Back!

Sorry for the extended absence everyone.  

What happened?  The plot had gotten overly complex and had evolved in ways I didn’t intend nor enjoy.  In addition, since the plot was developed while I was creating the game there were many parts of the game that simply disagreed with itself.  The relationship between the protagonist and the spirits, what the spirits themselves where, what the nature of your control of Terra was etc.  The code of the game was horribly complex and chaotic.  This is my fault, I don’t have a programming background and literally learned how to create the game in the process of creating it leaving random code junk throughout the event structure and making it essentially to any top down fixes or construction.  Finally, the quality of the content had gotten so inconsistent that I hated reading the early game but it would require so much work.  And trying to be tech support for the various RTP issues and script incompatibilities was annoying.  I got frustrated and simply walked away.  I had no clue of where to start fixing things so I simply did nothing.

The game always itched at the back of my mind though.  There was a lot of parts of it I enjoyed creating and not doing wasn’t enjoyable either.  I picked up ACE and started playing around with that trying to create new things but never really got into them.  I decided to try to work on Harem but that it would require essentially redoing the game in order to make any progress.  So for the last few weeks I’ve been working on rebuilding the game from the ground up.  Reordering my entire 3dcg arc folder so it works consistently and start fresh in ACE, using existing content as a guide rather than something that had to be worked inside of.  

In the last few weeks, I’ve essentially rewritten the entire first chapter of Harem (Fisher’s village) with completely new scenes and a renewed focus on character interactions.  While the light/dark path will still exist their natures will change, dramatically on the dark path.  While Harem will never be a PG game, I plan to steer away from the darkest extremes of the game, particularly the violence and rape aspects to it.  Especially when your character is inflicting that on others.  The dark path will be more coercion and callousness then overt violence and domination.  The light path will also change but I can’t really define how that will be done yet.  But hopefully the content will be superior to the old game and I know from a coding/testing perspective it is already massively better.

Mostly I want to apologize for the vanishing and to let everyone know that I still exist and that there may be new Harem content in the near future.  I also want to apologize the team of people helping me.  I did little to explain what was going through my head and vanished for them as much as I did for everyone.  Especially considering how much work they did on the game it was a shitty thing for me to do.  A big Thank You to HirotonoRei, TheEye, Calristian and Ninjician.  Within hours of me reappearing, they’ve already offered to help again and that does a huge amount to convince me to keep working.

Chapter 1 isn’t ready to release yet but I hope to have that done within the next few weeks.  It will be based on VX-Ace so you’ll need to have that RTP installed to play it.  If that’s received well I’ll continue to work on resetting the old content in the new design but that’s likely to be a slow process.  Fortunately, I figured out how to import the VX maps but trying to reuse the event structure would doom the project.  Essentially the first third to half the game has to be completely rewritten from both a content and design standpoint.  The changes intended will also involve at least altering much of the rest of it.  So don’t expect 0.7 any time soon, but hopefully 0.2.1 isn’t too far away.

Edit - Clarifications :  While I won't remove any of the old content from the blog or websites, I haven't and will not support it.  Enjoy what's there but part of this entire mess is that code was so sloppy it could not be troubleshooted anymore.  So if it blows up, well it blows up.  Existing saves will be meaningless and will not be portable.  The CG mode is written in RGSS2 and ACE uses RGSS3 is not currently functional.  Trying to learn RGSS3 is not practical for me so unless a scripter volunteers to fix it it's MIA from here on out.