This week I am going to ramble about engines and game design. Hopefully that will interest those who care about decisions behind the scenes, but if you're just interested in other stuff, some quick updates first:
Check the art above! If you were on Discord you may already have seen this, but Annikath went to a huge amount of effort doing a whole series of the characters swapping one another's outfits. ^-^
Follow-up on the previous post: Kickstarter has backtracked on their new NSFW content guidelines. Is this a positive sign? It's hard to say, and I won't speculate, because as I said last time, I don't think I'm a particularly good prognosticator here.
This week I concluded a lot of writing/book progress. I am very far ahead on everything, which feels nice.
Next month is still going to be an unpleasant storm of promotion, though. It will include an AMA people might enjoy, and some releases that some of you have been waiting for, but progress on things will definitely slow.
In theory Louck gets back from his month-long vacation soon and maybe DStP progress can resume again. I was planning to handle some of the remaining details while I'm wiped from promotion, anyway.
Which engine you use is one of the most foundational choices for a game, even for those with more coding ability than I have. You accept a certain set of strengths as well as limitations, and for me one of the biggest fears is getting bugs that I'd be 100% unable to fix because they're built into the platform. For example, OEA had some instability and a memory leak due to the engine, not anything I did.
Unfortunately, this is part of the decision anywhere, not something where RPG Maker is fundamentally worse than everything else. There's a similar engine called RPG Developer Bakin that I've never done more than tinker with because it seems a bit unstable, so I worry it would be even worse for others (OEA was ran perfectly for me). The same applies even to big games in Unreal Engine, which have their own kinds of jankiness.
There are a lot of engines, actually - I've heard people say good things about RPG Paper Maker, but I've never even tried it because my schedule is so full. Taking time to play with new engines, much less attempt serious development, means either delaying all the things patrons want or using my fairly limited leisure time, and honestly I struggle to spend free time on tutorials these days.
I've been thinking about this more than usual because the team behind RPGM just announced a new engine called U2U. It can make 2.5D maps, and while I'm not 100% convinced by the demos seen, I think in theory artists could probably work within the new limitations to make better visuals.
That's assuming that the engine is stable and viable, which is not guaranteed. Previously when they created RPGM Unite it was a complete failure: that was the only time I've seen the RPGM community completely reject a new version, and the developers subsequently abandoned it. While it's possible that this will be a better-designed version of their previous attempt at a Unity integration, that's often a bad bet with this company.
More in the abstract, I wonder if this will have an impact on the number of HD2D games and how good of a target they are. I think HD2D is a perfectly fine aesthetic, and it's more within the budget of a creator like myself than a full 3D game, so I've considered trying it in the future. The potential problem is, if there are start to be large numbers of games like this, the look might become the "RPG Maker norm" that gets dismissed out of hand. Will I really be able to afford to overhaul the graphics so much that my games can compete with the nicest-looking HD2D games like Octopath 2? Unlikely.
Unite and U2U are both components for Unity, which does have (so far purely hypothetical) advantages. It's a more robust engine that could be extended to do more things than I can presently do. So at this point someone might ask: why not just learn Unity? Well, that's where my position is a bit difficult. It would mean months of not being able to deliver much to patrons while I rebuilt all the ordinary RPG systems, like text boxes and inventories. In addition to being unfair to patrons, it's zero fun for me.
I've tried to look into this seriously, including available systems such as ORK Framework 3, and it's not impossible I'd take this step in the future. But even the most fully-featured options would require a lot of retraining time for me, plus rebuilding ordinary systems. I've talked to programmers as well, even some who are interested in collaboration, and nothing has really worked out. A lot of people who may be more skilled or talented than me are also in a mode of working on a single long-term project as a hobby, which gives them a different set of incentives than my career.
Abstract future concerns aside, here's how I see the situation with my current projects and their engines:
Don't Save the Princess was an experiment with using Unity and hiring a programmer. It should finish, but I didn't like a variety of things about this process. Aside from the expense, I hate not being able to go in and tinker with things like game balance myself.
Slave Rehabilitator is being built in Ren'Py, which is probably fine for a half-VN, half-management game.
The difficulty is RPGs, which are one of my favorite genres but also one of the most complex and expensive. I don't have any clear long term solution here, other than that I hope MZ will be a good enough platform for Omnipocalypse.
So where do I go in the near future? I plan to keep moving forward in careful steps and hopefully I'll be able to reach for greater things. All my projects have turned a profit, but if I got one that was an actual hit instead of a modest success, that might change the equation. For now, I think caution is the wisest path.