Work continues, although partially in a new way. Let's see what's happening!

What another crazy couple of months. ​Lots of major personal developments which have been distracting (in a good way, at least. I got engaged, woot!), but I still got a few things done! Conrad's quest is finished up, so the character-specific quests are all set! With that done, I've moved on to the overworld maps and started filling in more details, although that's going to be a lengthy process for how big the maps are. Admittedly, I should probably be focusing more on the dungeon maps and fleshing them out, along with the associated eventing. The core plot of the game is proooobably more important than secondary mapping details, heh.

Anyway, here's the progress charts!​

So nice to add more 100%'s to the chart...

In addition to all the quest-related NPCs I've added, a handful more flavor NPCs and their associated dialogue has been added. For example, here's a sign that children (and exasperated mothers) never changes.

I was also able to work in another character from one of the stories I'd previously written, although she's as mysterious towards Alex and friends as she is in the story, heh. Hopefully I can find more instances to work these characters in, it's always fun to write them (and pretty easy to figure out what they'd say in a given situation since their personalities are pretty developed, as opposed to figuring out a brand new NPC from scratch).

As mentioned, I've made more progress in filling in the first overworld map. It's been a curious struggle trying to find a good balance on distances between "points of interest". I've tried to be more realistic, especially with the larger overview maps (the map that shows the area the tutorial quest takes place in is pretty much the same size as the game Skyrim, but is only like 5-10% of the total area of Doramor). Terranis has roughly the same landmass as continental Europe, which is waaaaayyyyy bigger than pretty much any other game world out there. No, I don't plan on building the entire world in RPG Maker, you'll only be able to see a tiny fraction of areas, but I still wanted to give that sense of enormous scale. Conversely, I also realize it's a bit boring to spend extended periods of time simply running through mostly-empty ground, so I'm trying to keep that minimized as well.

Another big thing that's occupied my creative energy has been more work with the MidJourney AI, as well as resuming work on the tie-in novel! I'm nearly done with the first chapter of the revised draft, so I think I'm off to a good start. Among lots of other great things I've made with MidJourney, I've been able to put together some original "photos" of most of the main characters of the novel, and here they are!

As far as primary narrative threads go, the novel will be rotating between Renoir, Isaac, Hercule, Denia, and Esim (with a few small threads of other characters). Lyara also has her own standalone prequel novella I wrote earlier this year, which I'm deciding how I want to get that distributed (probably through the same channel as the novel once that's ready). She's probably my favorite of all the characters here, her novella was just crazy fun to write. But everyone's got their moments, their own motivations, their own quirks... After a while, it feels like I'm spending time with friends (even if some of them probably wouldn't get along with me if we met in person, heh).

I'll probably do some of the secondary characters as well in time (actually already did a couple of them), because MidJourney is strangely addictive. In barely two months, I've already generated over 10,000 images. Granted, like 8,000 of them were complete junk and I deleted them, another 1,000 were meh but not completely worthless, and only the last thousand (if that) have been even close to what I was trying to go for. It takes a LOT of attempts and tweaking of prompts and settings to get something usable out of it usually, especially if I'm going for something specific (like character photos that at least roughly match what's in my head). Each of those photos above was one of literally dozens of attempts (especially the male characters, I dunno why it struggles with men), and most of them needed at least a little cleanup in Photoshop afterwards, too.

Still, looking at the really good stuff it's come up with, I'm continually impressed.

Anyway, that's pretty much it for now. I'm looking forward to seeing what else I can crank out by the end of year!

Jeez, this month went by fast! Let's take a look at what's been going on!

First up, the work I was doing on Lucy's quest absolutely kicked my butt. After almost a full week of trying to get the code to work the way I needed it to, I had to give up. That was pretty disappointing. So the final part of her quest isn't going to be nearly as elaborate as I had planned. Feeling a bit demoralized, I took a break for a while.

But, eventually, I started getting back into it again, this time focusing on Conrad's quest! It's about halfway done, and thankfully far more straightforward, mostly I just need to write a bunch of conversations (he's a history nerd, so the quest is learning all about the history of various institutions in Doramor City).

