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The Pill 0.4.0 State of Play
🕑 Added 2020-03-05 13:16:11 +0000 UTCHey everyone,
I thought I'd give you all an update on what's happening with the next version of The Pill.
Long story short, after (a few months of) attempting to solve a number of issues that I've had with VN Maker, I've decided that the task would be too convoluted and piecemeal to try and solve the myriad of issues I've had within the game development platform.
I have instead decided to remake The Pill within Unity. This would lead to a game that appears mostly the same, but is written in C# rather than Java.
This is a lot of work and not something that I have not decided upon lightly. My reasoning is as follows:
- The larger the game becomes the greater we'd face the (already problematic) loading issues the game has in VN Maker. In some cases, (especially on older machines) the game simply wouldn't run. The larger it gets the more that will happen. Moving to Unity should solve that issue.
- The current version of VN Maker is technically still in beta and has a number of pretty serious bugs, including the game not working on the latest OSX, crashing while trying to skip scenes and breaking the game entirely when I try to move dialogue from one scene to another. Unity, on the other hand, has had years of development and heaps of support.
- Unity negates previous limitations such as allowing videos as rewards in the gallery. It also allows for much greater addition to the game outside of its current scope (e.g. currency, items and achievements)
- In Unity running videos in general should be a smoother affair.
- As a final big factor - I'm intending to create further BE games once done with The Pill (the game itself was always intended as a test run of sorts) and Unity is a much better platform to expand for that next endeavour.
In essence, I'm trying to look to the future rather than just building more and more on a shoddy foundation.
As for the next step - I'm currently re-creating Trish's story arcs within Unity with relative success. I've remade most of the menus and about 1/2 of her current existing arcs.
I'm conscious of the fact that you patient lot have been waiting for new content for quite a while, so the plan for v0.4.0 is to have the existing Trish story, as well as a number of new arcs present within the Unity framework. This will include (at a minimum) a new BE pill and a GTS pill.
I'm focusing on that new content rather than back adding in Belle for the time being, as it's a heap of work that's not super exciting to anyone who has played v0.3.5 already.
For timeframe, I'm hoping to have something by the end of next week, but as always there might be some coding snags along the way.
I'll post a bit more tomorrow, including a (possibly surprising) MWM and a new SuperSized poll!
Comments
B.E. Grove
Sadly I'm not the speed demon I'd hoped to be. I'll release a post about shortly but I'm not going to get you guys a new version by the end of this week. I've made massive strides forward, but not enough for a new release just yet :(
TheMartianKing
You truly are a speed demon! I'm reading this post, nodding along in agreement, because it is definitely understandable to get a more reliable foundation for the general health of the game and we all want to see it thrive and see the full extent of your wondrous BE powers and prowess. And I'm thinking "maybe he'll show us something new, as far as games go, by the end of the month" and then you're all like "gonna hit you guys with some juicy content next week!" I don't know how you do it man lol but keep doing it! :D
B.E. Grove
At this stage, I'll be using pre-rendered content within Unity (for two reasons - one is that that's how The Pill has been made so far and the second is that to use the model themselves within in any sort of interactable way requires a different license) however - yes, a personal goal that I have is to one way or another be able to create VR content. I've looked into other methods too, including rendering scenes in a stereoscopic manner, but it is currently one aspect that Daz itself is a bit difficult to work with.
LavaHot
Oh, so have you solved the render issues with Unity and Daz? Does this mean there could be VR content at some point in the future?
B.E. Grove
Thanks, VitAnyaNaked - it was a daunting decision but after working in Unity for a few days now I'm feeling like it was the right call to make for future games development.
B.E. Grove
I've muddled with it a bit before, mostly making experimental VR scenes and seeing how I can move between it and Daz, but after finding a couple of helper scripts I've found it quite enjoyable to use. Certainly feels like a very solid workhorse programming tool.
B.E. Grove
I really like Belle as a character and am not completely done with her arc, but it is on the backburner right now. She will be back though if/when we meet the 750 patron reward milestone as part of the unique Patron-only Pill expansion. And speaking of animating the endings, that's also a milestone reward - if I get enough patrons I can spend the time it would take to properly animate them all, so that dream is still on the horizon. If you wanted a taste of an animated Belle however, stick around as this week's MWM involves just that. I'll have it posted as soon as the video is uploaded.
VitAnyaNaked
I completely agree that you need to look to the future and think about the quality of the game and look for new best platforms.
Thaewyn
Nice to hear! I've worked with Unity a bunch myself, and once you get over the initial quirks, it's definitely a very nice platform for building... just about anything really. Looking forward to seeing what's coming!
GKMoritz
do I understand correctly that Belle Story is no longer being worked on? that would be a real shame and I would have liked the ending text to be translated into videos instead of just the pure text
B.E. Grove
Been up trying to get the next Midweek Mammaries done in time so they're not Weekend Mammaries. Not that I have anything against them... They'd basically be the same but with a bigger hat and sunnies.
Simon
WOW your up late lol hopefully not for long though as everyone needs a good night's sleep
