Welcome To Arkavite

Welcome to Arkavite. Home to Project Arkavite, and other things. I’ll be using this site for devlogs as well a place to host cyoa projects. Potentially some other stuff too. We’ll see how things go.

Introduction

This is just a test to see if posts are working as intended, so for this first post, why don’t we just go over what’s coming next in Project Harahel. My main priority right now is optimization and integration of some special features and mechanics, as well as much need UI improvements and settings. The core optimizations have been shown to be very promising. From RAM usage in the space of 1.2 GB, we’re now all the way down to 100-200 MB. Way more sane. Load times are also faster, and things run smoother.

To integrate these fixes a lot of the backend code had to be stripped out. This week I’ll be working to refactor that code and get things back to where they were before. (That will be v0.6.6)

UI & Other Things

After that’s all done, next on the table is settings, menuing, and those “special features”. What are these mysterious “special features” you ask? It’s a surprise so you’ll have to wait and see. Settings, will be things like “disable auto select gains” or let you mess with how the UI looks and functions. Build output settings are also in the table. There are some features some find annoying but others like, so it makes sense to have more customization in the experience, and wrapping all that up into neatly sorted menus is also necessary for a cleaner user experience. UI/UX hell awaits us all.

After that’s done, I’ll also be adding on a few more items and doing a big balance pass, which will conclude the 0.6 releases. At which point builds in Harahel will be stable for the foreseeable future.

I may also do a non-interactive release and host that on the site, but I don’t know yet. That’s all going to depend on those “special features” as they are non-interactive and provide some extra content. As a big priority of mine is ensuring there are no blockades to playability, it could be worth doing as an experiment, but an automated solution is necessary.

Next On The Agenda

So, after Harahel, what comes next? Project Harahel – Aria Academy! I’m more than halfway through the writing side of things, but there’s still a lot to write, and everything will need to be transferred into the interactive app. I’m considering adding a way to preview it early as it’s being developed in the app.

Aside from that, there’s some other important work to get done, and that is, Project Arkavite. The vidya Harahel is largely based on. I’ll make a more in-depth post on this in future but the long and short of it is that I need to develop a dialogue editor. A big part of the game is the aspect of “Choose Your Own Adventure”. Branching story, scenes and narrative. It’s been quite tedious up until this point to plan out dialogue for something such as this, and then rewriting it into a format which the game can understand and use.

I envision a interactive system which will allow me to create dialogue boxes with potential dialogue choices, and wire them together with nodes. Something elegant and simple that’s easy to understand and change. Working on the Harahel interactive has let me learn a bit more about UI systems, and I have and old dialogue editor I’ve made before. With these powers combined I’ll make a clean system which will help me long into the future.

Conclusion

So, this concludes the first post. Did you like it? This was just a test anyway. Don’t think about it too much!

Please keep in mind this site is still undergoing changes, so expect some oddities and hickups over the coming weeks. I will continue to work hard, and see you in the next world.