Dawnshadow Tutorial Update: on an update to Dawnshadow to smooth the early game experience for new players.

Dawnshadow Release Reflections: Looking back and looking ahead for Serinor.

I think it comes down to what are the most irritating things to have to work around. Because anything I wanted to do, I could. It's just ugly sometimes.

I think the biggest one for me would be having access to real floats. I ran into integer rollover issues trying to get good precision in Dawnshadow's damage calculation and had to break it up. And regeneration effects regenerate health unevenly. Again, I could have designed it better (and may yet) but it was one of the more aggravating bits to get working properly with only ints.

Member functions or the ability to pass structs as arguments would have been occasionally useful, but they're not critical since everything is public. I made good use of two of the more recent additions to vc, specifically dicts and varargs. Those were very useful.

And make sure to warn people if order of operations ever gets fixed. I know that I coded some things with the assumption Verge would read it left to right.

Dawnshadow is all vc. I've been coding in one version of vc or another for 20 years now, so it's almost second nature. I remember looking at lua when it was first incorporated into Verge. Then I looked at the existing vc codebase of all of my projects at the time and put it back down.

I picked Verge for a development tool because I knew I could start building immediately without having to learn a new system. One completed project later, I remain comfortable with that decision. Getting something built, finished, and (self-)published is huge, and I don't know if it would have happened if I'd had to teach myself an entirely new language, IDE, or both.

I've been a lot of things over the years. Funny what a recession can do at the start of your career. At present, I'm the corporate training manager for a logistics company. Which is nice, since it's a job that pays a professional wage and still ends at the end of the day so I can do other things. Like make games, or act in community theater.

I'm also a husband and father of a four-year-old (who I swear hasn't stopped running in this airport play area for the hour I've been sitting here.) Both are very supportive of my creative endeavors. My daughter likes to draw or color at her desk while I'm "building" at my computer. My wife mostly tells me it'd be easier just to write a book, but is thrilled I'm finally publishing something after seeing all the projects I never finished.

Thanks everybody! It's good to hear from so many familiar names. Because honestly, even I'm surprised a new Verge game is coming out. But I've always wanted to make a game, and after all these years, Verge was the system I knew well enough to make that happen.

Serinor has changed a lot over the years. Dawnshadow happens in the same world, but it has a much narrower scope than its predecessor. Which I'd like to go back to someday. But this one had to be something I could do on my own.

I'd be happy to share the changes I made to the engine! I'm not sure how to make that happen, necessarily. And I don't know that the way I did it is the best way to do it. (I'm a writer, not a programmer. ) Dawnshadow essentially has two binaries: a Steam one and a DRM-free one. But it works!

Realistically, Verge needs some updates before I'd use it again for a major project. Which makes me sad. I love Verge, and I don't want to learn a new system. Verge is very good at what it was built to do, but 10-15 years later, licensing and expectations have changed. If it had a free sound engine and I could publish to platforms other than PC, it might be different.

I'm mostly rambling now, but I'm stuck in the airport, and my flight is delayed three hours.

Edit:
And apparently that's the publish button on mobile! Who knew? Anyway, Dawnshadow goes live two weeks from today. Make sure to grab a copy! (I will never like marketing.)

After 20 years using Verge, I've finally finished something! Epic of Serinor: Dawnshadow uses a very slightly modified version of the Verge 3.2 engine and will be available on Steam and itch.io on December 21.

Dawnshadow is a modern RPG styled after the great 8-bit classics of old. It is the result of an individual quest to play an old-school RPG without having to play an actual old-school RPG and presents an original story and world in a classic style inspired by modern MMO and mobile gaming.

You can find more information and store links for Dawnshadow at my devlog, and/or you can follow it on Facebook.

I'm super excited. And almost too nervous to think straight. Hope to see you all on the solstice.