Princessity News - Major Announcements, Upcoming Changes, Project: Charon, Project: Persephone, The Future of Monthly Mod Reports

IT'S JUNE! And that means...

WELCOME TOOOOOOOOOOO...

Wait-!

Hmm... I'm not sure if "Monthly Mod Report" is an accurate label this time, because even though that's been... the only thing I've been using this Patreon for for the past couple of years, the post today is actually going to be about a lot of things that don't have much to do with Team Nessassity mods.

In fact, just as I promised last month, the topic of today will be all the changes coming to the Patreon format, the Discord, and even Princess' future as a modder... and more.

I've been holding it in for SO LONG and I'm so excited to finally start announcing all these things! >o<

Okay, enough with the boring intro nonsense! ADO! AWAY WITH YOU!

✧ Princessity's Game Dev Era

Okayso... it's been the most poorly kept secret ever for the past year or so but... if we pretend that I haven't spilled the beans a million times already, you may have noticed that I've been dropping a few hints here and there...

At the beginning of the year, I stated that this would be the Year of Finishing Things. More on that later, but I'm finally ready to reveal that this is the reason why.

I had been part-time preparing for it for the past couple of years, researching various engines, scouting out indie games to observe their developers at work, practising art and exploring different media and software. In other words, assembling the tools, knowledge and practical advice I was going to need. But it was this year that I finally stopped "preparing" and actually proceeded to doing.

But you may have also noticed by now that my participation in Team Nessassity projects, and my modding productivity in general, have dropped off over the years. Part of that was simply due to my lifestyle and career stability getting thrown into complete chaos in the early 2020s, which have not recovered to this day. But... perhaps the more impactful factor was my growing feeling of stagnation.

That is not to say I have lost my passion for it. Not at all!

I have always enjoyed modding, since almost as long as I have been playing games. One my first games ever was The Sims 2, and I found out about - and became obsessed with - its "custom content" in no time at all. I never ended up making any mods for Sims games, but ever since then, I would always be drawn towards games that allowed me to customise my experience through mods, change the way things looked, add new content, and so on.

So... you could say that gaming and development are really one and the same to me. In a way, modding is a game in its own right, with structures you need to navigate, rules that you need to learn, and various challenges you must overcome to achieve your goals. The goals themselves are something you have to set for yourself, but if you like the gameplay loop, you'll never run out of reasons to come back to it.

And if we keep going with this analogy, that probably makes actual game development... a bigger, less constrained form of that. Trading structure for more freedom, but also adding new challenges and new opportunities to create and pursue bigger goals.

I guess what it really comes down to is a desire to challenge myself. I want to level up and move on to a more dangerous zone! And... I'm very well aware that it might kick my butts in and leave me with a regret-shaped footprint, but I'm okay with that prospect. Because I think that the regret of having never tried at all would feel so much worse.

So...

You are probably wondering, if Princess is a game dev now, she must be working on a game. What game could it possibly be?

Ah! Not so fast! n_n We'll be talking about it next, but before we move on, I just want to assure you that the transition is going to be as gentle and gradual as I can make it. Until the Year of Finishing Things is over, I intend to stick to the plan and put most of my focus on completing the ongoing mod projects for Stellaris and Crusader Kings 3. I'm also still looking forward to working (although in more of a support capacity) on future Team Nessassity projects. And, who knows? I'll probably continue coming up with random little mods on the side, because sometimes I just can't stop myself =.=

Now... With that said...

✧ Project: Charon

The traveller silently checks her watch for the tenth time today. The girl beside her busily traces lines over the map. 

The old coachman casts a glance their way and smiles. Though the time they spent together was a brief ride, it was enough.

They exchange goodbyes, and leave to continue on journeys whose paths will not cross again. 

The traveller silently checks her watch for the eleventh time today. The girl beside her pockets the map and asks:

"Are we there this time?" 

The traveller silently checks her watch for the twelfth time today and shakes her head. 

She has seen countless journeys to the end, but the arms of her watch continue to stand still.

Project: Charon is going to be a story-driven card game with resource management and dungeon-crawler elements, in which the player takes control of two main characters.

Lapina is a bundle of contradictions shrouded in mystery. She meets many people but does not speak a word. She wields a sharp scythe with deadly grace, but refuses to cut short any lives before their time. Most strangely of all, she constantly checks her watch and appears to be lost, but is never in a hurry to reach anywhere.

Alice, on the other hand, is a smart and diligent young girl who has been accompanying Lapina since the day the wandering warrior had saved her life by chance. Although she is defenceless against the dangers of the endless road, those who meet the two quickly realise that if it were not for Alice's organisational and social skills, Lapina would still be getting lost along a straight path and subsisting on wild leaves.

The two of them will come across other adventurers, join them in their quests, witness their stories, and when the time comes, part ways.

Because for a journey to be fulfilling, it must be memorable, but for it to be complete, it must reach its destination.

But as long as they hold on to the memories of their shared journeys, it is as though the companions encountered along the way had never left.

