Hey all - long time no talk. Let's talk about why that is. For those of you who don't know, I am a development team of 1 and now have a 3 year old and a soon-to-be 9 year old. The last year or so has been extremely challenging with the younger one, leaving me virtually no time to work on projects that don't generate revenue, like Cross of Auria. However, I don't like leaving the project floating out there unfinished... because it is, absolutely and unquestioningly, unfinished. I've penciled in some time to change that, and there's going to be a relatively large overhaul happening to ease the process.
Rather than fill this up with an essay, let me bullet point exactly what's going to happen in roughly the order it's going to happen.
1) Common Event will be added to every zone/map in the game so that no matter where you log in, you can be served an immediate non-game-breaking update that may affect Characters, Skills, Items, Armor, Weapons, Enemies, Classes, etc.
2) Introduction of Save Points throughout the world and disabling of the global save feature to allow for maps to be edited without worry that players loading in will crash or get stuck.
3) Reduce level of overworld and castle encounters in YSV.
4) Finalize YSV in the new lower-level state.
5) Add Achievement checks to point 1 for players who passed the point of an achievement proc before it was functionally added to the game files.
6) Add overhead bubbles for the Grand Library sidequest.
7) Remove the Quest Log and all associated code from the game.
8) Adjust the Classes Core functionality and review associated skills.
9) Stat, skill, weapon, item, and armor squish everything across the board to reign in based on new narrowed scope of the project. -- This will be the most drastic change.
10) Disable unused plugins which are apparent in the menus.
11) Double check BSX functionality.
12) Double check BS1 functionality.
13) Extend story to natural planned end point for Cross of Auria - The Awakening (part 1 of the series).
Whether or not part 2 ever gets made remains to be seen, but it will be handled differently than this one was.
14) Review Colosseum, Pit, and other end/postgame activities.
15) Remove unused maps from the game files that are no longer under construction (Battlefront, Battle Tower, etc)
--- End of current plan.
To sum up what's happening - I originally made the planned scope of the game very wide in the hopes that I would have the time to put into it. This was before my younger daughter. As time went on, it became abundantly clear that I wouldn't be able to get to the things I wanted to do so long as this was more of a pet project than a career path. Basically, a lot of systems are in place that were preparing for a 500 hour gameplay loop, but I need to bring it down to 20-30. The first two updates coming will allow me to ship game-changing updates much more quickly than in the past, provided I have the time to do it.
My goal is to have this project marked as "Complete" by the end of the year. Whether DLC gets tacked on AFTER that, not like we've been doing, is another discussion to be had later. But I want the base game done and I want it done ASAP.
For those of you that don't know, I run a Discord of ~10,000 people who all came together for Pokemon purposes, but I've started to open the floor for convos surrounding this project. If you want to ask me anything, you can reach me on Discord @ https://discord.gg/Ur4GdaKxPD. I am, of course, "Hardytier". If you don't know what the "premier" ball is, it's the white one. Don't mess up in the welcome channel.
See you soon
//hardytier
0.6.400 [Build #147, Release Date: June 13, 2023]
- Every zone is now equipped with an autorun event which will check for updates and changes which need to be applied to characters, enemies, items, weapons, armor, etc. This will function in place of forced save restarts.
- The finished product of the main story will be marked as version 1.0. All versions leading up to that point will now be led with a 0. The most recent patch before today was 6.3.0.1. Keeping the following 4 numbers, the new version is 0.6.400, where the 6 marks significant changes, 4 broad changes, and 00 narrow changes and hotfixes. The leading 0 will mark full game versions as dictated by the finished product and/or expansions.
- This update will be released in the next 24 hours but does not change the gameplay experience. It updates every map file, so the download is larger than usual.