Captain! October was a slow month and we're a little behind but a good portion of work was turned in at the last minute so let's hope we can make that release deadline!
Work Complete / New Features:
Major Bugfix (I hope). I've removed a script that allows enemy summoning/spawning and replaced it with a less fancy but still effective approach. I believed that this script was responsible for not only enemy battle graphics remaining in battle when dead but was the cause of one significant and annoying game crash where RPG Maker would just, well... crash. It's only happened to me a handful of times (for some reason especially at the medi-center in original mode) but it was annoying. Hopefully this fatal flaw is now resolved. I think the issue was the game didn't know how to dispose of the spawned units and there was likely conflict with other scripts.
The game audio has been lowered for the most part across the whole game. This decision was made because the voice acting was hard to hear. I think I have struck a better balance now.
General changes and fixes have been made to the game and I am mostly personally responsible for testing game modes to make sure they work now.
Several new game sprites have been added to the game which include several more pop culture references and weirdness on my part...
Finally Jose has redone ALL the existing backgrounds in the game in a more updated style.
Work to Do / In Progress:
Voice Acting. I have good news and bad news. Good news I have edited over 600 files which are now placed in the game. I worked with amateurs and professionals so the quality is a bit mixed but I hope you all appreciate the effort and added immersion it brings.
More good news is that 1 more character is near completion 2 just need some retakes and 5 have just been handed in to me which I need to edit for game use.
The Bad news is that there is still 1 character left to do, one of the important story characters but I have someone trying to resolve that for me so I'm hoping that this doesn't cause any delays and it can be complete this month.
MacReady's Story. We have just started on sprite work for this, once that is done I will move away from testing and work directly on this. I will finish this in November BUT there are 30 art images that the story requires which is quite heavy work to get done in the month so I'm going to see what sort of timescale Jose needs for this. I'm hoping it can be done this month but I feel these images make MacReady's multi-choice story more immersive and personal as he's a core character to the film.
Generally all I have to do is test things and fix things mostly. Survival Mode is being testing right now but Prequel Mode (voice acting/audio balancing test) and MacReady's addition to Story Mode need testing when work outside my control is complete.
Steam Update
I fall into the category of a fan based game which Steam doesn't really accept. I think largely it would be due to the grounds of "copyright". The main issues I can see would be the games name and names of characters potentially. In the v2 a lot of the movie and 2002 game audio has been removed and replaced so that is no longer an issue but in short it's safe to say I wouldn't be accepted onto steam as it would likely bring me unwanted complications.
Release Date
I still want to say this month, November 2015. I will do my best to give weekly updates from this point as we move closer but 2 things hang in the balance of affecting the release. One is the last voice actor (sounds like an indie movie) and the other is the big old 30 art images I need after Mac's sprites are done. At worst you can expect December as I really don't want this to go into 2016. I'll do the best I can to smooth things along and I'll play every card I have left to try and get this November release going. I should have a video for you in next weeks post of prequel mode in action. I really hope it's worth the wait.
Thanks,
Richard
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