Announcement on Strive and next project(s).

It's been over 2 years since I've started the game. This is probably came bit too late, but it's about a time to move on. In this post I'm gonna to go over the process, and many reasons we have to adopt a new ways.

Why I'm slowing down on Strive

There's 3 core issues which make me very troubled when focusing on new content, and I'm gonna go through it to make myself clearly understood and show that I acknowledge my own mistakes.

1. Base code. As some of you might remember me not having any coding skills when I started to work on strive. Despite that I managed to assemble a fairly working game. However, at this point I know more and many parts just too ugly and heavy to work with. I obviously could rework and refactor all of it, given enough time, and I probably would, if not for other two things, which make me think its just not worth it.

2. Old art. Some probably have noticed, that our old artist has left the project a few months ago. Thankfully, by that time most of stuff I wanted done, has been done, so occassional art shift is not too glaring. However, it makes quite difficult to introduce new content while trying to keep with the original art style. Obviously, I have no will to redo everything at this point. It also is partly my fault for not having a clear picture on how much content of what type must be done before adding more, and instead of saying, having "original game + dlcs", our model was mostly "Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Sidechapters, etc". This kind of planning, even though works on some level (you can account for your previous errors), is mostly not worth it when you try to make a solid product. 

3. Original writing. As some of you might remember, Strive was originally purely text based, and only got actual illustrations after a year or so. This was very convenient at a time, since you can do a lot with text without relying on good art, but when art becomes available, text gets less important. So here's the conflict: since game started as text based, it requires a great deal of writing. Even with the introduction of art to it, we can't just change writing style to something more similar to visual novel, because it would conflict with all the previous work. Another problem with walls of text + terrible code design is that it's really hard to implement more flexible text, both because you need lots of variations (which becomes apparent when you consider how starting slave quest has about 12 different scenes) and because the code base is also not very suitable for it. Since you need tons of text, it often gets hard to fit many features I actually would want to try, such as, different NPC reaction based on your sex, race, combat group, more dialogue choices with unpredictable outcomes, and so on. To put it simply, I would prefer to move on visual novel narration style (sentence per screen basis), but its not possible for strive.

These are main reasons why Strive is gonna be of lower priority on my list of things from this point. 

New projects

So, basically, at this moment I'm starting a new project. With all experience I've acquired, it promises to not take terribly long until first versions will get to playable state. It's not going to be a lot like Strive, as I want to try something less ambitious first. However, there's one thing you might have noticed, which transitions into this new project: a more universal and flexible code. The mod system is in a nutshell can be fit into almost any project, as some other latest code implementations. The new project is going to contain many framework parts which can be used in other places and will considerably improve average user's experience, including multilanguage support, new gui approach, laid out planning and more. 

The next project will be slightly lighter in tone, far less loaded with all sorts of tiny features and more gameplay/combat oriented. It still is going to be fantasy-themed, but won't be related to Strive. There's been some work already done with it (documents and parts of engine), but once we get to the good parts, we will make sure to provide more information on it. 

The secondary project I have my plans on, is a continuation of Strive. To put it simply, I would want to make an origial Strive into a more accessible, better and richer version with better interface and gameplay. However, because of the reasons I named at the start of this post, this is not quite possible. The former project will provide more basis for Strive2 to work on. 

As for the Strive, new update will come out in next few days bringing constants menu back in form of in-built mod. 

As usual, Thank You for your attention and let me know what you think!