Said companions, present and past, can brave the long road alongside the two, contributing unique cards to help them overcome obstacles, complete quests on behalf of local adventurers guilds, and find treasure to trade for supplies necessary to continue onwards.

The game's themes of searching for closure and retreading the past from a new perspective are heavily inspired by my obsession of the past year - Frieren. But the mechanical side of things is actually an evolution of a game concept that has been on my mind for many many years - an RPG in which the protagonist is a non-combatant who takes care of all the aspects of adventuring that games usually don't tackle. Planning routes, securing supplies, scouting out the best jobs and getting the best deals when trying to sell the spoils.

In Project: Charon, I want to explore the "boring" parts of adventure fantasy. And perhaps tell a wholesome and uplifting personal story while at it n_n

✧ Project: Persephone

Sweet dreams and bitter nightmares alike.

Phantasmagoria of memories she once forgot.

Reality awaits at sleep's end, even the deepest one.

But as the dreamer wakes, she remembers: it ended long ago.

Project: Persephone is the second game I'm planning to make after Project: Charon. A far more ambitious undertaking that... I'm not ready to talk about in detail just yet, because it will ultimately be built on the foundations of the first game, expanding on its frameworks and taking advantage of the experience I'm hoping to have acquired by the time Persephone's development starts.

All I can say about it for now is that if you are interested in a mix of...

• Magical girls

• Cosmic horror

• Eldritch cute

• Urban fantasy

• Corporate Management Sim meets X-Com meets CCG

• Deep customisation and in-built modding tools

...then maybe it will be up your alley n_n

✧ More Game Dev Stuff - The Technicals

The first of the two projects - Charon - is going to enter active development near the end of this year. It is going to be my testbed for various ideas I have in mind, but in itself, I want it to be a relatively simple game with a tight focus. The more ambitious Persephone project will take a lot longer to develop and... requires a lot of skills I do not posses yet.

Originally, Persephone was supposed to be the only game I wanted to make, but as the planned scope and depth expanded, it became apparent to me that I was trying to bite off way more than I could chew for a first attempt at making a game. So I decided to scale back down to something a little more beginner-friendly.

There is actually a... very long story behind the process that led up to this decision, and perhaps one day I will recount it. But for today, let's talk about something Fun™!

I think some of you nerrrrrrrrrds (affectionate n_n) may be interested in the engine those games will be running on!

Choosing between Unity, Unreal and Godot has been pretty much the main quest of my life for the past year >.<

So I figured it may be therapeutic for me to let you experience the same suffering and decision paralysis I had to go through before I reveal which one won in the end!

Unity

So everyone has probably heard about the Unity controversy, and the subsequent dev exodus. Before it all went down, Unity was actually the only engine I was eyeing. It was the indie dev's starter kit, the default, the brainless choice.

And... Well.. It is now attached to an extremely untrustworthy company that will never be able to do enough to regain the goodwill it's lost in one fell swoop. The controversial policy itself wasn't really that relevant to me, as I'm not expecting my first project to even qualify. However, it did give me the fear of building on the foundations of sand. There was no telling when or how the Unity company might decide to change the rules again, but one thing is certain: that they can.
That paranoid fear is what prompted me to... expand my horizons and look for other options.

But were we to put all of that aside, Unity is uncontested when it comes to the ease of access, robustness and sheer flexibility. Anything the engine itself does not offer, there's almost guaranteed to be a plugin or code assets that do precisely what you want. And if that's not the case, the documentation is so extensive and so omnipresent that it's actually detrimental to the other engines. Because even if you are explicitly searching for tutorials to Godot or Unreal, half of your search results will be unsolicited Unity-based solutions instead.

Unity was "the default" for so long for a reason, and no matter what, it's still a very compelling reason.

Unreal Engine

The next destination was the other most popular engine, although admittedly, you hear of it more in relation to big name games and big AAA studios. However, it is actually no less accessible to indie devs than Unity. After playing around for a bit and quickly getting the hang of it, I understood that the respective associations of the two likely had more to do with trends than actual capabilities.

A lot of people have opinions on the accessibility extremes of UE's micro-intensive C++ based coding and the intuitive but limited visual coding of Blueprints. Personally, it was not a big factor to me, as I tend to pick up languages and get used to new coding environments very quickly. So, all in all, I was ready to commit.

That is... until I started diving deeper into the tools available and realising that... I would never need like 90% of them. All the advanced tech that was being heavily promoted at the time sounded neat, but after navigating past it to the features I actually needed to make my simple turn-based 2D card game a reality... were shockingly underdeveloped.

Suddenly it felt like launching Photoshop and renewing your Adobe subscription just to draw a stick figure (which... I've absolutely never done, nuh uh, don't look at me like that >.<).

