On Updates

*walks into the room, changes the burnt out lights and clears the cobwebs*

Welp. It's been a couple of years... A couple of very busy, very crazy years. Multiple cross country moves and job changes, profound personal life changes, a new baby... lots of things. So many things that I totally forgot I had this Dev Blog!

 Well, I've remembered!

 So let's see if we can't pick up the pieces from where we left off.




We'll start with the Vita port, since that was the most recent and exciting work I'd talked about. It was working and running great, but is now officially dead... Sony has decided to squash PSM, and with it the majority of my hopes of getting on the platform. I hold out SOME hope that I can manage to get a dev license for actual PSN, but we'll cross that bridge later.

This brings me to XBLIG. I've got 9 months to get the game onto that platform before it is also closed off as an avenue for release. I'm working toward that end, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to get it done in time.

Next up, I'll address HoE - Tactics, the spinoff title I built in a month for an RPG contest. Building it has been a huge boon to the development of HoE Core as it included many structural improvements and lessons for how to do things better (The funny part is: that piece, built in 30 days, is a good amount cleaner and more maintainable than the core system built over 5 years). I may come back to the project for an actual release if I can divine a cool/fun enough metagame and story to tie the battles together.

Now, at last, we get to the core game itself: Heroes of Eterna. No I've not forgotten it, or even stopped working on it. In fact it's largely better now that it's ever been, and much closer to something of an alpha state. It's largely playable, if a bit buggy and completely unbalanced but it's getting better with each revision. I've rebuilt the map system entirely, deriving a new system from what was built for Tactics, stitching together hand-crafted room maps to form a broader "dungeon" map to explore. Collisions and general game feel have been improved as well, and overall it feels more responsive. In the next few weeks as I continue to iterate I hope to create some videos capturing how things have progressed.

That's all for now, and maybe nextime it won't be years between updates!