Hey hey, everyone! Your boy, Tjop here.
It's been a while since the last time I talked about the Beyond so let's go over a few things.
This time, I won't be showing much pictures and new things just because I don't want to spoil too much of the new things and also I mainly just animated in the past few weeks anyways. I hope that's fine with you..
I want to be really honest with everyone - The progress of the game was really excellent this update, I can't be happier overall as I've said before. But - I did take a full week to play some games I wanted to for a long time and just relax mostly. (I grew up just gaming like most of you I presume. Huge mount and blade warband fan, I had to try bannerlord sooner or later :D )
I'm getting back to development again now, adding the rest of the animations I need to make.
MAJOR UPDATES ---First huge thing - Something I barely touched upon earlier but now is the time to properly announce. The Big Beyond is switching to UNITY. It's gonna be done in the background so there will be very little to none noticeable development delays for regular updates. I'm fully dedicated to continue making all the new scenes and assets as I have been planning in ren'py, and when everything is set in unity, we will start transferring assets slowly until it catches up with the "main" ren'py game. (It's all thanks to you, the patrons, that I can even think of doing this. With all the funds from the game being used for that.) The question you're maybe wondering is - why? Everyone knows how hard it is to switch engines.It's multiple reasons, of course. The game as conceptualized just fits unity much better with the battle elements and visual direction. I'm VERY limited as to how I can do and present thing in ren'py. It's going to open a huge range of possible things for me to improve. I want to continue working and expanding this game for as long as I can.. literally... so long term, it's a must. The main reason though is steam. Since I'm planning on releasing on there at some point I have to commit to unity first before I do so. Steam does not allow any adult games to update content the regular way anymore so I will do it all with free DLC's and since they depend on the base game, definitionally, I can't switch engine after I publish it. So I'm forced to do that now.
While at the topic of steam, I can now talk about the page. A lot of work has gone into making all the assets for the steam store so that also took a good chunk of my time, but I had to do it. It was supposed to be up already but I failed the review :P It's going up any day now.
Last thing - I have thought about this and have decided that I want to somehow give back more for some patreons since I don't feel like I'm giving enough. I will be switching up how the updates are going to be released from this update onwards. "Sponsors" (highest tier) are going to get it first, then 2 weeks later It's going to be unlocked for the "supporter" tier - and lastly 2 weeks after that for every patreon subscriber. I will release it for the general public 2 weeks after the last patreon tier, so everyone that supports the project will get it earlier then the public. This will also allow us to give better and direct support for any issues people might encounter since there is going to be less players at a time, instead of getting overflown with bug reports and scrambling to fix everything at an insane pace.
I'm genuinely sorry for the walls of text but there is just a lot I needed to inform you of. There is still a number of thing I haven't said and I'll probably make another post sooner. Thank you for each of you here, the game would be nowhere without your support. Special thanks to the people taking their free time to extra help out the project in many ways,
Tjop!