Between every major milestone in development, there are always a dozen smaller things that need to be changed, updated, or added. This weekend that's exactly where VNgen finds itself—at the threshold of great change, but in the meantime working through a handful of smaller matters. And yes, I do mean a handful this time, as opposed to the singular focus of the past couple updates. There's definitely reason to be excited, both for what has transpired in the past two weeks, and what's coming next. Because what's coming next is big news for everyone who's been eagerly anticipating VNgen's release. But I'm getting ahead of myself. First, the basics: (Not) Sweating the small stuff As I've said before, VNgen is not only a premium visual novel engine, but also a pretty powerful sequenced animation system in its own right. As I've considered this use-case in testing, it came to mind that there might be some sequences that developers want players to treat ...

It's that time again: another two weeks have passed and April is now behind us, placing VNgen firmly in its sixth month of active development. It's come a long ways in that period of time, and from now on it's only a matter of putting on the finishing touches before VNgen is ready for market. However, finishing touches though they may be, they're also rather large ones. This is where the rubber meets the road—where VNgen transitions from being a prototype to an actual development tool. Silence is (not so) Golden As previously mentioned, the big focus for these past two weeks was getting audio implemented. Now, VNgen being based in GameMaker Studio, there are already plenty of audio functions​ to work with, but integrating them into VNgen's event/action system proved to be a bigger undertaking than expected. Certain built-in functions like volume transitions are mostly useless when they don't respect engine pauses or offer any way of direct access to their unde...