TL;DR: Can’t buy new agents, will assume I have them, new engine to be used but might go back to GM, sometime in 2019 the game will officially begin production.

The new year is almost upon us and I have many plans for that year, but the ones for MS Agent World, considering the recent events, have changed. I’m going to use this update to talk about the future of MS Agent World, the changes that have occurred from then to now, and what’s been going on in my life that may have affected the project.

First, I wish to talk about my real life. Right now I’m at a point where my money has run out due to having no hours in my job. No hours = no paycheck. All this should be rectified by January (hopefully) but this meant that I could not buy any more agents, what little there are left and according to my research the last few agents I need to buy will cost me quite a bit of money. I still intend to buy them but apparently I can’t do it all at once, at least not right now. So what I’m gonna do is this: I’m going to assume that they’re all approved and add them to my database. Before I even begin planning out the game, I have to confirm how many agents I have and I can’t do that unless I have found every single agent I could possibly find and since these agents need to be paid for I can’t finish the database until I checked them. That means I could not proceed with the game until I get those agents. Well from here on I’m just gonna assume that these agents are approved. With them out of the way, I can simply concentrate on the agents left (mainly ACF files lingering on the Archive) and have my database complete to finally start planning the actual game.

The next big difference is the engine I’m gonna use. Before my 100% departure, I was going to use Game Maker Studio 2. However, now that I’ve decided to join my old community this has changed to another engine, but that has come with it’s own problems. You see, this old engine is exactly that: old. The last update was like 5 years ago and this engine was created in the late 2000’s. Yeah, it’s quite old. Due to this project being nostalgic driven and the agents are as old as this engine, I figured it would fit but the problem with an old engine is that it’s not meant to be used with modern specs, or even modern monitors. But the biggest problem is that it has no online capabilities. You can technically make it go online with plugins, but so far no online ones that actually work exists. There is a new version on the works that should be a modern version but it’s taking forever for it to release (but then again, it is being worked on by… I dunno… 3 people). If the new modern version does not come out by spring 2019, then I’m going to go with it’s spiritual successor, RPGWizard. It looks like it’s being made in spirit from the old engine so perhaps this is the one to go, but I’m also worried about this. I downloaded it and it appears to be just like the old engine. Still, however, while the old engine is old, this new engine is young and thus I’m finding some things odd about it. Perhaps its just the demo game but yeah, there are some bugs. Oh gosh, I’m really tempted to go back to Game Maker but I have a strong desire to get this game done on a legacy engine. I’m going to go with RPGWizard and see how that works out but if I can’t even us that, then I may have no choice but to go back to GM.

So with all that said, what are the plans for 2019? Well, hopefully by then the database will be complete. When that is complete, I am going to plan out how the game is going to play, how the world is going to look like, where each agent is located, how is the battle system going to be, and anything else that needs to be planned. Planning will be mostly done in the beginning of 2019 but eventually I’m gonna actually do some coding. I can’t say when the actually development of the game will be but once I am ready, I will make an announcement for sure and updates of my progress will be made periodically, though where exactly is yet to be determined.

That’s all I got to say. 2019 is looking like the year MS Agent World will finally begin. Keep an eye on this Game Jolt page for more info.