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New Year, New Things

by reimakesgames on

Happy New Years!

Sorry for the lack of blogposts, been busy with things in life especially with the recent situations surrounding my other fields of expertise. However, there’s been major internal changes between v0.1.6 and the upcoming v0.2.0 update that I’ll be more than happy to share!

v0.2.0 Preview#

New Iteration Policies#

Let’s describe what we mean by this. If you noticed by now, the new iteration will be v0.2.0 instead of v0.1.7. The reason I decided to iterate the minor version (based on semver.org) is the fact that our “patch” updates aren’t necessarily patches, and were full blown minor iterations.

Previously, I targetted a release of a patch version (but adding in tons of functionality) every first week of the month. This is difficult to achieve now, and you can see that there are tons of months in between iterations. And they are incredibly dense too! So, we’re moving to a much faster release cycle which allows us to ship more changes to get testing faster.

We plan to have small updates every month, and with less changes. We’ve reached a point in the project where big changes cause tons of issues downstream and we want to simplify the process. This new release system will help us stay focused on the changes we need to do, and to make it as stable as possible to prevent bugs on release if that ever happens.

Kidding aside, keeping our cycles fast helps us stay focused and motivated on the project. We’ll be asking you people more about what you guys want in the game while allowing us to have enough insight, to allow us to create a game that’s expressing a story without causing issues for the players.

Documentation Update#

We rewrote the majority of the documentations site to be more readable for new and current members. This rewrite also adds in new story elements that hasn’t been added into the documentations for quite a while now.

There were things that wasn’t documented yet and had to explain it every time a new member comes up. So this change was really great for sharing the framework of the story.

Editor Era#

I started work on how editor tools will work for Neofighters, seeing how we’d be reliant on these tools to simplify our workflow for making content in the game.

The first tool I made is a SpriteEditor which lets us create the sprites you see in the Visual Novel section of the game. The tool will also allow us to easily make those characters be expressive, without sacrificing the performance of your computer. We achieve this by making the face parts seperate from the body, which allows for tons of ways to express an emotion in a character.

example

You can see something this in other visual novel games where there are tons of characters, and where optimization is important. An example would be Purrfect Apawcalypse by 90% Studios.

Their assets are displayed like this (spoilers for the game btw)

pa

Me and CJ has been working on smoothing out the developer experience of the SpriteDisplay and the OnScreenCharacters which will be used throughout the game. The changes we made paved a simpler way for how those characters will be modified as well as allowing a way for a StoryEditor to be implemented.

We also fixed some weird behaviors when new editors load up a project for the first time. This issue was a headache when I accidentally deleted local files and everything got screwed up. Atleast it’s all done, fixed, and learnt how to avoid those issues in the future.

Miscellaneous changes#

Here are smaller changes that didn’t get highlighted

Upcoming features#

We also have more upcoming features for next versions, which is not a hard list for what we’ll be making. It’ll just be a general list of what we’ll have for the future versions we’ll be putting out. Some of these will most likely change, but they’re ideas that have been filtered thru tons of brainstorming.

Final Thoughts#

We have tons in store for 2025, and we’re projecting that we’ll have a working demo sometime near the end of the year! Our gap in progress doesn’t mean nothing is happening, but behind the scenes, We’re paving the way for a better experience for us to develop this game! This game is an expression of me, and I’m allowing others to learn to create and express themselves alongside this project.

I’ve been working on the concept, story, and game since late 2023, thinking of making something to express the emotions within me. I haven’t written anything about the first ever anniversary of the conception of this idea I’m making, but now I got something to write about it on! Cheers to more years for neo!

We’ll be writing more blogposts and release more frequently as the year goes on. And we promise you, our gaps in progress in this project means we’re working on something else! I’ve been working more on music as of late, so go ahead and join my server here to see more!

or follow my twitter…

See you soon!

Next Post: Update v0.2.0