It’s still January, so this time I’m not late on making a new year post. I’ll tell you what I did in 2023 and what’s the plan for 2024.
YouTube Channel
If you see my 2023 post, I was a bit skeptical if I could do a lot of streaming for 2023, but oh boy how I’m very mistaken. I think I did around 150 streams throughout the year. That said, the games that I streamed were mostly Nikke, Star Rail, and Final Fantasy 14. I planned to stream more games this year, not just my usual Gacha/MMO games.
Oracle of Forgotten Testament
Technically we’ve finished chapter 3 (also the final chapter of the game), but there are actually a lot of contents that we cut due to various reasons. We have done some open beta tests to see player’s reception, and we’re going to make changes or add new content accordingly. After it’s officially released, we’ll resume the translation for Simplified Chinese.
Cursed Mansion
We finally released Cursed Mansion last year, but that doesn’t mean the journey was already over. We still have more updates planned for the game, so stay tuned.
RPG Maker Programming
This year I delve further into the Javascript programming for MV and MZ. I also update some of my old RMVXA scripts. One thing to note is that I just know that Pastebin has some content detection now, and somehow it flagged some of my scripts (it only flagged old scripts when I updated them) as inappropriate or something. What in the seventh hell.
Due to Pastebin flagging my scripts, I decided to put those that got flagged into Github. I then realized that Github provides licenses that can be used for the things we placed there. I started reading all of those licenses and the MIT license caught my attention. It’s a better license to use compared to the one that I currently use, so I started to change the license of the updated scripts to the MIT license. I decided that placing the public scripts/plugins into Github and using the MIT license for them would be the standard moving forward.
Game Development Updates
I started doing more Game Jams in 2023. While not every Game Jam produces a playable game, I learned a lot from almost every Game Jam that I participated in. I delve a lot into Renpy during most of the Game Jams, and I think I’m ready to create some advanced mechanics using the engine. I’d like to take a shot at it when the opportunity appears.
Aside from Renpy, I also learned a bit about GameMaker Studio. The engine is quite interesting and I’d love to learn more about it. Another reason why I’d like to learn about it is because I’d like to try developing some console games. As far as I know, popular game engines that have console support are Unreal, Unity, and GameMaker; and learning how to make games with these engines will help me achieve my goal. However, with what happened to Unity recently (and that I never liked Unity in the first place), I guess I’ll just focus on GameMaker or Unreal.
Plan From 2023
So from the 2023 New Year post, I can say we did make progress on some of the plans. We did finish developing chapter 3 of Oracle of Forgotten Testament, but there is still development in progress for the overall game. It’ll be deemed completed after we finish with the translation part, so I’ll add it to this year’s plan again.
For the Discord server, I actually did make one. It was actually made in 2022, but at that time it was still very empty, and last year, I at least added more stuff to it, so let’s say I managed to complete this one. The next plan is to open it to the public. I don’t know when, but I guess when we enter the next phase of the YouTube Channel project, I will have it open to the public already.
I didn’t do anything for itch.io and Patreon, so nothing happened to plan. I did some thinking, that perhaps I need to be able to make my own graphic resources before I go to Patreon. So I’m thinking of learning to draw some character portraits and character sprites. I’ll put aside the itch.io shop plan for now.
Plan For 2024
- Complete the development for Oracle of Forgotten Testament.
- Make a game in GameMaker Studio or Unreal Engine.
- Open the Discord server to the public.
- Learn how to draw character portraits and character sprites.
- Set up a Patreon page.
Trail of A Developer 