What's going on? It's been over a year and a half!
So to be upfront, both me and the other two developers of the project acquired full time employment which is one of the big factors to the radio silence since March 2025. This project isn’t paying the bills and we don’t think it's in a state for any kind of monetary inquiry. Last August after some internal testing we realized the state of chapter 1 was very disjointed and bloated. So we completely overhauled it. Some areas appear earlier in the story and others were straight up scrapped. The playtime for chapter 1 slimmed down from 2 hours to about an hour, while chapter 2 is an extra 2ish hours.
Now before we came to that conclusion chapter 2 was already around 60% done, we just need to do some polishing and finish the final dungeon leading to the second generals fight. As of now the overhaul of chapter one is basically done, and chapter 2 is about 90% done. We still need to do internal testing following that we’ll begin external testing (more info on that coming soon.)
An Optimizing Problem
This leads up to the second reason things have been so quiet. If you’re at all in the rpg maker space you’ve probably guessed one of the big plugins we use is MZ3D. We really like MZ3D. I like the 2.5D effect it gives our project. The problem is it's kinda unoptimized, mid to lower range PC’s (especially laptops) have a problem reaching even a stable 30fps. Which is frustrating because we want the game to be as accessible as possible.
There is a complete rewrite of the plugin in the works and the creator plans to have it out this year. But we don’t know how this update will affect our current dev build of the game, including script calls and overall function. So we’ve been kind of put in a weird spot, we want chapter 2 to leave a good first impression on the community but we also want to get this chapter out as soon as we can.
So we can either finish our current build and release the game regardless of when the plugin rewrite comes out, or we wait for the plugin rewrite to come out and then go through the process of updating the whole game with the updated plugin and then release it. In all honesty we’re leaning more towards the former rather than the later so you guys can just experience the game with no more hold ups.
Upcoming Features
So, in terms of features the game has had some updates to both overworld sprites, enemies, music, and story. Including:
New areas in Chapter 1
Playable Chapter 2
Reworked items
Re balanced skills and enemies
QOL features like:
Settings access in battles.
New Formations system
Better autobattle
Tweaked battle UI
Darkmode UI
Togglable visual effects
CG Gallery
Message Log
Working Bestiary
A built-in progression tracker (so you know where to go)
Updated cutscene both 2d art and dynamic 3d camera angles
Updated Firearm/Pierce damage systems
Working on a new logo!
Made the game launch and play on the steam deck (experimental)
Closing Remarks
If you are interested in playtesting the big Chapter 1&2 update you can see updates here. Benefits include being re approached for testing on later chapters and your name in the credits. We’re hoping to get the update out by the end of the year at the latest. We’ll see how things go but like we said in the last post the games not life is just busy. If the game ever gets postponed or cancelled you’ll hear it from us. See you at the release.
-Lunar Boon