Why? Because when I'm stuck on bedrest during the periods where I'm awake I can actually have time to work on the game. And what work I've been doing.
Long story short the biggest thing I've been doing lately is converting the game from RPG Maker VX to RPG Maker VX Ace. To 0nymous's (The team map maker) credit he wanted to do this a long time ago and I avoided it because I hoped I could work around some of the problems with vanilla RPG Maker VX. I eventually did decide it was just too much bother. It's an incomplete and dead system and an endless headache. VX Ace is complete, has new scripts, and frankly does every damn thing better than VX vanilla.
Good news: There was an automatic converter that did 99% of the work for me, and I've mostly been looking for game breaking bugs and converting over the fair amount of stuff that didn't make the transition. Well that and working with scripts (custom programming for the game).
You as players probably won't notice a lot of difference in the end, but *I* will, and I know 0nymous will. Mapping is infinitely easier now that we don't have to use SwapXT. You see - in VX Ace you can use as many tiles as you like, but in Vanilla you got the default and one extra small page worth of customs. That's IT. SwapXT lets you get around that but it's a pain to work with. That's just one example of the MANY artificial limitations VX vanilla forces you to work around.
Everything is 100% easier in VX Ace, basically. I had always intended to do any sequels and expansions in it but hadn't expected to make this transition. I was simply working on the game one day and after the fifth time of running my head against one of the limitations of the very crappy and incomplete RPG Maker VX vanilla I just decided to convert. Good news: Everything is just a hell of a lot easier now. I don't expect it'll take very long to complete the transition.
I have a lot of new art done, including the VERY LAST sex scene in the game. Because there's a LOT of spoilers involved in this I can only show you the background, but damn. That is a fucking awesome background. Sleepymaid has outdone even the normal crazy good standards of her work on this one.
I'll dole out more art previews in coming weeks. As for an ETA - because I know you'll want one - depending on how much real life work I have to do (which will probably be a lot) and any snags during the conversion I haven't hit yet I'm expecting somewhere between 1-3 months.
Also I may launch a Patreon soon. While the game is fully funded I've also sunk a lot of my own money in the game and wouldn't mind recouping some of the costs. Won't be too choked up if I don't but hey, I haven't had a pizza in a year. I'll prolly buy one if I get cash enough. Apparently you can still make donations to my Paypal right now so you can still take advantage of that if you want.
Thanks for being fans!