Aside from that, in terms of direct game work, I did a little bit of further map work on the Eastern Fields, and was able to implement a new plugin that allows me to set dialogue choices as visible/invisible or enabled/disabled based on assorted conditions like switches being on or off, without the need for absurdly complex branching trees in the event editor! One of the most obvious uses for this is on the world map navigation, where I can easily adjust which maps you have access to (wilderness maps will essentially be unlocked once you first reach them), allowing for fast travel between places you've already visited.

Aside from that, most of what I've done has been outside of the game, in a mix of writing and other creative works. I tried to work on the next lore article, and realized my writing "muscles" were pretty out of shape. So I've spent some time hammering out a 40K story I've been meaning to write for probably years now as a warm-up exercise, and suddenly the new lore started flowing a bit better! Weird how that works, heh. I'll hopefully have the new article ready to go this week!

On top of that, I've been spending some time messing around with AI-generated artwork! It's the new craze, and a friend of mine was posting some results from one called MidJourney, which seems to be about the most advanced one out there. Although even this one has its limitations, I've been able to coax a few good pieces out of it, and I'm looking forward to seeing what else I can do with it as I figure out how to work it! Here's a few examples.

You can definitely expect to see some more of these images in future lore articles!

That's going to be it for now. See you soon with some new lore!

I did it again, but with good reason this time! Major life developments happened, but I still made progress on the game since the last update!

The big thing was that I bought a house at the end of April. Despite the crazy market, somehow we landed a pretty nice place. And, as it turns out, home ownership is...not simple. Moving aside, I'm suddenly finding myself engaged in hours of yardwork every week, plus I'm already launching into assorted home improvement projects (like installing lots of soundproofing around the home theater in the basement, or having to get my drain pipe snaked by a plumber after it flooded on my birthday). Sufficed to say, Unto the Breach took a backseat for the first couple months, but in July I finally found I had gotten enough done to allow for further development work in July. It's not a ton, but I think it's a decent chunk.

As I mentioned in the last report, I was working on Doramor Palace and its three floors. Since last time, I've finished the first floor, and the other two floors are about 2/3 to 3/4 done. Given all the important and/or plot-relevant parts are done, I'm gonna leave the rest for later and get back to the field maps to build out more content there.

Aside from mapping work, I also got some story/quest material done! Ali's character quest is fully implemented, and Lucy's is about halfway done (I'm working on the final challenge which is, admittedly, a bit complex). I've been trying to get some additional lore articles written, and the next one is going through final revisions now.

And now for the progress charts!

The changes are all for Doramor City and the associated side quests. It felt good adding another 100% to the list, though obviously I still have quite a few to go, heh.

​Advancement on all three unfinished categories! That's what I like to see! Once Lucy's quest is done, I'll get to work on Conrad's, which should take maybe 5-10 hours of work to implement. Then there's only two side quests left in the city! One is mostly dialogue and searching oriented, the other actually involves combat.

​I'm going to skip the overworld chart this time, as nothing was done there. BUT! I can post the task list, because I made progress there!

It's nothing too dramatic, but I was able to fix the bug where sometimes the lighting system would fail to engage after a map transition. Turns out I included a step in my random weather common event that was permanently shutting it off, so a simple tweak to that and now it's all moody again! I also did some more minor code optimization that squeezes a few more frames out, but I still have a long ways to go on that.

That'll wrap it up for now, but I'm excited to finally be getting back into working on this again! If I can maintain a decent pace, Episode One MIGHT be ready for some kind of early access by the end of this year, but no promises on that yet. My real life obligations are still proving quite...overwhelming, but I have to hope things will lighten up soon, and this housework stuff ends at SOME point, right? ...Right?

Like most RPGs, Unto the Breach uses an elemental system that can lead to enhanced or reduced damage when utilized (im)properly. However, its elemental arrangement is a bit different from most, so let's take a look at how it all works!

While most RPGs use some variation of the tradition earth/wind/water/fire elements, Unto the Breach makes use of the Chinese Five Elements, which are Fire, Earth, Metal, Water, and Wood. These elements exist in a cycle of feeding and growth, as outlined in the picture to the right.

