News for RPG in Another World

Hello everyone! It's been a while since I last visited this page. Right now, I want to announce that RPG in Another World just reached 1 year in development, in which I'm releasing a massive update named V 0.1.4.14.

The changelog is too long for me to write here, and I'm not confident with the formatting either. Anyway, if you want to view the changelog, you're free to do so directly in RIAW's itch.io website. So, I intend to share a devlog of my one year of development here.
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Happy birthday to RPG in Another World!

It's already been a year of me doing this. I've written over 200K of words, along with thousands of lines of code. Honestly, I can't believe I've been this consistent in something lol, I guess I really find my passion.

Making this game and the story has been a blast for me. I learned a lot, and have come far from my own starting point. I still remember watching countless video on writing tips and godot tutorial. I made a lot of mistakes in the beginning, that's also why there are two consecutive update focused on re-write, maybe the story would have advance much further without it. Then again, the quality wouldn't be as good as it is today. When I start, it was when I recently graduated from high school too, so I was really ambitious and overscoped a lot. I still am ambitious, by the way, I just have a better sense over the direction I'm heading now compared to me a year ago.

The reason why I started making this game is because I was maybe a bit bored due to all the free time I had when I freshly graduated. I'm also curious about a certain aspect in Interactive Fiction and that's how you can literally create your own world. I mean any story does that, but with Interactive Fiction, you're able to interact with the world itself, being a part of it and influence it to a degree. That's also probably why I picked Godot Engine to create the game.

When I was planning on creating RIAW, I was thinking on where should I create it. Most IF is created in Twine or COG. But, I was unfamiliar with both and the gameplay aspect in those two is quite limited, and it definitely wouldn't be able to support my turn based combat system. In the end, I picked godot, even with its weak support in creating Interactive Fiction, it's still an all-rounder engine and I'm able to manage it quite well.

At first, I thought this game is going to be a short one. I was thinking perhaps I can finish the game in a year or something. Now, here I am not even halfway there yet. I overestimate myself too much and paid the price lol. I'm also moving in a snail pace whenever I write, maybe because I'm a beginner or that English isn't my first language. Oh, and perhaps college took maybe more than half of my time too. I really wish I still have my free-time I got when I first graduated. The hardest part in writing is mostly figuring out about repetition and player's choice. I always re-think if I wrote something similar in other branches, I wonder if I did too much or too little. Yep, I think there's also too little because in some situation, even with variations, there are a few things that logically will end up mostly the same, trying too hard to write it very differently would only strain myself. I was also double-checking if I give the player too little choices. Because this is an interactive fiction, player need to have some degree of control over the event and their reaction. If I don't provide enough action for the player to flesh out their own personality and ideas into the story, the world would feel bland and boring overtime.

Overall, for a first timer, I hope I did okay. Sharing my own work for the world to see isn't easy. It's even harder to make a long-lasting impression on people, which is what I'm intending to do with my game.

Thank you everyone, your kind words and the time you spent in playing my game has help me in moving forward and continue, despite the issues I encountered during development.

I also want to give shoutouts to people on discord for giving me suggestions, corrections, and encouragement during the creation of this game. I can't list all of you now because your numbers keep on growing, but thank you, y'all!

And of course, the last special shoutout I will give is honored to my very own laptop. It's an old, 2013 laptop, with the fan as loud as a jet engine and the speed of an elderly, but the old dude somehow is able to keep up with the development of this game. Without this laptop, RIAW is non-existent. I want to reveal my laptop to this post too, but IFDB news don't allow image attachment, so check out the post on itch.io!

I hope the second year of the development of RIAW will go much more smoother than the first year. I'm hoping I'll have creativity flowing like a raging river too. See you later, y'all :)