The april 1st of 2023

Still working on V3.

Yes, it's very disappointing and irritating. Honestly, it's been causing a great deal of anxiety to me for the last three years and just quitting to end the questions and self-doubt seems like the better deal compared to listening to the jeering from the sidelines. But I've seen multiple projects and internet personalities quit projects like this to save themselves from the anxiety of "not delivering", and it always felt far worse than just getting even a small snippet of content from them later down the line.

Yes, the development has been quite slow, but it cannot be made any faster. I do have a life outside of Teraurge, so my schedule is filled with things that take precedence, which keeps slowing and obstructing the development. Remembering the posts I've read from other game devs I notice that they'd list the things that affect the development time and such, in order to justify their shortcomings. However, I feel like these hurdles tend to be so mundane there'd be little point to list them, other than to make it seem like the dev is groveling for forgiveness, which wouldn't make much sense in my case because I've grown unrepentant.

I was planning to include preview snippets in this blog post, but I realized I would have to dedicate time and effort to hunt for those (which I don't have). Then I would have to suffer the questions about them without being able to answer (because I don't have time for that). And then finally I would have to watch as people create new expectations and assumptions based on the previews and lack of answers which ultimately wouldn't be corrected (because I don't have time for that).

And here is the traditional up to date stream art super pack for your convenience.

Stream art super pack download

V3 will come out whether you like it or not.

The end of 2021

Still working on V3.

This year has been a maelstrom of things happening to me personally, some of which have changed my life considerably. Regardless, they have not seriously hampered the development of the game. I even finished my first D&D campaign I DMed for 2+ years for eight(!) people, that was fun.

The technical side of game development has been hindered by Adobe AIR support vanishing and overall it becoming more and more of a nuisance. Progress to the next update has been severely affected by this development, and some drastic measures have been taken to ensure V3 can actually be installed and run when it's released.

The development version of the Teraurge V3 currently runs on the Unity engine. I had been working semi-seriously on an Unity version of the game as precautionary thing along with the AIR version, but irreconcilable technical hurdles forced the issue and I had to take the plunge into the Unity for V3. 

The switch has been a big effort but the new tools Unity and C# bring to the table have made the development far more enjoyable and efficient than what it was on the Flash Actionscript 3. Large sections of the game's code have been translated into the new engine, but various parts are still missing.

The news of an engine change may sound dire or irritating, but I already delayed the engine switch (probably) far too long and only did so when the issue was forced upon me. The engine change has brought new possibilities in the technical sense and made the development far less troublesome. I changed to Unity with great hesitation and dread, but I've come to realize that I should have made the jump to Unity in V2, or even earlier.

As is tradition I've created a new super pack of all the stream art for your convenience.

Stream art super pack download

The end of 2020

Season's greetings

I can't stress enough how humbled I am with your patience with me.

I am still very much working on V3, and I can hopefully deliver it in the coming year. The extreme amount of time spent on V3 has happened because of a mess of trial and error gameplay coding I had been doing to improve the overall experience, combined with the usual problems with writing. Fortunately updates should come much quicker in the future, since I feel confident that I won't have to fiddle around with the guts of the code or the gameplay in a while. One messy writing thing I've been struggling with is deciding what characters to focus on. Juggling between creating new stuff and expanding existing characters is difficult, since basically all characters have their advocates that wish more content for them. Regardless, I will do my best to round off all the characters in a way that doesn't leave them dangling narratively. The stream theme experiment has yielded good results for the long term development of the game in the form of backgrounds, sprites and inspired writing that often takes place after the streams. The fruits of the streams will not be seen in V3, but they'll have an effect in all of the future updates. I've once again created a new super pack of all the stream art for your convenience. It's a poor replacement for V3, but I wish my commitment to the regular streams will uphold the trust necessary for such a long project.

Stream art super pack download

Irregular Blogposts

 

Art

Posting irregularities

This is more of a proof of life post, v3 is still being worked on, (also make Proventus a mod).

Biweekly update #7

 

Art

Giant human brute

Subni hustle

Subni gather

Subni smooth

Subni look space pony

Dev spotlight

Subtember

Subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni subni.

Still working on V3.

Biweekly update #6

 

Art

Double teamed at shore

Dev spotlight

Stream TU stuff

The idea of drawing TU backgrounds and sprites on my Picarto stream has been a big boon. I've collected the backgrounds and sprites that have been produced during the streams here. Note that this doesn't include concept art or other full color images created during the streams. All of these pictures and the missing ones are available in the stream picture dumps that are posted on my Twitter and Patreon.

Weird postcard

All of these sprites and backgrounds could be fully usable in the game with some detailing and finishing touches. The streams based on the locations in the game world have also created good palettes and concepts for different ideas to source from when working on those locations. These streams have been such a valuable thing for the development of the game and the world that they're probably here to stay.

Biweekly update #5

Art

Happy to see you

Dev spotlight

To anyone wondering why there was a long pause between the blog posts, I was just on a vacation. In hindsight it wasn't that smart not to notify about it on the blog as well, since my Patreon page and the blog probably have some differences in audiences. I'm back now, and I'll be doing the normal weekly and biweekly things as before. And yes, I am still working on V3.

Contributor help hardships

Some people may have noticed that I've recently had trouble responding, or just didn't respond to emails sent to me. It's actually caused by a rather unfortunate issue of time, energy and value.

When I started developing Teraurge, I naively thought that I could help other writers and vet their writing just by having them send me their stuff via email. This did happen for a short time, but it soon became evident that even a small number of writers is just too much work to handle for me, because of the uneven quality and amount of learning needed from the writers, and my lack of time to coach them properly.

I did persevere with a few writers in the beginning and tried to push the things they were writing to completion, but I either lost contact with them, or the writers became disillusioned/stressed/uninterested in the writing process and their writing projects never got finished. After several of these writers abandoned their efforts despite my help and critique, I became disillusioned with the process, as the opportunity value spent on helping writers became very, very slim. It seriously sapped my own enthusiasm about the idea.

For a long time I wasn't sure what went wrong, or what I was doing wrong. Eventually I did realize what the issue was, but I ignored it in hopes of making it work. But in the end it's simply a logistical issue of a single person trying to do too many things at the same time, and dividing their attention between many complex tasks. 

Anyone of you who did write and send emails to me and never heard back; I appreciate the interest and I wish I could have worked with everyone to put content into the game, but it just wasn't realistically possible. As it stands I cannot help contributors over email but I would still like to implement possible contributor content if it has already been finished and meets the guideline standards.