Nearly every monster you fight (except for fellow humans and a couple others) belongs to one of the five elements. Each element will have a different effect on the target, depending on the relationship between them. The monster's native element will have no effect on them, while the element which feeds it will heal it (e.g. Fire feeds Earth). The element fed by the monster's element will do normal damage. Additionally, each element "insults" one, and "destroys" another, indicated by the straight lines on the chart. Each element destroys the element two places down, and insults the one three places down (e.g. Fire destroys Metal and insults Water). Attacking an insulted element will do +50% damage, and attacking a destroyed element will do +100% damage.

Let's take a Fire monster for example:

• Attacking it with Fire will have no effect, as that's its native element
• Attacking it with Earth will do normal damage.
• Metal insults Fire, and will do +50% damage.
• Water destroys Fire, and will do +100% damage.
• Wood feeds Fire, and will heal the monster instead.

There's a great deal of interaction between each of the elements here, but proper utilization will let you do tremendous amounts of damage to most monsters. Every one of the four characters in Episode One utilizes them in some way, especially Lucy, whose damage output is almost entirely element-based. Ali can also unlock skills that further decrease a monster's resistances, allowing for even nastier combos!

The player characters have no built-in weaknesses or resistances to any elements, but certain pieces of equipment or unlockable talents can grant you some resistances, reducing the damage taken when attacked by that given element.

In addition to the Five Elements, there are three other elements that appear in Unto the Breach. Holy and Dark are diametrically opposed elements to each other, each drawing upon the raw energy of another plane of existence. As no monsters will attack you with Holy spells, you don't need to worry about resistance against it. Likewise, you can't use any Dark magic, so there's no monster resistance against it.

However, you can still build up resistance against Dark magic that some monsters use, and Holy attacks will do extra damage against certain kinds of monsters (particularly undead animated by Dark energies, and demonic entities from the Great Enemy's home dimension). Holy attacks also have the benefit of being able to damage everything you fight, it just won't do a great deal of damage against monsters not explicitly weak against it.

Finally, there's Arcane, representing the raw potential of humanity and our own universe. Only a few abilities will deal Arcane damage, but it has the advantage of being equally effective against all potential targets, as nothing has innate resistances against it. Its base damage output is also higher than Holy, making it more versatile at the cost of not being able to do massive burst damage against anything weak to it. Only human opponents will have access to Arcane attacks, but building resistance to it with the player characters is still possible.

Well, that's not the best start to the year, to post basically nothing for the first three months. Bit of a tale to tell regarding that, so let's see what's been happening.

A mix of personal issues, new developments in my life, and getting distracted with secondary material has contributed to me having essentially nothing to post for the last few months. My active time in RPG Maker before this past week was maybe ten hours in the entirety of January-March. On the plus side, I've completed what turned out to be vastly more extensive writing exercise than I thought it'd be when I started, which has led to a considerable amount of world-building for Doramor City and Dorlish culture, and some elements of this will be integrated into Unto the Breach. I also wrote another novella that ties into my main novel I've been working on, The Legacy of Terranis, along with some other writing plans.

Also I'm back at it with the game, and I'm almost 1/3 to completion with the Doramor Palace maps.

Alright, here's some more expansive details on what's been going on.

The bad: I'm still stuck in my current job, and it's been getting increasingly difficult to maintain a positive outlook on things, despite some (very) minor improvements. Until that changes, it's going to be difficult to stay motivated. Part of what's been going on has been my withdrawing into the writing exercise I was doing, as that was low-pressure with no hard, defined goal, I just...let the characters speak (something I always hear about, but honestly this is the first time I myself have encountered this in my own writing for more than a single scene or two. In fact, the later part of the narrative wound up going in a totally different direction than I thought it might initially).

The good: I'm buying a house! That's eaten up most of the last month with searching, viewings, extensive text conversations with my realtor and loan officer, signing an absolutely absurd amount of paperwork (nine forms just to put in a bid!), and lots and lots of anxious waiting. I should be moved in by the end of this month, after which things should settle down a bunch. I also became an uncle at the start of March!

Also also I went to Adepticon for the first time in three years, which was a ton of fun (but also had the usual stressors of me not having my army fully painted, heh).

