Hello everyone!

Wow am I excited for this. I finally get to share this project with you more up-close and personal! I’ve put my heart and soul into this so far, so (after reading this) I hope you enjoy.

Let’s get it out of the way now:

This release isn’t perfect – and it isn’t meant to be. While this release is nowhere near what the full game will end up like, I hope it will be a great showcase of my skills and design philosophy moving forward.

If you find any more bugs, feel free to share them in the discussion channel!

What was I up to this week?

This week, I spent a long time polishing up all of the existing systems to get them ready for you! I tackled the remainder of the roadmap that was laid out for before this proof of concept rolled out, added many more description panels for various elements, finished polishing the map generation, and made the player display panel functional!

What can I expect in this release?

I wanted this release to have some sort of fun thing that you can do. I made the experience a little similar to one of those mid-2000s shovelware dress-up games that have a sweet spot in my heart. You can move around and interact with monsters to take items off of them and then equip them to add them to your character permanently! Well, semi-permanently. There’s a reset button. Honestly, I had a decent bit of fun just wandering around trying on different outfit combos. You get a pool of 50 random items to pick from on the map, so every experience should be a bit different. Hopefully, there’s enough variety to make it interesting!

How can I get my hands on this?

The first look release is available on a brand new SubscribeStar! You can subscribe for $5/month there and get access to all the major builds that I make. You’ll also get access to polls about new features and changes when I have questions for the community. In exchange, I get paid a portion! Which is great! Thanks :3

Devlogs will be posted weekly to the SubscribeStar, but if you want to follow along and don’t have the income to support, don’t worry! Major devlogs like this one will still come out for free.

How’s progress on the parsing from Inform?

Good! You can witness firsthand in the game’s external files section how the parsing has been going. It’s a slow process, but it’s getting more and more accurate over time. There are some mismatched inventory sprites and clothing window sprites that you might experience if you try the game out for yourself, but the cause of this is identified and will probably be fixed before the first alpha release.

What’s on the table for next week?

There’s lots to tackle over the next bit, that’s for sure. I’d really like to get the map generation code reworked to allow more unique generations. That code is currently functioning exactly the same as it was in Inform, and it’s causing some issues. I’d like to re-align it with my own design philosophy in mind. Work on the parsers will continue as new things are needed, and I’d also like to implement a bug reporting feature in-game so that I can pull things like system statistics and other things. I don’t think I’m going to get everything listed done in the next week, but if I do, I’ll be looking at adding in the first of the content to the game, starting with some basic traps.

FAQ Time!

I wonder if I should call it an OAQ because most of these questions have just been asked once.

Any plans for new areas when the port’s up to date?

Modding support will support new areas, and content development should happen a lot quicker! I know lots of people in the community have great ideas for new regions that I’ll be very excited to see. There’s not any plans for ‘official’ new content yet, but I personally (dev hat off) would like to see maybe Binding of Isaac-style alternate areas or something fun like that. (dev hat on) With the new map generation, there’s going to be a lot of space to add newness, even just on the community side.

Will the new version have updated graphics/animations?

Re-included from last week, but at the moment, all graphics are going to be sourced from TQ in Inform. Artists deserve good money for what they do and I don’t want to promise new/updated graphics without the capital to back up that promise. The success of the project as a whole will dictate what new assets are included and a graphical refresh may follow after that. For now, I’m working with what’s currently available to me.

What do the controls look like for the port?

Eventually, I’ll have custom key binds set up so that you can pick your own. The goal is to have everything be supported by keyboard and mouse separately so you can pick your poison and keep a hand free for, idk, eating ice cream or something. Currently, things are pretty one-option for interaction, except for the textbox which allows for spacebar or clicking on it.

Why JSON instead of another file format for storing modding info?

It’s a good point. There are a lot of file formats that would get the job done. I really only have two main reasons for JSON over anything else: the first one is that I’m familiar with it, and the second one is that Godot has built-in JSON support without the need for a plugin. I like that kind of reliability in my life.

What platforms are you going to release this for?

This question was posed in the discord server and I said I was going to give a short response there and a long response here. I don’t know what I was on, because I typed like three paragraphs. I’m just going to copy-paste that here:

That's a good question! I will be answering this in the next devlog but I'll give a shorter answer here. My goal is to bring the port to as many places as possible. There's a level of difficulty associated with the port to each platform and I'm planning to tackle them in order of difficulty. Here's a breakdown:

Android will be fairly simple! This is definitely planned. Controller support for PC is something that I would like to add at some point in the future and is currently planned.

MacOS and iOS require a special dev license from apple that I would be happy to look into if more people are interested. Godot supports exporting for MacOS and iOS the same as Windows and Apple. This is planned if there's enough interest to justify the dev license (I think there will be).

Linux already has a solution through WINE - I see zero reasons for TQ to have an anticheat at this moment, so no issues there.

Consoles are the only area where I'm tentative. To develop or port to any console, you have to get your hands on their development SDKs (and often times dev consoles too) which is a lot harder than getting the SDK to, say, build an android app. Hiring another company to port to a console can cost thousands of dollars and it's not something that I can promise for this project so early. Would I love to do it? Absolutely. If it becomes financially feasible, I'd be willing to do it.

Basically, in early development, releases will be for windows until I get the android release set up which I'm hoping will be around the first beta.

No anticheat ‘at this moment’? Competitive TQ when???

You know, there are a lot of good ideas for lewd games involving multiple people that have not been so thoroughly explored. Could be fun. Again, what I will say is that my development framework does not exclude the possibility. There are no plans right now, though. And I don’t think that I would write an anticheat for it if there was lol.

Can runs be seeded? Will I be able to share custom maps?

That’s a yes on the seeded runs part, and a yes but later on the custom maps part. I do hope to eventually release some sort of visual modding tool like Baba Is You or Warcraft 3 – that was always part of the plan. When that will happen, I’m not sure. It depends on how interested people are in modding. I want to lower the barrier to entry on modding for this game as much as I can.

Will the port have localization support?

With localizing the game, there’s two main concerns. The first one is just ‘is it possible to move the text from TQ to a different format.’ The answer to that is most likely yes and the parser to do it is in construction. The second question is will the framework be able to support it. That one depends a lot on the language. If someone has the passion and drive to make a full translation, I’ll make sure that the framework supports their language.

Anything you can say now about character windows?

All the character windows are going to be rolled up into one. If you want multiple character windows, there’s no issues with that! That means no more multiple downloads per window and no more having to pick.

That's it for this week! Please let me know what you all think of the port and give me any feedback! I'm always happy to answer questions on discord.