OhMeGa
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The end of Roll the Dice, the birth of Tale of Tali
🕑 Added 2021-01-31 22:00:02 +0000 UTCIf you read anything and feel like panic, please keep reading. It will all make sense in the end.
Some of the best stories in my life start with “Huh… I bet I can do that!”
It’s been over a year since I looked at a contest on tfgames.site and thought… Huh… I bet I can do that! I can make a game in one month… why the hell not? There was an ever so slight issue with me not knowing a thing about coding, making games, writing stuff, but hey, that was not going to stop me! So I made a game, and I called it Roll the Dice.
The premise of the contest was Game Night, so I took a story I thought about how to put the story I came up within that framework and came up with the idea of it being a VR world based on the imagination of the players. Over the year I’ve come to realize more and more that as fun as it is, this is a compromise on the story I really wanted to tell. I want to spend more and more time in this fantasy world, and the real world aspect just kept getting in the way… So after over a year of development, I am both sad and happy to announce 0.2.1 will be the last build of Roll the Dice. It’s time for Tale of Tali.
What happens to the project now? It’s not going away. Depending on the poll below I intend to either revisit the story, and rewrite it to no longer be about an IRL/VR mix of worlds, and instead become a full fantasy setting, where I no longer have to worry about “well how does that work with the irl stuff…”, or... well... And here we loop right back to my idiot monkey brain that looks at a 20-day trial version of RPG Maker Engine and thinks… Huh… I bet I can do that! Not that I have ever made anything in this engine, know the first thing about it beyond one youtube tutorial or have any experience in anything even remotely similar but it’s not like that was going to stop me…! So umm… I kinda ended up making a proof of concept for the game already.
I have seen issues with other creators who moved from Twine to RPGM, and so I want to take a moment to address why I am considering this.
1) The complex battle and inventory mechanics we have working in RTD are essentially black magic to me, and I am genuinely incapable of modifying them at all without the help of others.
2) RPGM is honestly a lot of fun and my limited experience with it has unveiled a lot of really annoying flaws, but at the same time, it is still a lot more rewarding and interactive.
3) I believe the story I want to tell is better suited by this engine, and there is a lot of effort essentially wasted on trying to force Twine to do things it wasn’t necessarily made to do.
It’s something I have been working on intensely for the last couple of weeks. Now before you jump to conclusions, the entire proof of concept demo has been made on a very strict 0$ budget, relying only on assets already made/ordered for RtD, stock assets from the engine, royalty-free assets from the internet (credited in the credits file) and my own edits of all the above. I think if I am going to invest Patreon money into this you guys should be on board, and it would be unfair for me to do it in any other way.
So what happens now? After the upcoming build this month, Roll the Dice will be discontinued, and I will release the code in full to the public. Based on the public response to this, either of two things will happen. Either you guys hate my proof of concept and I rewrite RtD in Twine to remove all the VR stuff, or you guys love it and we move over to RPG Maker engine fully. All I ask is an honest try of what I’ve made before you vote either way. By my estimate, there are about 30 minutes of content there to be seen.
The poll is going to be public, however, it will be weighted to give Patrons higher voting power.
The browser version of the demo: http://bit.ly/39vLlHM (allow up to one minute for loading, if the game does not load till then your internet is too slow or my server is on fire)
The PC downloadable version of the demo: https://bit.ly/3t8oSsa
The MAC downloadable version of the demo: https://bit.ly/2MgXyqY
If you feel like this is not the direction you want to support on Patreon, I totally understand that, but I would still ask you to give the game a chance. After you have played, please feel free to vote in the poll below. I am available for all questions both here and on the Discord.
EDIT: I have noticed there are some issues with the web build and not all scenes/plugins work correctly. Please use local version if possible.
Comments
Stormy Weather
I'm new here, so a bit late. I like the concept of transferring over to rpg maker, but it is sad that Roll the Dice is discontinued. The story concept was one of the best I'd seen, and I particularly liked the duality between the VR player and the character they were becoming. Looking for a new version of that on Game Jolt, and noticing you had a patreon is actually why I'm here. I'm glad that you're excited for the new game, but I do really hope you come back to RtD at some point.
Proxxie
For what it's worth, I always thought RPGM would be a better fit for the kind of game it seemed like you were making. Creating a battle system in Twine is pretty impressive as a feat of engineering, but it felt sort of like re-inventing the wheel, and I thought the experience less fun than it could have been in RPGM. I think you're probably making the right decision; hopefully most of your supporters feel the same way. As you've seen a little of in the comments, a lot of players are biased against the engine for reasons I don't entirely understand.
