July is over! Summer is still kicking. Time for another monthly report!
Next VLOG Report will either be in September or October. Pending how schedules align. Now, onto the report!
July we had a pretty big event with the teaser release of our second project: The Father's Story. We also were able to help out a Guns of Icarus competitive event by providing some copies of Dust and Air. Some people never had heard of it till we did. Surprising but, also not too surprising. The community has changed over the years since our founders were more active in it.
Work on the Father's Story advanced forward a bit in July. We're happy to announce the last of the rough story is now in engine. With all the art assets in place, we're moving forward with incorporating them into the story. Granted, we've already done some of this before when we tested the expression sets on Bethia but, we opted to get the story in engine before going back to that.
This is going to be a rather big moment as we'll be looking more into Dust and Air porting while we do this. There is also some interesting rumblings as far as Dust and Air expansion goes. The VN Effector tool which is based on Tyrano, is picking up more steam from fellow Tyrano devs. We've reached out via their discord and informed the developer of our project's needs and the reception was quite positive.
Effector is roughly Tyrano being continued by a Russian developer who is looking to pick up where Strikeworks left off. Given that Strikeworks is abandoning Tyrano, we're keeping our eyes on Effector. To be frank about it, Effector is a fan project that does pose some legal questions if Strikeworks ever wanted to challenge it. So should that dissuade us from using it? That's a good question.
From what we know about the VN game engines, VN Maker is also built upon Tyrano. They pretty much stole the entire backend of the engine and put their own front end on top, then charged $60 instead of $15. While the now defunct western publisher of Tyrano communicated this reality to us, Strikeworks never seemed to challenge it. Likely wasn't worth the cost or time fighting it given VN Maker is China based.
Our commitment has shifted to Unity but if the Effector devs deliver on their promises and make something that challenges Nani Novel, we'll have to serious look at it for Dust and Air. It will be good news in someways as we won't need to do anything major for porting.
As far as Father's Story goes, we're already committed to Nani Novel and we want the experience working on Unity so we won't be looking to change that.
Going into August we'll be going full steam towards an alpha build of Father's Story. We're also going to be poking around a bit on the music front and see if we can secure a new composer.
Alright, that's it for this month! Till next time, see you in the skies!
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