Ascension (MV) Alpha 5.0 [Chaos]

And, after a two year intermission, we pick up right where we left off - almost to the day* (how weird is that?), with the very next update I would have published, featuring the completed level that I was working on (Chaos - The Yawning Chasm) when my program crashed and my files were corrupted, and before my home life turned into a chaotic whirlwind that has since mercifully stabilized.

*Which also happens to be Valentine's Day - because nothing says love like the impending doom of crushing darkness, leading to the ultimate destruction of the universe!

I'm about as tired of making promises now as you are no doubt tired of hearing them, so from here on out, it's what you see is what you get. I am determined, however, to complete this project. I've given up on the pipe dream of making this game "everything it could be". I don't need this game to be perfect, I just want a finished product I can share with the world, that can be played start to finish, that brings to life the story that I wanted to tell.

Which I think it already can - it just needs to be put together. Which is to say that I need to finish the adaptation effort I started two years ago in porting the game from VX Ace to MV. Which I am now once again working on. The good news is that, although there are periods when I struggle to even open the program, the fact is that once I have it open and am working on it, I really enjoy the work quite a lot (barring the occasional frustrating coding challenge that I can't seem to surmount). It's just that - and this is true in a lot of disciplines - putting together a large project, and seeing it through to a level of completion is hard. (Which is why I have to finish this one before I work on Dragonfaith again).

But, like Sisyphus, I'm still chugging away. And these periodic downloadable updates are the proof of that. I've made a determination this time around to cut out some of the fat, so hopefully that will make my task easier. No more save files - you can continue from any stage once it's been unlocked. And I no longer have anxiety about the length of the game - this will be one you can probably complete in a single sitting. (But maybe not the first time; or at least, it will take some added commitment to unlock the secret extra stage). And that's okay.

Ascension (MV) Alpha 5.0 (including all stages up to Chapter 7 - Chaos)
Download (~230 MB): Windows | Mac [see sidebar for latest release]

Note: The download size has jumped quite a bit, because I couldn't use the option to "strip unused files" because I tried it that way, and it stripped some files that were used but not recognized because I referred to them only implicitly via a script command (and not a traditional eventing command). It sucks, I know, but I'm not going through right now and individually hand-picking which files are used and which aren't, so you'll just have to live with it.