OK, enough about me, you're here to read about Unto the Breach and the Templarverse. Let me talk about this writing exercise.

So, about four and a half years ago, I had a particularly vivid dream set in Doramor City. Like, an entire full narrative, complete with a brilliant opening line and possible follow-up threads. Come morning, I wrote a short story about it. And then I decided to keep going. It kept going, and going, and going. At the beginning of April, last week, I finished the second novel-length story of the character introduced in my dream.

Yeah, I wrote two entire novels, with a combined length of nearly 280k words. All giving backstory to a character that's "on-screen" in Unto the Breach for, like, five minutes.

The second novel involves his early(ish) days working at the palace, and so a few characters from that novel will make appearances in some capacity as minor NPCs in Unto the Breach as well.

Now, I suppose the obvious follow-up question is regarding possible publication or something. To which I have to say, "Probably not." Thing is, the general style and theme of the novels was...not something I'm used to writing, which was part of the whole point of it, to push me outside my comfort zone. While I think I eventually got pretty comfortable with the writing part, I am still far from comfortable with actually sharing the work with a wider audience. In fact I only just shared the first book with my girlfriend of 4+ years a couple weeks ago, it took me that long to work up the guts just for that.

So, they'll probably never see the broader light of day, which is a bit of a shame considering the sheer volume of material between the two books (The Legacy of Terranis is barely 100k, or at least the draft is). Or maybe they will, down the road, if I feel more comfortable with it. If nothing else, it was a ton of writing practice and character studies, as well as the aforementioned world-building for Doramor City and Dorlish culture in general (for instance figuring out what a Dorlish Ascensionist wedding would consist of, or the typical structure of school).

​It also paid off in improving another story I wrote which WILL be getting published in some capacity, hopefully this year. I did a prequel novella to The Legacy of Terranis, centered around probably my favorite character from the novel, Lyara Keshin. In the novel, she's a freelance cargo runner/smuggler who gets hired by Lieutenant Hercule Girard (distant ancestor of Alex in Unto the Breach) to escape the Delta Gamma 421 system as the Great Enemy invades, though things...don't quite go to plan. The prequel story is her final job before coming to Delta Gamma 421, and it was an absolute blast to write, both the character and the story. It clocks in at about 19.5k words. Once I have something figured out, I'll be sure to share news.

Now that Malthus' story is complete, I feel ready to get back to The Legacy of Terranis. It really bugs me I've let it sit for so long, but, as always, there's only so many hours in the day. Alongside it, however, I also plan on going back and revisiting Unto the Breach: The Gathering. It's hard to believe it's been almost 12 years since I wrote that story. I've changed a lot, and so has Terranis. I want to go back and revise the story, update some of the world-building details, probably clean up the writing style a bit (I certainly hope I've gotten better in the intervening years!), and, perhaps most importantly, add on to it and make it an anthology instead of just a novella. I have three short stories planned (one of which is 95% done), one for each of the other three main characters that join you over the course of Unto the Breach. I'd like to include a fourth story, but I haven't decided what it'd be yet. There's a couple other stories I've written over the years I could easily include, but wouldn't be keeping with the "gathering" theme of the main characters coming together, so I'll have to think about it.

So yeah, lots and lots of writing. It extends to Unto the Breach as well with NPC dialogue. But of course there can always be more! Meanwhile, I'm also working on finishing off the maps for the palace. The first floor is about 3/4 done, the second floor is about 1/4 done, and the dungeon is basically unstarted beyond greyboxing. 

I'm going to forego the progress graphics this month, since said progress is so marginal. But hopefully I'll have something to bust out with them next month.

So yeah. I'm back, baby! Stay tuned for more lore articles as well!

Once again, I'd swear the year just started, yet here we are at the very end of it. Feels like it's only going to get faster as I get older, heh. Anyway, let's take a look back at everything that happened with Unto the Breach, along with a look forward into plans for next year!

