- Jul 15, 2017
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We do use Game Maker Studio 2 as a tool, but we did code our own visual novel engine from scratch to fit our needs and use our own custom scripting language on it. Game Maker, Unity, Unreal etc are general game making tool/engines in which you can code what you need. Is not the same as Tyranobuilder or Ren'Py that are specifically visual novel engines with their paradigms and limitations, not general programming products.Off the top of my head...
Interesting... this changes all the crap I said about Tyranobuilder....
You built your own engine? You're not using someone else's?
Because the last people that said this (Chloe18) didn't build their own engine. They were using another product.
Can you be clear about what engine you're actually using?
(Speaking of Chloe18, as I said, they claimed to "use their own engine", but actually useYou must be registered to see the links, which seems similar to what you are using, as it has the same kind of nasty export formats, web support, the "data.win" file format, etc... so if it's not that, it seems like it's something very similar and not something actually build from scratch by the devs? Hence my curiosity about what tools you're actually using.
It doesn't change that I think forcing the users to hop back and forth between these crappy incompatible web based versions and the standalone desktop version is driven by greed and the desire to try to force users to pay to be patrons to see the content, despite it causing more problems for the users and making a lot of them unhappy... rather than just making a high quality product like other devs do, who put the low bar of a patron only post up, but allow them to be shared here anyway because they still get plenty of patron support for making good products and treating their users with respect.
Ideally this game would be released up front as a single build that includes successive chapters in the same download, with a single set of saves, and would support Windows, Mac, and Linux by default as the Ren'Py builds do. Not to mention better saves, rollback, and the flexibility that comes with Ren'Py.
But hey... I'm just a filthy user peasant, right? What do I know. )
These days I was joking with my team mates about how the engine became a monster and I came with these curious numbers:
- 41,315 lines of code
- 10 extensions
- 191 objects
- 22 rooms
- 280 script files
I know my engine doesn't has all the features that, for instance, Ren'Py has. But hey, Ren'Py has been in production since 2004... Is an unfair tech comparative (although still valid from the point of view of the raw player of course). I am actively working to make it better and several new features and improvements has been implemented since we release the first chapter of DFD. Is not that easy to develop a custom engine with all the things players want when you have to deal with monthly deploys + maintenance + server + support + meetings + bugs + life. But I'm doing my best.
And yes, we have plans to have an all-in-one build with all chapters once the game is completed. The current distribution method is just the way we found to deal with the monthly releases of an in-production game.
As for the other stuff, I won't share my thoughts here as it involves the Love-Joint team decisions as a whole and I'm not the official spokesman, I am the programmer