Important Announcement For Chivalrous Games

Hey, important announcement.

I'd like to preface this statement with a heartfelt thanks for all the support and kind words we've had over the years.  Development hasn't moved at much more than a moderate pace (who am I kidding?) but all of you have stuck with us regardless.  There's a huge amount of support and camaraderie with the Towergirls community in general, who continue to produce great content, which will always be one of the greatest parts of it.  You are all awesome people.

Programmer Complaining

There's been a number of features that we'd always wanted to implement in Towergirls (such as a real-time siege battle system similar to a dumbed-down, simpler Total War), and similar, that were unfeasible to do in Game Maker Studio.  GMS in general has been a pretty massive pain in the ass.  As the game has grown more complex, and had more and more intermingled systems, the shortcomings of the software have become more and more apparent.  Crash logs typically report zero useful information to be given to me, one cannot use doubles/floats/ints as appropriate, UI cannot be developed in real time, and the game handles code differently when test-ran compared to a compiled executable.  Code blocks have to be assigned to objects through a drag-and-drop interface.  Those useless crash logs and UI are the two main things, naturally.  If UI has to be adjusted I've taken to starting a separate code project to develop it there- since I have to make an adjustment, recompile the entire texture page (a process that takes like 30-40 seconds in the actual game project), make adjustments to the UI elements or code, and repeat ad infinitum.  Eventually this hypothetical UI would be deemed good enough to move over to the main project, wherein it would have to be copied over, integrated, and debugged.  As you can imagine, I've gotten really tired of this.  Much of this could have been avoided by using perfect code practices towards the start of development, but as with my last project, hindsight is 20/20 and I've only continued to become more finessful and regretful with old code.

End Complaining

With all of this in mind, and the current state of the Patreon (we've been stuck at like $800 since forever), we've been forced to reassess where we're at and come to a big decision.  With all of those aforementioned reasons in mind, current size of the team, and our rate of progress, I had no real choice.  It's with a heavy heart that I'm announcing that the team

is porting the game over to Unity.

Ahahahahaha.

Or, more accurately, I am porting the game over to Unity.

Unity has its own fair share of oddities, but as a whole is a much more powerful game-making suite than GMS will ever be.  It's astronomically easier to debug-while developing, UI can be adjusted and developed in real time, and I get to work half in C#  and half in the Unity engine, which is stricter and runs more efficiently in general.  Not only will this make coding the game much more easy-going, but it opens the door for some of the systems we've thought up in the past.  Here's a brief, very WIP teaser of a probable new siege-battle system.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ptveoKHvw5Khalr9k2k_Oc9zY54RHS41

Porting a project of this size and age is a serious undertaking, but I'm confident in my ability to see it through.  I'm experienced enough with Unity by now that any and all of the systems in Game Maker should be easily reproducible, more efficiently and bug-free, and new ones made possible besides.  I don't have an exact answer on how long this will take, but something in the ballpark of 6-10 weeks is a pretty conservative estimate.  While the game is being ported over the artists and writers will continue to work on new content, so there won't be a halt in developing those parts of the game.  With that said, I realize some will be disappointed that the game will be in a sort of effective hiatus while the port is being done, which is fair.  If you'd prefer to stop supporting us during this time period that is totally understandable.  Part of my making this announcement, in addition to letting all of you know that we've made this choice, is having y'all hold me accountable to see this through.  I've said before, several times, that the only way I stop working on Towergirls is if we violate our contract/lose rights to Towergirls (something I doubt will occur in the near future), or if I were to be ran over by a bus/struck by lightning/mugged in an ally by Hetros for making a move on Goblin Princess/other act of God/legal ninjas.  Progress will continue, we just have to move on from Game Maker first.

While the porting over is occurring I’m going to be taking screenshots periodically and making an attempt to let people know what I’m working on.  I might stream some, too, though coding has always felt a little too dry to be entertaining.  Let me know if that’s something you’d like to see in the comments.

More status updates soon.  Thanks again for sticking with us this long.

-Duke