Obviously 2021 had a lot of the same issues that 2020 did in the world, but things thankfully seem to be slowly getting better again. Hopefully that trend continues. For my part, things have largely been in a bit of a holding pattern, with some things getting better and others getting worse. A string of departures at my current employer has left me completely overwhelmed with work, but, rather than let the burnout pervade my game dev work, I've managed to shift my perspective enough to view working on Unto the Breach as a pleasant diversion instead. It probably helps a ton when my game's code is infinitely cleaner and better organized than what I have to deal with at work (I've been wanting to do a complete rewrite of one of our main toolchains for nearly a year and a half now, but have so inundated with endless maintenance work that I've yet to even get started on it). I've been attempting to find better work elsewhere, though nothing has quite panned out yet (I do have one promising lead that'll require waiting until February, at least).

I suppose my biggest disappointment is still not getting Episode One done, even after putting hundreds more hours of work into it, but I can at least take solace in recognizing how much progress was made. The scale of this project is bigger than some games I've played with entire teams behind them, so it shouldn't be a surprise it's taking a really long time to complete on my own.

Anyway, let's take a look at everything that was accomplished this year!

As part of my resolution to get back into things with working on the game, the early parts of 2021 saw a lot of under-the-hood work accomplished, leveraging my newfound proficiency with programming to modify existing plugins, sometimes heavily, to finally get various gameplay elements to better match my vision for the game, or to fix longstanding bugs.

Among other things, major accomplishments included:

• Fixing a number of issues with the random loot system, including improper colors being applied to names, and "duplicate" items appearing in the map popups and after battle reports.
• Expanded the skill learn system to also include purchasable stat improvements, tailored to each character.
• Began publishing tutorial articles meant to explain various gameplay elements. So far these articles include:
  • Loot quality and effects
  • The equipment system
  • Character stats, both primary and secondary
  • The skill mastery system
  • The monster proficiency system
• Various UI improvements/fixes, such as fixing alignment issues in the universal status window, drastic improvements to the item usage submenu, cleaning up the Status Menu, and improving readability of resistances.
• Assorted battle system fixes and improvements, such as removing awkward pauses in animations, adding a weakness indicator to attacks, color-coding damage numbers based on the element used, correcting icon issues for buffs/debuffs, and making attacks, dodges, and counter-attacks more obvious with new animations.
• Began implementing character-based side quests focused on your various companions, as well as a psuedo-reputation system for said companions' opinions of you, based on various decisions or actions you can make throughout the game.
• Converting the random loot system to use a centralized JSON database instead of extensive individual notetags for each monster, making my life significantly easier there and providing a more consistent experience.
• Expanded the affix system to allow the odds of certain affixes to be adjusted dynamically based on various conditions, allowing for more flexibility and options for things like crafting.

I did a little bit of content creation during this time as well, but obviously the bulk of my time was doing foundational coding work. I've definitely been very proud of myself for being able to figure out how to do all this, and in only three months, no less!

As the year went on and I knocked out more and more tasks on the coding side, I started to shift back towards content and changes that would probably be more obvious to the player, and/or enhance the experience further.

This included:

• Implemented the first stages of a random weather system, allowing for outdoor environments to be either sunny or rainy. Where applicable, lanterns will also be lit when it's darker outside.
• Added some additional lighting and color effects that will do things like add subtle bloom lighting to certain surfaces when it's brighter outside.
• Added ember particles to campfires, braziers, and anything else with fire in it.
• Completed the connecting content for the first two quests, essentially turning the first half of Episode One into a cohesive experience instead of just unconnected pieces.
• Also completed the connecting content to the third quest, granting access to the larger wilderness exploration maps.
• Fixed a lot more bugs! So many bugs!
• Began some optimization work to improve the game's performance on low-end systems.
• Started grayboxing all remaining maps for Episode One, and completed a couple smaller maps.
• Finished implementing the Skill Mastery system values (i.e. damage/healing amounts increasing based on the mastery level).
• Published six new lore articles (five complete rewrites and one totally new article)!

This was a big step for me, because Episode One is finally starting to feel like a single unified game, instead of just a bunch of random pieces that can't be accessed from each other outside of playtesting. The finish line is actually starting to come into view!

Development for Unto the Breach slowed down a bit in September and October as my time was taken up by various tabletop gaming activities, plus I spent some time finalizing a professionally-printed copy of my board game Protoverse, while also attempting to finish up Seven Families of Jorandek. However, that didn't mean work stopped entirely!

