Hey everyone!
I apologize about the lack of posts lately. I just haven’t had anything major to report in the last couple of months with either AMS Studios or Apocamorphosis itself. But that has finally changed! I hope you find the following news something wonderful to look forward to.
Keep in mind though, I have a lot to say and a lot to explain. So if you aren’t interested in hearing what got us to this point, just skip to the GOOD NEWS section.
PATRONS
Before I get into that though, I have a lot of new and old patrons to thank for their donations during this moderate haitus. Thank you very much to these individuals listed below!
Tyler C.
Anlanar
Herman K.
Paul R.
Kayleigh B.
Cecil K.
20XX
Ronnie M
and Jonah
And thank you all for your continued support and donations during these hard times! My family and I greatly appreciate you and hope to find a way to pay back all this wonderful generosity in the next coming months 🙂
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
Now then. The last you guys heard I was going through a bit of a funk/depression. I wasn’t sure what to do with myself since I had to stop writing on Quest which ultimately halted Apocamorphosis’ production. I just kind of felt like I lost a big piece of myself and my focus when I had to take a break.
As many of you know, during all of this I was trying to go a couple of different routes; most of which ended with little to no results to say the least. Here are some of the greatest hits:
1) 4 programmers that took about 2 months+ to find or who had directly asked to work on the Save System for Apocamorphosis—all bailed or flaked out after a few weeks. Some never even got started but led me to believe they were working.
So that sucked.
2) One of the main programmers for Quest mentioned (several months before all this started) that he was working on a new Save System for Quest which would change the way the games saved and thus would solve Apocamorphosis’ save problems.
Several months of procrastination later, he mentioned he finally got to work on it and was making a lot of progress. I decide, hey, he’s finally working on it and he’s provided a page dedicated to the system. Great news, right? I thought so too. So I kept working figuring it would be an easy fix.
Unfortunately, he ran into several issues and problems that hindered a lot of his progress and then he lost a huge chunk of work when his computer crashed. Well, a couple of months later after finding out all of this, he basically mentioned that it could be several more months—possibly a year or more before he’d even be able to have a working prototype for me to test.
I finally decide…to hell with Quest. If they can’t spare enough man power to create a working save system, then the engine wasn’t worth my time and energy. Apocamorphosis deserved much better and I felt my patrons and supports did too. SO — long story short. I just….stopped.
The problem was if I kept working in Quest—none of the issues with the save system would ever be solved and I would just keep getting deeper and deeper into the game with no solution in sight. I was tired of fighting Quest. So Apocamorphosis production stopped.
3) To fill these new gaps of time, I decided to look for a new engine to transfer Apocamorphosis into which ultimately boiled down to Inform 7 and Unity. Both are respectable engines and both seemed like reliable candidates to continue Apocamorphosis on so I started getting my feet wet by creating mini-games and seeing which of the two was the most compatiable with the style of coding I’d grown accustomed to.
Needless to say, I poured a lot of energy into creating SPACE OPERA 2320 but I wasn’t super pleased with the result. Sure, it’s a challenging game and has some fun action in it—-but that was it. That was pretty much all I learned how to do after several months of coding in it.
I just couldn’t make it more interesting than that.
It also didn’t fill my Apocamorphosis void.
After that, I shifted my attention to Inform 7 and began learning that next. It only took a month/month 1/2 though before I decided that the engine was far too strange and way out of my comfort levels to program in. It was also very difficult to find help in. But hey, the engine itself seems solid and I can recommend it as a learning tool for creating text adventures. If you’re interested. Give it a shot. http://inform7.com/ <– You can download it here.
If you’ve made it this far, you’re a champion….or used to my long rants/spleels. Either way, you’re about to be rewarded for your efforts. This has all led to my GOOD NEWS.
GOOD NEWS *trumpets*:
So what’s been new, you ask? Well, about a month and a half ago, I actually went and hired someone to design a brand new engine for Apocamorphosis from scratch using Quest as a basis for the coding. The cool thing is that this engine will allow the game to be played via any browser for any operating system which means the game will no longer be limited to Windows only and it will have a reliable save system.
Not only that, but it will also have an updated UI, updated inventory interface; something more sleek and streamline but will be coded very similarly to Quest behind the scenes which means it won’t take too long to transfer the game over to the new engine once it’s fully completed.
The bad news about this is that I currently do not have a timeline of when the engine will be completed. I have a rough estimate, maybe 2-3 months but it could turn out to be a little more or a little less.
So while this programmer is designing the engine and working on the tweaks, I’ve begun writing for the game again. Currently, I’m writing transformations items and remastering all the regular items so that when the engine is ready to go and the game is transferred over, I’ll be able to focus on looking forward and increasing content with every update.
That’s where we are at though. I’ll show you a preview of what we have so far but keep in mind this is about a month old and the final product will not look like this. It’s just simplified for the time being to get the basic framework in.
Pretty wild, huh? So yeah, that’s what we have to look forward to. I also have a lot of ideas about the interface and hopefully it won’t be too much trouble to implement them >:) But should really help bring the world of the game to life! Bwahaha! Not spoiling anything else though.
That’s pretty much it for this post. I’ll be staying in better contact and will report when I have something meaningful to say or something substantial to tell you guys. There is another updated version of the video above coming to me soon and if I’m feeling generous I’ll share ^_~ hehe
As always, if you guys have any questions or concerns please feel free to voice them and I’ll be happy to get back to you.
Anonynn.
