Maids & Masters (& Arrival Remastered)

If you follow me on Twitter, you've already seen the evidence - the process of remastering has begun.

There's a lot of pre-work I have to do - getting tilesets to not look terrible in MZ after resizing, doing the same for sprite sheets, re-rendering the existing renders, rendering any new things that might need visual representation - the list goes on for a good while.

The good news is that this gives me a good deal more assets to work with (like the native assets for the other versions of the RPG Maker engine) a whole boatload of new features that are native to the engine (like mouse support and text skip) and a whole slew of other benefits on the development side of things.

I already covered a lot of my general plan in my general February update, but just to reaffirm it here, the first step is to remaster the prequel/tech demo thing I made. That project is closer to a remake than a remaster, since there are a lot of placeholder assets and I need to rewrite basically all of the dialogue, but it's already coming along pretty smoothly. I think I'm going to set the release date for that as the second weekend in March, which my calendar tells me would be March 10th. 

 

I do still have other things to concern myself with that'll take up more than a trivial amount of time, so it's likely it'll be done before then, but I want to give myself an excess of time to test things for a couple of reasons. First, I want an extended period of time to playtest the new prequel. I want the save to properly carry over this time, I might want to go back and forth between the prequel and the main game for continuity, and the smaller scope of the prequel gives me an opportunity to test out any plugins I might want to use in the main game and make sure I fully understand them before implementing them. All of this will take time. On top of that, Arrival will be coming out as a complete product. Unless I manage to miss something absolutely game-breaking, there will be zero patches or updates to it. That means I should take the time to be thorough and really make sure I'm not missing something.

Plus, I don't want to leave ya'll hanging for a full month, or possibly longer. Sure, I could have it done this Friday, but then you'd not hear much of anything from me until April, and I don't want to leave that much dead air.