(devlog) What the Heck's Up?

Heyo, it's been a hot minute.

Sorry for the radio silence; its been a doozy of a year. There's been a lot of instability, a lot of ups and downs, and a ton of just sheer laziness. In truth, I just haven't had the drive to continue working on my games, or anything really. And that sucks.

Truthfully, I'm still not ready to lock myself back into the development closet, but that won't be the case for much longer. I'm pulling myself out of this funk I've been in, and with a new outlook on what I want to do. ...Which is to start over.

The plan right now is to recreate Atlas from scratch. I'll still be using Twine; the ability to write passages normally and create widgets with ease is invaluable to me. But I'll be focusing on making the game as modular as possible. Injecting or removing content will be much, much easier. Plus if I need to temporarily disable something to work on it, I can and it won't break the game (hopefully). There won't be a map system this time around (at least, not like the current one). I'm thinking of something a bit less button-y, something more like KotOR or New Vegas with actual lines to choose from. There'll still be scenic images, but I'll probably use them like a banner so there's less "clutter" on screen. I'll be focusing on making it mobile-compatible too (at least for Android, not sure how to build for iOS since they don't allow third party apps natively).

All in all, I want you to be able to play the game any way you like, anywhere you like. And I'd like to make it so that you can add content If you want and not have it break with future updates (again, hopefully). It's going to be a while for me to have something to show for it, so no date estimates yet. But this is what is next for Atlas...eventually.

As a reminder, the best place to check for updates is twitter at @AutusDevNSFW.