Specifically, the one thing whose absence I felt very keenly was native support for skeletal 2D. Of course, it's entirely possible to make 2D games in Unreal. Although natively, your choices are limited to between 2D spritesheets and 3D-masquerading-as-2D, with third-party tools like Dragonbones, the deficiencies of native tools can be bypassed. I even found some tutorials explaining how to set everything up to... bring it... close to what Unity offers by default.

However, as I was trying to do more research and finally decide between the two, a third option revealed itself.

Godot

Unless you're also actively interested in game development, or go out to find obscure indie games to play, there's a very high chance that you have never heard of Godot. It's not attached to a controversial company, associated with high profile games or driving the bleeding edge of dev tech. Although it's been around for many years, it's never been in the same league of popularity as the Big Two. In fact, if you're only a consumer of video games, it's more likely that you know RPGMaker than Godot.

However, despite its relative obscurity, what did bring it to my attention was a lot of actual games on itch.io using it. And from the testimonies of their developers, I learned that it had a lot of potential. As an open-source engine, it gets bigger and better with every experienced developer coming over and contributing features that they themselves want to see. It's an engine not just made for indie developers, it is very clearly made by developers who then go on to make their own games in it.

But my first contact hit me with an immediate culture shock. Godot... speaks its own language.

I mean... literally. With the .NET version, it can also operate on the industry-standard C#, but if you really want to engage with Godot as intended, you should learn its proprietary language, GDscript.

Earlier, I bragged that I can adapt to new coding environments quickly, but while I believe that is true, it still does take quite a lot of effort. Whichever engine I would ultimately choose for my project would become my home for the next couple of years. Switching to another mid-development would mean pretty much starting over from scratch.
So... naturally, one of the most important factors I had to take into consideration was how much effort I was willing to dedicate to dealing with the quirks of the engine, versus how much energy I would then have left to work on the game itself.

And the winner is...

...

Okay, fine, enough with the mystery! So it's Godot. Although the culture shock still lingers, in the end, I was won over by the simple fact that it's the least overwhelming engine of the three. The Node-based structure is surprisingly intuitive and I appreciate that everything is nicely categorised and colour-coded.

But also, I recently got an opportunity to dive into modding a certain other Godot-based game, and it led me down a rabbit hole. And in the process, I ended up picking up a lot of useful skills.

As for the mods I ended up making and the game in question... hehe... actually, I'll keep it a secret for now n_~ I'll show them off in the next Monthly Mod Report! But here's a little teaser - one of the outfits I drew:

✧ Team Nessassity & Monthly Mod Reports

Aaaaand... speaking of Monthly Mod Reports. The next six months are going to bring in a whole lot of changes to the Patreon format, our community Discord and the way we communicate.

First of all, please rest assured that Team Nessassity isn't going anywhere. Even though I will be stepping down from the representative position, we're ultimately still a bunch of friends who help each other make mods, and there will probably be many more mods we make in the future.

However, I will be setting out on my game dev journey alone, and most of my personal focus will shift towards Project: Charon for the foreseeable future.

Along the road to that point, however, I'm hoping to measure your interest and ask you a few questions via Polls. The community we've built up is very precious to me and you have always been my source of motivation and my best cure against burnout. So even though my future focus is going to be far, far away from the content you may be used to, I am hoping that at least some of you will follow me on this journey, and help me create not just a game I want to make, but also one that you want to play! >.<

So, elephant in the room - where does that leave Monthly Mod Reports? The final answer is, their spirit will be preserved in a different format, but I will be gradually phasing them out as the Year of Finishing Things comes to a close.

But soon, you will notice a few new things coming to our Discord, which will allow us to deliver progress reports in an even better and more efficient way!

Remember that "Weekly Updates" thing that I was supposed to start posting for Vellum Noctis... ages ago? Well, how about something better? How about live updates as soon as code is written? n_n

Oh! Ooops... Looks like I've teased too many things in one MMR, and the Mystery Police is on my tail! Seems I won't be able to reveal everything until the next Monthly Mod Report! Oh well... can't argue with the rules! @.@

✧

So, until then, I hope you're as excited for the future as I am. Let's have fun playing games, and soon, making games too!

If you're not part of the adorablest community on Discord yet, this is the best time to join up, so you can grab some popcorn and witness everything going up in flames as I try to restructure and add new features to it soon! >.<

And to all of you who continue to support us, thank you SO MUCH! We could not have gotten here without your constant encouragement and support. And this time, I would like to address you personally as well, as Princess.

Your support has genuinely gotten me through some of the lowest points of my life. I HATE trauma-dumping and dragging other people into my problems, so when I write these reports, I only do that when I'm able to sound optimistic and crack silly jokes every other sentence.
Sometimes... it's incredibly difficult to get into the right mood, but for so many years now, you have always been so patient and forgiving of my repeated failings to maintain proper communication and deliver the results you deserve.

I will never be able to return even a fraction of what your kindness has meant to me, but I will never stop trying to!
Until now, I have had precious little to give you back. But as Project : Charon and eventually Project: Persephone get underway, there's something... special I'm cooking up for you. I'm hoping... you will like it ~_n