Definitely Not April Fools

Hey everyone! Happy end-of-March thing. I dunno, I can't think of a particular event for this one, but it is the traditional "Oh hey I should probably make an update at some point this month, whoops"

As I may have mentioned before, my previous day-job contract wrapped up about a week ago, and I've been using that time to get back into the swing of things working on Channeling. I've included a screenshot here of an early pass of the 'welcome' cutscene to the next town in our adventure. Earlier in the month I also made an attempt at an Android build of the game, which has a link available on the Discord server if you want to give it a try! (I'm still not 100% confident in its quality, but I'm hopeful it worked?... >_> )

I should also mention that thanks to some input and a lot of thinking, I'm planning on having the next release be the final release included in 'Chapter 1' of the game. That is to say, I'm currently planning to have 'Chapter 2' (and future chapters) be a whole separate project. There's a couple of reasons behind this: firstly, as I'm sure many of you have experienced: transferring saves in RPGMaker is a huge pain. It's not 'end-of-the-world' bad, but it's awkward enough that I hate doing it myself, so I know you folks probably hate it too. So the longer the game goes on, the more difficult it will be to test small sections and let people play the story and provide feedback. So that's the motivation there.

Secondly, this actually affords an interesting opportunity to try out different programs for future chapters. I'm still going to be telling the same story, but I've been feeling the limitations of what I can easily do with RPGMaker, so I might take a stab at moving over to something like Ren'py, and they've also announced a new version of RPGMaker that's built on Unity instead of Javascript (and I've made games in Unity before), so that might happen later this year as well.

But the TL:DR; is this: the story will continue! I want to keep this adventure going and continue to explore this world and these characters (I have some stuff planned for Chapter 2 that I think is going to be really good), and if it means more people have an easier time trying things out, then all the better.

So thank you all, as always, for your patience and support. The winter was a rough time for me, and it means a lot to know that there are folks out there who are interested in what I'm working on.

Until next time, take care of yourselves, and be kind to one another. <3
-T