I still accomplished:

• Finished connecting all maps for Episode One, so it can now be played from start to finish (although the story events towards the end, and the episode ending itself, have yet to be implemented).
• Finished the main exterior map for Doramor City, and added the first group of new NPCs to it.
• Added NPCs and crafting stations to Legacy Armaments in Doramor City.
• Finished restoring the Mercenaries' Guild third floor.
• Made some tweaks to some interior maps.
• Added buff/debuff turn counters back to the battle system.
• Fixed even more bugs!
• Implemented a code tweak to save myself some work on item pictures in the menu.
• Adjusted the help text for skills to change the damage/healing amounts based on the current mastery level.
• Redesigned Alex's skills to have two skill trees like everyone else, replacing his limited access to the Restoration and Elemental trees with a totally new tree that's a hybrid of those two.
• Published three more lore articles, including an entire short story.

I almost feel like I should focus on finishing the connecting content at the end just so you can legit play the entire episode from start to finish. At that point it'd almost be ready for some kind of early access build, heh. Although given that process is usually fraught with danger for devs, maybe I should just wait until it's done...

When I list everything out like that, I think it feels a lot more impressive how much got done for being one guy working on this game in his spare time. I don't plan on stopping in 2022 either, of course. As I said above, the finish line is finally coming into view, and for the first time I actually feel confident in saying I think I can do it this year. Of course I don't want to jinx it, heh. It's still going to be a metric frak-ton of work, especially in the final dungeon maps. But I just need to keep pushing forward, and we'll get there. I can't wait to finally release this game for the world to enjoy.

However 2021 turned out for you, I hope 2022 is better!

-Brian

It's only been a few weeks since the last update, but I've got quite a bit to report!

I went and gave myself some mental butt-kicks (to over-simplify) to get back into gear, and it seems to have worked a bit​. The last couple weeks have been highly productive!

On the backend of things, I did some more code cleanup and improvements, as well as adding new functionality. The biggest thing I added is turn counters to status effects in combat. So now you'll have an idea of how long buffs/debuffs will remain in effect (although they were already viewable in the status window). Admittedly, they were previously already in place when I was using Yanfly's UI elements, but after switching to Mog's Battle HUD, that feature disappeared, so I had to add it back in. And it surprisingly took far more steps than I would have figured, but eventually I got it. Hooray for more useful information!

Aside from that, I also fixed some bugs where the third and fourth battlers' character art was appearing above their HP/SP/OD bars, as well as fixed some alignment issues for when you have less than four people in your active party (such as during the tutorial quest). Furthermore, I streamlined the item discard window's appearance to better fit the menu (instead of simply hovering in the middle of the screen obscuring random elements). Some other minor tasks were knocked out as well, such as fixing alignment issues in the battle status window and removing the redundant "Remove" option in the formation menu. Finally, I implemented a code adjustment to save myself a fair bit of work with notetags regarding item pictures in the inventory and shop menus (it'll automatically load a high-res version of the picture if one exists, or default to an enlarged icon if it doesn't, all without crashing like before). Now I don't need to write notetags for hundreds of items, weapons, and armors (Plus, if I change the icon of an item/weapon/armor, it automatically updates which high-res picture it grabs too).

Now, onto the infographics!

Once Doramor City is wrapped up, I'll resume work on the Overworld and dungeon maps. My first priority will be completing the story-critical sequences, although I may save some of what's planned towards the end for much later, because it's going to be...complex, heh. I'd say more, but I don't want to spoil anything.

On the plus side, my overall tasks list continues to shrink as more things get done. Probably my favorite part is that, although some new bugs arose, I was able to fix them quickly, so the overall list of bugs actually went down this month! Huzzah!

Oh, right! I forgot about the skill mastery help text! I was able to add a process that dynamically updates the help text base damage/healing amount based on your mastery level. So, say you've got a skill that starts out at 150 base damage, once you get to level 1 mastery with it, the help text will update to say the base damage is 165. Currently it only re-evaluates the number after a usage, so the first time you use a skill after leveling it up (the calculation of which is done after the skill use sequence completes), it'll still have the old base amount. I haven't figured out how to force an update after leveling yet, but I will. It is...inevitable.

