If there's something that I personally like the least, it's writing a story, especially for this project.

There were several reasons why Chessmaster's Challenge was conceived, and one of those was the fact that I was at the dead-end and didn't know where the game's storyline should go. Besides, I considered the battle system as its main point anyway, so the story delivered was... well, it was there.

That's why, this year, I'm about to get off of that hurdle and try my best to actually writing a story. I know my own capability on writing a story or two, but I'll do my best nonetheless.

The story will involve around the Empty Tome--yes, THAT book--but it comes in a different approach. The concept behind it is because of how the project itself started: numerous characters, relics, and bits of lore scattered around bundled in one single stuff. The "different approach" here is more on how it's being retold, however.

From the previous devlog, you can see the future design of the game. Instead of being a linear game focused on a single character, now it will be more like sporadic scenes put in some sort of a "story web" which you can check whenever you want. This way, the already sporadic scenes can be chained into a storyline that (perhaps) comprehensible with little to almost no contexts.



This style of scenes will rely heavily on the bust module I've made last year. At first, it feels kinda clunky, considering how limited the picture commands as well as how varied effects it can use. The number of lines shown in the dialogue box also limits the amount of "lore dump" I can put there, which is a good thing, I'd say; it keeps the information delivered concise and on point.

This approach is more or less inspired by visual novels and some mobile games I've played some years ago. My memory may be fuzzy most of the time, but I think I nailed it so far.

On top of that, I've checked the language support of this game. It's been there since v1.3,  but it was so limiting to the point I had to remake it sometime in v1.7 era for a better future-proof method of multilanguage access. On the game's side, it's barely noticeable, but on the development side, it makes all things narrative can be easily read.
Also, recently I found out the module was broken to the point most non-Latin texts were unreadable at best. With a little fix, it now can show some foreign letters like shown below. Guess it'll be much easier to provide raw texts to translators, that is if there's any...



Maybe that's now for this month's devlog. The contents are, well, due to the number of characters present in the game, it'll take a while to complete the whole thing. Although, I've planned to release a test build for people on the discord server to play and mess around with.
If you're interested in the development of this project, feel free to join our discord server. We're still growing at the moment, but occasionally there's something about the project's development popping out, so it won't be quite... barren.

Cheers!