Tuesday, February 7, 2017

What next

What now?

Eroico
I'm currently waiting on info from Nutaku about taxes, waiting on Mangagamer for marketing stuff, and waiting on DLsite to determine if the game is different enough to be listed as a new product. First word on it is that is isn't, but then this is, so I'm not totally sure what they're going on. The unlock code was included with the DLsite game, so people would be able to upgrade by using the trial.


Patreon
Other than that, I put up the latest character poll for patreon. In the meantime I need to do one of the draw winners from forever ago, and after that's done, do the animation from the poll. After that's done I'll probably finish the animation player and close the Patreon.

Noaika
For Noaika, I need to do it's whole soundtrack, sound design, and I also want to convert it to GM Studio 2 (They've made the process much easier). As I've said before, that's going to take a while so I want to release one of the side projects before doing that, so that I'm paying everything I need to be paying as I go.

GM Studio 2
Speaking of GM 2, I have it now, and I'm currently looking at all it's new features and deciding what I want to do with em. Main benefits so far are;

- Camera zoom and angle is easy and works well.
- Tilesets have autotiling and a brush system. (Speeds up tiling a lot)
- Rooms have layers, and you can have parent rooms.
- A ton of quality of life features.
- Decent audio mixer, making overall balancing much easier.

The only downside is that some of GM 2 is going to take some getting used to. Some of it works a lot differently, and some of it is kinda bad (The sprite editor is all over the place). In general, I'm going to have to adjust my workflow a bit.

Other than that, I'm trying to decide what sorts of things I want to learn how to do in GM. Even Eroico had performance problems, so I want to learn about more optimization methods, such as better collision detection. I also want to start using external file handling more, since Noaika in particular is NOT going to be able to run on a lot of computers without it.

3d elements in backgrounds are a bit of a gimick, but one I enjoy. It would be neat to get that working.

In general I want to come up with better methods for a lot of the stuff I've been doing. Syncing sound to Eroico's animations was time consuming, so it'd be nice to make an editor for that, since I'll be using the same method for future sound design.

All that said, I'm still not sure which side project I want to work on once the patreon stuff is done, since as much as anything it will be about learning some new stuff before I try to implement it in a bigger project like Noaika.