Maids & Masters (& Progress on Arrival Remastered)

Lots of big progress for such a little demo.

I'm still unsure about adding full animations to the main Maids & Masters game due to the sheer amount of work it'll entail, but since it was just one scene, I figured "why not animate the end of Arrival?"

This led me to a 14 hour journey through despair, downloads, and ultimately - victory.

And as an extra bonus, I have a whole new set of skills now.

Animation isn't something I'm particularly passionate about, but it is something that interests me, and it's one of the many subjects I've studied just for fun. This last weekend, all that studying paid off, and now instead of chopping up renders and animating the pieces, I'm exporting full blown custom animation videos. Will they make it into the main game? I've got a poll coming up on that, so if you think the answer is "yes," go support me on Patreon and vote when that poll goes live. The decision - and a significant part of my future - is in your hands.

The other big thing is all the plugins. See, RPG Maker doesn't like to play movies in parallel with literally anything, so I needed to go find a plugin to make the animation happen while the text was going. Then it took a little more work to loop those animations without the map below flashing in between each loop. Then I got to work on all of the other QoL plugins that I've wanted to put into the game since I started making Maids & Masters - a quest log, custom status screens, proper external linking, instant text, the ability to hide the text box, customizable controls, and a few extra bits - all of which now works about as well as I can ask it to.

There are still a small handful of things I need to figure out. For example, the Formation option doesn't need to exist and isn't relevant to Arrival, so it's just turned off, but I still need to figure out how to let you arrange your party in the main game with the option gone. So there's still a good deal of work to be done, but Arrival functions from start to finish. The only thing left to do is playtest the hell out of it. 

 

Launch for Arrival's remaster is still scheduled for March 10th, at which point it'll be available for early access on itch.io and to Patrons.