Hey, everybody. Here's that transparency devlog I promised... how long ago?

To be honest... I just didn't really have anything to say for the longest time. Things weren't exactly changing. I wasn't making much progress, either. Every time I tried to work on the game, I'd run into some kind of issue along the way. And then, yeah, while I promised monthly transparency updates, I couldn't really fulfill that promise. Mainly since, well, there wasn't anything that happened other than "my mental state got slightly better/worse" and, with all due respect, I think that's what therapy is for, not GameJolt.

Anyway... Let's change the devlog tpromise to, uh, something along the lines of "monthly transparency devlogs but only if anything of note actually happened", aight? I think that sounds fair.

In other news, the year's almost over and GameMaker Server isn't exactly gonna be around for a whole lot longer to my knowledge, so... now what? Well, I have good news for most of you. A public BETA version of the unfinished update will probably be releasing within the next week or so. It's not finished, nor is it the most polished thing ever, but I want you guys to at least be able to enjoy what's there while it's there.

So, what about the project from here on out in general? Well, this is where things get a little bit more interesting. To be honest, there are a lot of problems with MTO at the moment. GameMaker Studio 1.4 is janky abandonware that's an absolute pain to actually work with, MTO uses an edited version of Downfable with a bunch of spaghetti code from someone who had no idea what he was doing back in 2017-2018, the game has a ton of unfinished and scrapped content, uses a lot of placeholder assets, moderating the game is a pain and the server that has its own dedicated extension is going to be shutting down. I think you might see why it's a little difficult for me to actually work on this project lately.

So, is that it? Am I just dropping the project with little to no fanfare? Not at all, actually. It's simply taking on a new vision.

To cut a long story short, I'm starting over. No Downfable or other premade engines this time, I'm starting from square one. This time the Multiplayer portion is going to be the side mode it was always supposed to be and it's not going to be relying on any one particular server. I'm currently considering just going with a basic peer2peer system, not unlike games like Minecraft, but a few friends of mine have also been recommending their own alternatives.

Progress on the new game is going pretty well, actually. Maybe I'll start posting some devlogs on that soon, maybe not, we'll see.

Possibly a bit anticlimatic, but yeah. I feel like, overall, the change in direction is probably for the better and, hey, maybe I'll drop a few small DEMO projects here and there to showcase progress.

tl;dr: Public BETA release this/next week, game is being remade