Happy Easter to one and all!!

Magnificent holiday, ain’t it? Just another one of those days where you get those sugar highs every now and again if you’re not careful! Honestly, I didn’t expect to make a major post this week because progress was rather slow, but then stuff happened that eventually led me to making a major decision for OviVixen as a whole!

Leaving Clickteam and Heading to Godot!

Some of you programmers are already thinking: fucker, why didn’t you do this sooner!? Lemme explain.

Since the late 2000s, I always wanted to buy Multimedia Fusion 2 for game development. A YouTuber claimed it was a better program than Game Maker at the time while playing a Halloween-inspired Mario Fangame. Eventually, I got the Developer version of the program and that costed me a pretty penny: so basically, I was trying to hold on to a major investment for the longest time.

I have to be honest here, Clickteam may still have my most favorite U.I in programming despite the move. It’s linear programming, but a lot of events or conditions can simply be “drag n’ drop”. Even writing code from scratch, you’ll do much less typing in Clickteam than any other program because conditions and events can be duplicated and modified with just a few clicks. It’s gonna be tough learning how Godot works, but there are plenty of reasons why I have to make such a move now.

How it started…

About more than a week ago, I was getting rather addicted to playing mobile-friendly itch.io games. The first one I played was so incredibly basic, it inspired me to make a “super quick” browser game just in time for Easter! The game wasn’t supposed to be much anyway: it was a planned to be a simple click simulation game with only one scene. So I got started with the most simple prototype on Clickteam… It wasn’t actually simple…

Clickteam Fusion, despite having my most favorite U.I, is probably the most RIGID programming engine ever! So much so, something as basic as skewing a shape requires a third party extension and a shader for it to work. How do you use them? Beats the hell outta me! It’s actually pretty tough finding proper Clickteam tutorials these days unless it’s tied to replicating popular indie games. Not only that, even if you know how to use the extensions or shaders, it’s not a guarantee that it will properly transfer over to platforms other than Windows.

So I was stuck: I have to move to another programming engine just to make this one dumb click browser game for Easter! Unity? Eat a dick! Game Maker? Requires Internet to activate every two weeks EVEN FOR THE FREE VERSION! Pygame? Even the set up gave me a headache. Scratch? …Yeah, okay. Godot…?

Godot!

All it took was one YouTube tutorial… ONE YOUTUBE TUTORIAL, to make a game that was much more functional than OviVixen Arcade!! Wasn’t even a click-based game, it was just a generic platformer using a premade library. I learned more about programming from just those few hours messing with Godot than what Clickteam could ever teach me! The layout is a bit odd: everything is called nodes as well as the game scenes and even operational commands like layering. However, unlike Clickteam, Godot is built around other platforms: I can transfer games to HTML without much issue! In fact, Godot as a whole is a fantastic entry point to game programming in general: having an asset folder with independent files including individual scripts that can be moved and duplicated away from the program itself. Sure, you have to type things manually. I even got a crash because I used a colon rather than a semicolon; nevertheless, it was still much less busywork and even bloat than my attempts with Clickteam! With this, I can actually learn C, C++, Python, and even Assembly if I’m bold enough! I can see so much potential from using only Godot… and that’s where we are now.

Moving OviVixen to Godot

After daring to look what’s behind me like in the Allegory of the Cave, I scrapped that click game and decided to bring OviVixen as a whole to Godot! The whole thing! I even fused a multitude of side projects into one straight forward plan.

First thing’s first: Rebuild OviVixen Arcade from the ground up before August!

I guarantee this version is gonna take up far less space, and will be much smoother than its Clickteam counterpart. So much so, I’m confident this will run swimmingly on browser AND be mobile-friendly as well! The Newgrounds version is gonna be cleaned up and be reposted as a fresh title, and it will even be run on Itch.io’s browser system as well. This will ultimately replace the .exe “OviVixen Emulator” currently housed here until a more proper Hub System is built down the line.

As for OviVixen Master, it’s going to be built immediately after Arcade and the planned second game in the series. However, unlike Arcade, the full version of Master will not be released as a standalone product.

OviVixen Emulator’s New System

To those of you who have actually downloaded OviVixen (18+), you’ve noticed that it doesn’t actually start in Arcade: instead, it starts in a hub where multiple games are meant to be housed with the only one currently being Arcade. This revamp is going to start similarly; however, four of the six games are going to be included AT LAUNCH rather than just the one. Not only that, there’s going to be two versions for this revamped bundle:

The Free Version: all six main games are going to be included, but nothing extra beyond that.

The Paid “Rika” Version: all six main games are included; however, they all play a major role in “The Hub” that’s a game of its very own and a rather expansive one at that! What the hub game will really be is a secret, but there are hints of it in my Newgrounds portfolio.

Further Plans

I’m still not done with everything I’m planning to do for OviVixen, but I’m gonna keep what it really is a surprise. As for my dying tablet, because I’m basically rebuilding only OviVixen Arcade’s programming and no need to revamp any of the graphics, I’m going to use my gaming laptop to make most of Arcade’s revamp. Not my favorite thing to use for game development but it’s better than nothing!

Now I’m starting to get REAL winded writing this, so I’ll close this off for now! I hope all of you had a fantastic Good Friday, and again, a Happy Easter to you all!