Alright, that should wrap it up for now. As we enter into the holiday season, having some extra days off work (plus a lot of PTO I have to use up or lose before the end of the year), should hopefully mean some additional time I can put into working on Unto the Breach. It is sadly obvious at this point Episode One won't be done by the end of the year like I had previously hoped, but I've at least still made tremendous progress on it over the last ten months. Believe me, I'm frustrated at how long it's taking, but that frustration isn't overriding my desire to see this completed the right way. There's still a long road ahead on finishing this adventure, but I think the end product will be well worth the wait.

​See you next month!

Yep, it's that time again! Let's see how things are going!

Development was admittedly slower in September and October, but by no means entirely dormant. Some of the tabletop events/leagues I run took up a lot of my free time in organizational work, both for local leagues (new edition of Kill Team, whee!), and prepping for the Michigan GT, the largest tabletop convention in the state. I ran two different tournaments simultaneously at the GT, which was challenging but highly rewarding, and participated in a couple other events as well (I took first place for Conquest: First Blood, SCORE!).

Also on the tabletop news, I put the final touches on Protoverse and got the first professionally-printed copy made! It's glorious!

Not gonna lie, it's extremely exciting ​to see something I've created be fully finished and produced at a level of quality on par with what you can normally buy in a game store. I don't have any distribution options setup yet, but I'll definitely try to figure something out. If you're interested in getting a copy, let me know!

I've also made some solid progress on Seven Families. An initial draft of the final rules has been written up and is being proofread now. I've also finally reached a more finalized design of the gameboard I'm happy with (that was the biggest thing slowing me down). Hopefully I can have everything done and also sent off to the printers by the end of November.

As for Unto the Breach, it's a bit of a mixed bag. The situation with my work hasn't improved at all since my last update, and I've been utterly burned out enough times before to recognize when it's happening again. As before, it's left little motivation to spend any additional time outside out of work on my computer. Or, if I did spend any additional time doing creative stuff, it was largely focused on Seven Families. I needed to do something that had more immediate results. That said, September and October haven't been entirely devoid of progress.

The biggest steps taken in this time were connecting all the existing maps for Episode One, so you can now play from the beginning through nearly the entire final dungeon. Greyboxing is done for all but the last floor of the final dungeon. It should be a relatively simple process to get the last floor done, then perhaps start working on the ending sequence.

Several NPCs were also added to locations around Doramor City, helping the city be more lively. The final number will probably be around double what's currently implemented though, if not higher. I really want cities (and the world in general) to feel like they're actually inhabited by lots (and lots) of people, Doramor City has a population of about 250,000. You're definitely gonna meet more than a few of those people, heh.

Also on the creative front, I've got a new lore article written up that I'll be posting soon. It's a historical article about one of the most crucial battles of the Judgment War, and is easily the longest article I've written yet, at about 3,400 words (so about 1.5-2x longer than the political articles I posted in July/August). I'll likely have that up next week. I've also got another lore present planned for Halloween!

That wraps it up for now. I wish I had more to report, but we all know how life is. I'm confident my situation will be improving soon, though, and things will pick back up with Unto the Breach as I muster the energy for it again. And even if things don't improve, I will endure, as always.

​See you next time!

Just in time, I've got a new monthly update! Let's take a look at what I've been up to in July and August for the game.

In terms of game development, July was dominated by new lore writing, much of which has been posted in the form of completely overhauled articles for Doramor, Saernis, Korneth, Saniel, and a new article for Weijin, who never got one previously. If you haven't given them a read yet, I heartily encourage you to do so. There's tons of new information in them, even if you've read the original versions. I have some additional articles I'm putting the finishing touches on, and will have at least some of them posted within the next couple weeks.

On a more personal note, July (and much of August for that matter) was a rough month. My mentor at work left, and with no one brought on to replace her, I suddenly found myself doing the work of two people (and I already needed help before that). Much like last year, I've found myself so exhausted from the workload I've had little energy to stay in front of a computer after 9-10 hour shifts that left my brain feeling rather melted, so my spare time has mostly been more in my model painting activities, and any gaming I was doing was predominantly VR-based (I picked up an Oculus Quest 2 a few months ago, and it's amazing).

