I've already posted this news on Patreon, but I figure I ought to keep the Itch.IO followers updated too.

I want to announce that Foxblade is moving away from RPG Maker. It's been enormously useful to help me get this demo out to players and gather valuable feedback, but it's become far too limiting for what I want to accomplish with Foxblade and so it's time to move on.

Instead, I am porting Foxblade to my own in-house C++ engine. There's a lot of reasons for this, and a big one is that there's going to be a whole pile of visual improvements coming to the new version that I'm really excited about!

Something I identified in the SAGE demo was that people who did play the game really seemed to enjoy it, but the game struggles to get much attention in the first place. I think the culprit is that the game's presentation is lacking - the art itself is pretty, the sound and music received praise, and the combat is fun, but the game still doesn't look terribly exciting from a glance.

This big rewrite is going to be focusing on a few things to address that. A big one is that the game was always heavily inspired by early PS1 and Saturn RPGs, and I think there's a lot more I could do to pay homage to these inspirations as far as visuals are concerned. Thus, this rewrite is going to feature full 3D environments, albeit with the same 2D characters - think games like Grandia or Breath of Fire 3. I also want to focus on having much more "dynamic looking" battles - more dynamic camera movement, characters moving around, more animations for enemies, etc.

I think overall these changes are going to result in a much more visually striking and unique look. Additionally, there's some other side benefits to moving to my own engine: smaller game download size (no need to pull in the massive Chromium runtime anymore) , more efficient runtime (so the game should have a much better time running on low-end computers and devices), and it will be much easier to port to certain targets such as the Switch as well (which is something I'd like to look into in the future)!

Anyway, that's all I've got for now. The rewrite is going to take a bit, but I'm looking forwards to being able to share builds as soon as I can (reminder that you'll be able to get those builds early if you're subscribed to my Patreon)!