Rorasuketo Dev Blog

Like most artist types, I'm not much for self-promotion, marketing, and other such things. I put out a comic book about 10 years ago and just kind of hoped it would vacate the shelves of one local bookstore on its own. I didn't do appearances or anything like that. I still have 20 copies or so (I had 50 printed) sitting in a box in a closet. With  Rorasuketo,  I recognize some degree of promotion needs to happen if I want it to be seen by anyone. I've done some webcasts and forum posts (and this blog), and I'll be doing a Mitten Kittens appearance - hopefully with co-writer Tiffany, by the way! I could probably be doing much more, but I find myself hesitant to really  go nuts. Our dutiful composer Nebyoolae asked, "Don't you believe in  Rorasuketo?" I do and I don't. I believe that  Rora  is a game for a certain type of person who's looking for a certain type of experience. I want to promote it so that person can find it, absolutely - but I don...

  If you're wondering how you'll find the  Rorasuketo  table at Mitten Kittens in Lansing this October, keep your eyes out for the weirdos wearing purple Lala t-shirts. So far, we're only planning on distributing shirts to the immediate creative team and booth babes (well, the booth hunk, anyway), but I might toss a few fun ones in the order just in case a billionaire skydives into the immediate vicinity and says, "You're the creators of  Rorasuketo?  Give me a t-shirt right now and you can have the keys to my Ferrari." It's good to be prepared... to towel-snap a billionaire with a custom printed t-shirt. My latest Alpha 1.04 playthrough reads as 9.5 hours so far. That includes time spent hopping over to the other monitor to fix or change things. Throwing in a \.\. or two to let dialogue breathe, or making a note to give Wedge's hands two more pixels - that sort of fix, most of them. At one point, I did run into a game-breaking bug (I want to say the t...

Our very talented composer, Nebyoolae (a.k.a. Michael Chadwick) unearthed a photo of me working on Rorasuketo in 2018. (Along with a couple early screenshots that I am too embarrassed to share at the moment.)   This is pre-transition, social media-consuming, roller derby-playing, long-haired Cam, two apartments and two cats ago. Kinda wild to think about how long it's been. A little "enhance! enhance!" on the background shows that I might have screwed up the formatting of a tileset - and that's why I am wearing that crazed expression. But what we're ultimately looking at is an unfinished  Barneston  - the fourth map in the story, and the main setting. Pretty crazy to imagine Barneston first bubbling out of the primordial ooze.

As I have mentioned, my husband recently played through the entire game. Over the last eight years, he's slogged through a few minutes of gameplay here and there when I politely commanded, or watched little snippets when I was particularly proud of a cinematic, but he's never seen the whole thing from start to finish until now. And I had to ask... did the ending make sense? Did it wrap things up? Do you feel satisfied that the story was complete? The answer to him, and so far one other tester, is "yes." All of my alpha testers so far have voiced that the mental health aspect of the game is what interests them - while story, dating, and RPG aspects have been more diverse interests. I find that really interesting, and also encouraging. So I feel like I'm on the right track. Because here's the thing.  The odds are extremely low that I will recoup the time, energy, and upcoming promotional costs of making this game. I have put in countless hours, plus I have a tea...

It's been a real struggle figuring out the SteamPipe documentation. I've been learning that the instructional videos from Steam itself have incorrect, outdated, or misleading information in them. (!) It took a lovely tutorial from a YouTuber to get me on track. Many thanks to AuroDev for putting that out there. I spent today trying to sort out how to make Achievements work with RPG Maker MZ. There are several different plugins/workarounds out there that promise such integration, one of which looked very promising. I even started to mesh it into the game... but I couldn't get it to work. Someone tried to have AI give me instructions, which I reluctantly followed with an enormous degree of distrust. There were a lot of very rocky moments here in Casa de Norcross as I raged my way through several misunderstandings. I've been told that I need to use my indoor voice when making futile verbal requests of my computer. There's really not enough documentation for these plug...

I'm in the process of coordinating an appearance at a roller derby event this fall, and I might try to push forward the release date to coordinate with said event! My original release goal, just to be extra safe, was January 2027. I no longer see a reason to wait that long. We'll see how alpha testing goes. With luck, I can roll out a beta in August or September, and have all the Steam finagling sorted out in time for the tournament.  The pipe dream is a demo testing table and some stickers for sale. We'll see how much of this becomes a reality. But I'm excited!

My adoring husband has done 3 playthroughs in as many days, and I ended up telling my alpha testers to hold off for a minute while I fixed some of the bugs he found. Husband and I managed to get through the entire game without it crashing, and I fixed about a dozen bugs, several of them pretty glaring. Now 1.04 is done, and I sit back and wait for my testers to test and find all the bugs that probably remain. I'm going to do something crazy. I am going to actually talk about coding in this dev blog for a moment. This was the worst bug. During a cinematic, the scene would fade out, and then fade in on the same scene and repeat itself. The game could not continue past this point. Here is how it is done correctly . If Self-esteem >16: These are best outcomes. If player is Anxious , go to worst outcomes . Else:  If Confidence > 90, say this dialogue, proceed to next city. Else: If Confidence > 75, say that dialogue, proceed to next city. Else: If Confidence > 50, say yet a...