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OCH - Future plans

While I'm mostly done with Orval Creep n' Hammer, there are a few things I wanted to do with it before entirely moving on to other things.  I've got a short list of things that need to be tweaked, but the big issues are technical in nature.

First, I'd like to change the way videos are played.  While the current system works, it's not ideal and given the quality of the videos, the file sizes are just too big.  For what it is, the game just weighs too much, you know?

Secondly, the Android port.  While I have technically ported an SDL2 project to Android, it was a bit of a process and the project itself was very, very small in scope.  It was basically just C++ with bits of the SDL2 "standard library".  This game, while not tremendously complex, is quite a bit larger in scope than that earlier "test project," so I'm not sure how all of this would play out in an attempt to port to Android.

So what are my options?

Option A is to simply do it.  Keep using the systems I'm using now and brute-force my way through it, step-by-painstaking-step.  This was the initial plan, but recent events have changed my thinking a bit.  Which leads us to...

Option B:  Port to Unity and use that for the heavy lifting.  I've been tinkering a bit with Unity3d and so far, I like what I'm seeing.  As long as you're not getting too creative with the game, it helps you crank out the simple stuff in pretty short order.  If it can do video playback (I assume it can), it seems like it would be quite well-suited for OCH, since this game is little more than a VN with a couple of other minor elements tossed in.  I'm imagining that it would solve my two biggest problems pretty handily, and as a bonus, it can export to other platforms that were (for all intents and purposes) unavailable to me previously, such as OSX, iOS, WebGL, etc..

I'm leaning strongly toward option B, so in a week or two I'll probably start porting the game.  I'll be working on something else simultaneously, though, so I wouldn't expect an amazingly fast turnaround.  If anyone reading this can give me a particularly compelling reason not to use Unity, feel free to speak up, but for now I think that's the way I'm going to go.

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