Hey all, Bauske here.
I'm posting this to give an update on Micro Stream RPG's current state. While it's not the good news I'd love to be giving right now, I want to be up front and honest about what's going on.
First, the good news: The third dungeon, which I've called The Jagged Vale, is basically done, and I've been starting work on the dungeon after that. Before I launched Micro Stream RPG, I had intended for the third dungeon to be a swamp area, and was already in the process of creating stage graphics and enemies for it. Due to progression ideas though, I felt like the swamp would work better as dungeon four, and started working on another area for dungeon three. Now that dungeon three is almost done, dungeon four should go much faster as I already have about half the assets ready to go. It's mostly just programming special situations and enemy stats from that point.
My goal for the next update is to have both dungeon three and four done to give you guys a bit more content to sink your teeth into. And then after that, I'm hoping to get the companion app launched too. That'll give you more customization options and control over your character and game progression.
Next, the not-so-good news: Progress has been slower than I would have liked. Much slower. There's a couple reasons for this. The main one is that I've been struggling with a couple major bugs in Micro Stream RPG. If you've read past news updates or the community posts here on Steam, you probably know some of what I'm been talking about. The three major issues right now in the game are:
Micro Stream RPG randomly crashing
Micro Stream RPG randomly disconnecting from chat and not receiving commands
Micro Stream RPG executing shortcut commands when the window is not in focus
I'll admit I'm a bit of a perfectionist at times, and these issues are pretty serious to me and I want them addressed. The problem has been that I can't seem to find solutions for them. I've been asking the Clickteam developers for assistance, I've been sharing test builds with people to get input on changes, and wracking my brain on solutions without much progress. It's made working on the game frustrating to say the least because whenever I want to work on new content, I'm reminded these bugs are present and I continue to try and fix them.
Now for the bad/maybe good? news: As it turns out, my copy of Clickteam Fusion, the program I created Micro Stream RPG in, was corrupt. I've had it installed on my computer ever since the most recent rebuild, which was a couple years ago, so I suppose it's not surprising, but I've never had Clickteam Fusion itself become corrupt. I didn't even think to consider this as a possible cause for the issues I've been having. But after experiencing some other weird, unexplained issues in both Micro Stream RPG development and other game development, I decided to completely uninstall and reinstall the program. My suspicions were correct, and it seems like the corruption and issues have been resolved... at least in the other games I was working on.
Here's the current bad news: The Micro Stream RPG files seem to be corrupt. What I mean by this is that I can open the files, edit and update them, but I cannot run them. The game simply does not execute. Nothing happens. And I'm not sure why. I suspect that the corruption in Clickteam Fusion affected the Micro Stream RPG core files a long while back (coincidentally, right around the time I launched on Steam), and none of my backup files up to that point will actually run in the fresh install of Clickteam Fusion.
What this means is I will have to completely rebuild Micro Stream RPG in a new project file in the hopes that the game will function again. No, this doesn't mean completely recoding the game. I just have to copy and paste all the coding, assets, and objects from the current files into a new project file and test to make sure it all is working. It's time consuming and tedious, but better than starting from scratch. I've done this before with a past project, so I'm fairly confident this will work, and my hope is that doing so will hopefully resolve the three big issues I mentioned above. I'm not 100% confident it will, but I'm hopeful.
So that's the skinny on the current situation. My apologies for the long post, but I wanted to explain what's been going on. It's been a frustrating past few weeks/months trying to fix these issues, all to culminate in a program corruption situation I wasn't expecting. I need to do the rebuild to continue work on Micro Stream RPG, BUT I'm hopeful that doing so will fix some of these other issues I've been struggling with. I'm trying to stay positive about all this haha.
If you read this far, thanks for sticking with me. For the TL;DR - Micro Stream RPG has had a few issues lately that I believe were caused by my copy of Clickteam Fusion going corrupt, and now I need to rebuild the game in a new project in order to continue development. It's not hard, just time consuming, but I'm hoping it'll fix the issues going forward.
Thank you again for your patience, and I'll update you all again once I get the rebuild done.
~Bauske