Hey guys,

So I wanted to give a bit of a reveal to what this new re-work of the game is going to be about. This time the whole rework focused around shifting the entire game onto a new engine - in this case RPG Maker MV. 

I know this might surprise quite a lot of people, but hopefully my reasonings below will persuade you that this was the best course of action for the game.

That said if you just want to give the game a try, you can download it right away for the 0.4 version!

The game should match entirely what was already present on 0.4 Unity version  with the following notable changes: 

• Characters now stay on screen when not giving their own lines
• Multiple characters now display on screen simultaenously
• Added some sprites during sex scenes 
• UI no longer shows "Corruption Level" but instead shows how many nodes you have to unlock powers with
• Corruption bar is now a scale from 0 to max corruption (rather than filling up per level)
• Memories can be accessed any time by pressing M
• Powers can be accessed any time by pressing P
• Intro is now skippable
• Mini games are (temporarily removed) - apart from the lock pick mini game

Why change the engine?

So my experience of Unity has been an up and down one. For my other project, things feel much more straight forward when creating that sort of point and click style of gameplay / interactivity. Even future mechanics I have planned for that project feel doable and I have a good plan of attack.

The problem I've come across with Kingdom of Subversion however is that it felt very much like re-inventing the wheel. I was able to emulate an rpg maker style game, but at some very noticeable costs: the assets available are far more limited, the interactions in game felt quite janky at times and there were collision issues that just felt quite hard to deal with long term and finally the amount of time it took to "put things together" felt much longer (probably thrice as long) as what I remember it took in RPG Maker. 

I won't go into the technical details, but basically placing a character on a map, that only appears at certain times of day and moves around the map is far simpler / easier in RPG Maker MV than in unity. And when the game so closely matches what is already available, but does it worse with very little upside there comes a point where you have to ask; "why am I doing it this way?"

The benefits of unity wasn't something I was able achieve with this particular project VS the costs of picking it over rpgmaker. In the end, cutting dev time, making things easier to develop upon and having more assets available to me far outweighted what I was gaining out of unity for this project.

Ultimately the proof is (hopefully) in the pudding. In the space of this month, I managed to recreate everything I had done for the unity version of the game, along with a dialogue importer (because I still don't want to input every line of dialogue into the game manually!) and some other features. And I hope you guys like the results!

The game should run smoother, play better and be a lot less buggy overall. But I would love to hear your thoughts on it!

Does this mean the game will include basic rpgmaker combat?

At this time, no. One thing I've said a few times on this project is I don't want the game to feel like a grinding simulator at any point. I want it to feel like a natural progression of events. With that in mind I still have combat ideas in the back of my head, as well as re-implementing the skill game mechanics to come in the future.

If there is going to be a combat system again, I will like veer away from the rpgmaker combat system in favour of something else.

So how many more reworks can we expect?

None! This is it now. I feel a lot happier developing and taking the game forward in this way and I hope you guys will agree it will create a better game overall. I've been able to do a few really small minor things, that I hope really add to the overall experience. (Mainly thinking about those animated sprites that appear during scenes, and the use of the exclamations.)

The game is perfect then?

Not quite! There are likely still some minor issues and definitely some improvements to make going forward. I want to tweak the lockpick mini game to make a few Quality of Life changes and as I said I want to bring back skills and skill checks. 

What about 0.5 - is that delayed?

It shouldn't be! I've been extensively play testing the current build as well as having some alpha testers run over it and it seems very stable at the moment. So for 0.5 I will be adding Titania's and Lucille's progressions. I have a lot of the dialogue prepped and the progression planned out and with the new speedier implementation I should be able to complete it by Friday!

That said if there are delays I wouldn't expect them to cross over into next month, so the build will definitely be no later than the 30th of this month!

I'm really looking forward to bringing you 0.5 with Titania and Lucille as they (and all the Royal Court) have really juicy, meaty content! A lot to unpack for sure!

If you have any thoughts or anything of the like, please leave them here or on the discord!

Speak to you on Friday hopefully about the 0.5 release!

 - Nergal