Thankfully, I took a much needed vacation this past weekend, and finally managed to fire up RPG Maker again to work on Episode One some more. Over the course of a couple days, I created, built, and completed an entire mercenary encampment you visit late in the episode, plus all story-related cutscenes and NPC dialogue, shop, and inn functions.

​So that's one more major step taken towards completing Episode One! With a little work (maybe an hour or so), I can connect all the existing exploration/dungeon maps, allowing you to play from the very start until just before the final dungeon maps (although many of the maps would still be quite...barren). I have to admit it still feels a bit weird that it's actually resembling a coherent game now, and not just a series of unconnected pieces. I like it, though!

​Anyway, onto the infographics! I'm restructuring the overview one to make it a little easier to read (and I was having issues getting the zoomed in version to display properly here on the site).

The only changes this time around are in the final Quest section, along with the accompanying Overworld and Dungeons sections, owing to completion of the mercenary camp and at least starting some of the additional maps. Aside from building out the Overworld maps, I think my next priorities will be finishing up quest content, so they're at least playable, even if the maps are pretty empty still.

I'm going to skip the Doramor City infographic this month since nothing was done for it, and instead move on to the Overworld/Dungeons map.

Again, the bulk of the work was the mercenary camp, but it still feels good to be able to advance the numbers a little. I'm also just now noticing the rings don't actually match the percentage amounts. I should see if I can fix that. I might also split the Overworld and Dungeons maps into separate sections as more progress gets made, to better distinguish their individual states of completion (I was just trying to minimize potential spoilers in combining them).

Finally the Other Tasks section, which shrank slightly in the Menu Functions (completed the skill damage/healing values pertaining to the mastery system), and grew in the Bug Fixing section (optimization, and some glitches pertaining to the camera zoom mechanics). As always, fix one bug and three more appear. But eventually they'll all be slain!

​I think that'll wrap it up for this report. Until next time!

I do most of my work for Unto the Breach on my personal desktop, which is a mid-to-high end gaming PC (Ryzen 5 3600, 32 GB DDR-3200 RAM, RTX 2080, etc.). Occasionally I'll do work on my Surface Pro 6 though, like when I'm traveling or just want to lay on the couch instead of sitting in my computer chair for hours on end. Normally I do just coding or database work on the Surface, and almost never actually do a test play of something. So I had a bit of a shock recently, when I tried to fire up Unto the Breach to test out the dialogue and eventing for a new scene.

The framerate suuuuuuucked! I'm talking single digits here, even on a map that was barely the size of the screen, so there were virtually no events to bog things down. Granted, as far as gaming goes, my Surface is barely a few steps removed from a potato (It even struggles to run Jackbox games smoothly, and those aren't exactly hyper-realistic graphics or anything). But it made me realize, not everyone's rocking a RTX video card or high-end RAM, either. And, if I had to be honest, even on my gaming PC, the game occasionally chugs a bit.

So I started testing the various plugins installed to the game, trying to figure out which ones were destroying the framerate. Eventually I tracked it down to a couple specific ones (and was a bit surprised when it turned out to not be the ones I initially suspected it would be). Which in turn led me to discover those plugins were more symptoms of a larger issue facing me. So now I'm on a (kinda) epic journey to overhaul how the game does updates.

In a nutshell, the game runs an update process 60 times a second (by default in the engine this is actually tied to your framerate, but one of the plugins I have decouples it and makes it a consistent 60 times a second which makes way more sense from a programming standpoint). This includes everything from rendering graphical changes (in fact the entire screen is re-rendered every frame), to updating object properties (anything from character stats to sprite colors to event positions), to handling player inputs, to loading new files (graphics, sound, etc.), to a bunch of other stuff. It is, quite simply, a LOT of data to crunch. Unto the Breach is over 85,000 lines of code long, split across hundreds of classes and methods. There are a LOT of classes getting called during the update process. Some take less than a millisecond to finish, others take...longer.