Took a long time to do it, but aside from polishing, the first public preview build of Immortal Sins Version D0.30 is now available. This update brings an overhauled engine, quality of life improvements and changes. In fact, once you start playing, you’ll see that the game is now named as Immortal Sins Second Edition. Yup, that big project I was talking about recently was remaking the game to a new engine. Let’s start with the small ones.
Part 1: Northbridge
Nothing much there. Mainly changes to support the new engine. But there are a few improvements. First of all, I’ve enabled .NET Framework’s multi-core Just-In-Time compiler, improving the startup times. I’ve also made some of the tasks faster on newer systems with multi-core processors. Not much but still helpful. Now, over to the meat of the update.
Part 2: The game
This is the part where most of the changes were done. As soon as you start playing you’ll notice the game starting in widescreen. This is mainly due to the game moving from RPG Maker VX Ace to MV. The new engine brings a lot of improvements from VX Ace. Aside from resolution, there are performance improvements (thanks to proper hardware acceleration support), Unicode support (no need for Compatibility Mode), real-time effects and a few graphical improvements. The maps received a few improvements thanks to layers used during mapping.
There is a major switch up in the gameplay. While most of the mechanics have been kept from the original, it got re-designed. The battle system is switched from Active Time Battle to Charge Turn Battle system. Drive Arts were slightly tweaked, having 300DP instead of 100DP. A new damage calculation algorithm was implemented, introduced Row Formation, added a quick way to switch between squad members and more quality of life improvements. Upgrading and learning new skills have been tweaked as well.
The rest of the changes are quality of life improvements. There are some quirks of the new engine though. Due to a new compression I’ve implemented, it will take some time to start the game up. Also, since MV is written to a different programming language (JavaScript, to be exact), the saves from the old version aren’t compatible. Northbridge settings will carry over, however.
There are some things that need to be ironed out before releasing the stable version. I’m releasing a pre-release build to get feedback for the new version. And it’s currently available on some mirrors (Gamejolt and itch.io). And Windows only for now. I am planning to release it on the rest of my mirrors and other OSes once the version is polished enough.
That is all for now. See you in the next post.