(Boy, this devlog will be a long one) Today, Myara 1: Hurricane of the Ancient One, was released into the world.

It’s a very important day to me because of what this project means to me. I’ve worked on this for the past year and Myara, in a whole, is something really important for me. It’s the second fictional universe I’ve created and one of my proudest creations.

This game has seen a lot during its development phase. I’ve been through really hard times IRL and continued working of it even with those heavy times. So I wish to thank everyone who supported me during the development of the game and still continue to do so afterward. Thank you to everyone who will play this game (and maybe find some bugs which I haven’t seen?) and maybe like the world like I do.

But I wish to remind everyone that this game was made by only one person, a lot of things can go wrong when working alone on something like that. My main goal was to create something I’d enjoy playing even after spending a whole year coding it, and today, I’ve met this goal. I hope you will enjoy playing it as much as I had fun while making it.

Now, I wish to share the journey of this game’s non-existent replay system: This started on the demo development. The game had a lot of problems with how the replay system worked for a simple reason: LuaSTG’s replay system can handle 8 inputs. My game has 10 different inputs, two of which are the spellcard choser. The way replays are programmed into luaSTG is simple: Every frame, the game translated which keys are pressed into numbers (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256 and 512, programmers knows what this means), and combined into a single number, for example, right and left : (fake values) 2 and 4, so 6. This number (6) is then turned into a single byte and then wrote in the replay file. So, the numbers from 1 to 128 seen earlier are contained into a single byte, BUT 256 and 512 exceed the single byte, these are the two inputs I’ve added, so I needed to write into two bytes. So I did try for 5 months, nothing I did worked, so I kinda gave up. That’s only one week ago when I was finishing the game that I figured I’d give a last try, and I then tried to turn those values into ints instead of bytes, and THIS worked. But problem: The file was now twice as big, 4Ko before this change for 6 stages, now it was like 8Ko, so it caused problems I don’t have the time to explain here that forced me to give up entirely and just remove replays from the game. So yeah, there might be replays at one point in a future update, but not for the moment.

Now, in the last devlog I already told what I planned to do for Myara 2 and when I’ll start working on it, and since then, nothing changed on what I planned. I might even publish it on steam when it will be done, but 100€…hurts a little bit for my skinny wallet.

At the moment I’m writing this, it’s yesterday, November 22. I’m very stressed for the game’s release, I know I playtested a lot and did everything I could to avoid bugs or something that could break the game. I think I did great at avoiding those, but even so, I can’t help but feel very stressed that I might have skipped or forgot something important. I hope the game’s release will go smoothly, I’ll eat burger king tomorrow to celebrate the release and I’ll release the game after I finished eating. I’ll then block the entire afternoon and evening to fix bugs I could have missed the faster I can. I don’t know how many downloads I’ll have and even if this game will be successful, I don’t know if I’ll get any donations (don’t feel forced to, you’re not), but I hope I will have at least one person playing this, at the moment, for the entire year I’ve had 27 downloads, 18 or them on the day of the demo release. I don’t know how much I’ll get for tomorrow, but I have hope! :D

I don’t know how to really advertise this game, I have my two twitter accounts, the one of the team and my personal one, I have this itch page and discord (BHE and other servers), so huh…Idk what to really expect, I’ll see tomorrow I guess. I’ll make a devlog like a week after to summarize everything that happened since the game’s release.

Well, this game’s development has been a long and stressful ride, big things happened in my personal life and really funny things happened during development (like the bug where Miko could skip entire bosses if her shield’s hitbox touched the boss’ hitbox, or the one where the one where Hanase was just Reimu’s sprit for some reasons). But I had fun while making this game and playing it after playtesting it for the last time, and in the end, it’s all that really matters: having fun. It doesn’t really matter if the game is buggy, I can fix it. No, for me, the journey is more important than what I’ve managed to acheive. I’ve been really lazy for one or two months, not doing anything on the game, but when I started to have ideas for spells cards, I got back into it and finished the entire extra stage in a single week. So yeah, I’m happy I managed to release it and finishing it, but I would have been happy even if the game got cancelled because at least I have a working demo.

So, again, I hope you’ll have fun playing it, please don’t mind minor bugs if you find any, sorry for missing replays (I just couldn’t do them) and, I guess see you tomorrow (for me today) for the game’s release and a lot later for Myara 2!