Rorasuketo Dev Blog

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 I've been learning that the instructional videos from Steam itself have incorrect, outdated, or misleading information in them.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...

I am in such a good mood today. My husband is getting a lot more kisses than usual, there is a spring in my step, and I occasionally break out into chants of "It's done!" or "It's happening!" My alpha testers now have access to the game, and here, I sit back for a minute, like Gandalf with his pipe, and reflect. There's still a lot of work to be done: Fixing whatever inevitable bugs are discovered in the alpha, catching up on Steam documentation, figuring out what NW.js is and how to update it, adding to my walkthrough, adjusting sprites, and maybe throwing in a couple plugins for cosmetic purposes. And yet. It's finished . I have a video game that can be played from start to finish. A cohesive project. A  thing. I never finish my projects, so this is a huge personal achievement. As I keep saying, because it still blows my mind, I started  Rorasuketo  in 2018. That's eight years ago . It's taken me eight years of picking it up, dropping it, k...