The Pill 0.4.0 State of Play (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

I thought I'd give you all an update on what's happening with the next version of The Pill.

Long story short, after (a few months of) attempting to solve a number of issues that I've had with VN Maker, I've decided that the task would be too convoluted and piecemeal to try and solve the myriad of issues I've had within the game development platform. 

I have instead decided to remake The Pill within Unity. This would lead to a game that appears mostly the same, but is written in C# rather than Java.

This is a lot of work and not something that I have not decided upon lightly. My reasoning is as follows:

• The larger the game becomes the greater we'd face the (already problematic) loading issues the game has in VN Maker. In some cases, (especially on older machines) the game simply wouldn't run. The larger it gets the more that will happen. Moving to Unity should solve that issue.
• The current version of VN Maker is technically still in beta and has a number of pretty serious bugs, including the game not working on the latest OSX, crashing while trying to skip scenes and breaking the game entirely when I try to move dialogue from one scene to another. Unity, on the other hand, has had years of development and heaps of support.
• Unity negates previous limitations such as allowing videos as rewards in the gallery. It also allows for much greater addition to the game outside of its current scope (e.g. currency, items and achievements)
• In Unity running videos in general should be a smoother affair.
• As a final big factor - I'm intending to create further BE games once done with The Pill (the game itself was always intended as a test run of sorts) and Unity is a much better platform to expand for that next endeavour.

In essence, I'm trying to look to the future rather than just building more and more on a shoddy foundation.

As for the next step - I'm currently re-creating Trish's story arcs within Unity with relative success. I've remade most of the menus and about 1/2 of her current existing arcs.

I'm conscious of the fact that you patient lot have been waiting for new content for quite a while, so the plan for v0.4.0 is to have the existing Trish story, as well as a number of new arcs present within the Unity framework. This will include (at a minimum) a new BE pill and a GTS pill. 

I'm focusing on that new content rather than back adding in Belle for the time being, as it's a heap of work that's not super exciting to anyone who has played v0.3.5 already.

For timeframe, I'm hoping to have something by the end of next week, but as always there might be some coding snags along the way.

I'll post a bit more tomorrow, including a (possibly surprising) MWM and a new SuperSized poll!