![[RPG] GROVE: "Dark Places" (v0.308)](https://img.itch.zone/aW1nLzY5MjM5MzAucG5n/original/gVA7gq.png)
[RPG] GROVE: "Dark Places" (v0.308)
The future of GROVE!
Hey all! We hope you've all been enjoying a most wonderful holiday season! The new year is almost upon us! We've been reflecting on GroveDev and our games, and we'd like to share with you our plans for the new year going forward!
We have three big announcements, with some more detailed explanations to follow.
- First: GROVE is getting an engine update and system rework!
- Second: We intend to start a very simple Patreon for those who wish to support us, and improving how often we share news and updates on our game development to those interested!
- Third: We intend to share some development 'Miniprojects' between our major project releases! These will be through the aforementioned Patreon, or one-time cheap itch.io purchases!
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On the GROVE Rework
We've learned a lot whilst developing Grove and Prowler over the years. And in so doing, we also realised that... a lot of our early, experimental eventing and coding in Grove was bogging us down and holding us back from adding more content, features and mechanics.
To that end, GROVE is making the move to RPG Maker MZ, and undergoing a technical reworking!
But don't panic!
The characters, content, and the vast majority of gameplay mechanics you (hopefully) enjoyed will still be there! In moving to a new system, we're also thinking about new additions, subtle tweaks to improve older systems, graphical updates, larger revamps to early game content / character interactions... and most importantly, easing our own development for the game going forward by cleaning up our coding!
We're experimenting with character sprite size for the GROVE Rework. A double-height Grove will allow us to more easily show off armour sets (or lack of), but we'd like your opinions on the change!
And for future work-in-progress previews, regular monthly development updates, and a handful of other little bonuses to show our gratitude for your support, we'll eventually be launching the GroveDev Patreon.
(Early location enemies will be redrawn and updated to be in parity with Dark Places pt.1 content)
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On the GroveDev Patreon
What, why and when? We suspect that's the first thing a lot of folks are wondering, so to explain...:
The What:
Patreon will primarily be the home of new, monthly development diary posts for those of you who are interested in more frequent updates from us and more previews of WIP content like screenshots and short recordings (no WIP game builds). There'll also be a special channel on the Discord for these updates and discussion around them, as well as the comments section on Patreon itself.
For those who wish to donate a little more each month, you'll also receive our sincerest thanks for the support, some little Discord bonuses like special roles and some more flair, as well as in-game credit.
In time, all Patrons will also be able to receive cheaper, bundled access to some 'Miniprojects' we intend to release over the coming months!
As for Why...:
We've been asked a lot about Patreon over the years. Besides certain content policies, our main reason for avoiding Patreon was the sense of pressure it would put on us as hobbyist developers to commit to schedules and future content, despite all our real world obligations...
However, after a LOT of consideration, we're hopeful that keeping Patreon focused on development logs, Discord bonuses, and miniprojects will strike the best balance for us not to overcommit and underdeliver, and for Patrons to receive tangible rewards both constantly and monthly, rather than paying for a future 'I.O.U'.
With a little luck, and a lot of your kind support... we may even be able to make game-development a full time pursuit of ours!
As for When:
We're NOT starting the Patreon right away!
We're going to be using this time to gather some feedback and impressions, work out our plans for pricing, and make sure things can go as smoothly as possible with the launch. We want to make sure people who join get something immediately, rather than waiting on the promise of a promise...!
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On 'Miniprojects'
As we've worked on our games over the years, prototyping new mechanics and ideas, we've always used new projects to work on the code in isolation, to prevent any weird issues with the main game project.
Oftentimes what begin as simple concepts end up becoming fun, self-contained little games in themselves! And in the hopes that they will give our audience something to enjoy in the downtime between main project releases... we are thinking about polishing and uploading these Miniprojects in the coming months!
These Miniprojects will be short, hour-long experiences, focused on one or two mechanics, and one or two kinks.
Right now, the plan is to post these Miniprojects on itch.io, where they can be individually purchased for a small cost ($2-$4) by anyone...
Alternatively, if you are part of the upper tier on our GroveDev Patreon, you'll receive bundled access to all of our available Miniprojects!
(This bonus won't begin until the price of the Patreon Tier is less or equal to the cost of the projects we have released, so you aren't short-changed!)
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As you can see from these posts, we've got some big plans for the new year, and you've likely got several questions that arise from reading!
We'll do our best to answer some of those questions here. And of course, feel free to ask us any questions that may remain!
-- Q&A --
Q: What's happening to the RPG Maker MV version of GROVE?
A: It shall remain freely available in its current state for the foreseeable future, but it will NOT be receiving any additional content updates.
Q: Will my old save files be transferrable to the new version of GROVE when it releases?
A: Sorry, but they will not!
A shift to a new engine and a ground up rework makes save compatibility impossible, but we've made sure to spruce up early game content to ensure all players have something new to experience when starting again!"
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Q: Will the new version of GROVE be Patreon exclusive?
A: The new version of GROVE will NOT be Patreon exclusive.
The Patreon will be for development updates, in-game credit, Discord rewards, Miniproject access (after a few are released), and a way to further support us as developers!
Q: How long will it take to rework GROVE, and how much content will be in the reworked version?
A: Right now, our intention is to rework everything that currently exists in GROVE, and implement the long-awaited Dark Places Pt. 2 content. We don't want to put out a new version with less content than before!
Because of that, we can't really give an exact estimate on release, besides our hopeful plan for it to release in 2025!
Q: What kind of content will the 'Miniprojects' include? When will they be released?
A: The Miniprojects will be NSFW in nature, and may cover a range of content including but not limited to: M/M, F/M, bondage, rape, bad endings, corruption, mpreg. More details will be released in time. As for release, we're predicting to release at least two within the year of 2025! After that, we're not certain, but Patrons will absolutely be kept in the loop!
Comments
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If I were to sponsor a certain amount, could I expect a Korean patch?
Or, if I may be rude... could you tell me how to translate the game script files myself?
Translator++ is a program that's capable of translating a great deal of RPG Maker's text. However it's machine translation is not great, and there is a LOT of text in Grove to translate.
Ooooh, it's the MZ version. That version has continued mac support. Hope the transfer goes well with minimal bugs.
Thank you, here's hoping!
I'm super excited! Your team's always been way too generous giving out GROVE of all things for free. It's about time you get paid; hope it proves very profitable.
That's very kind of you to think so, thank you!
Will you release the game on Steam ?
It's unlikely, sorry.
nooooooo ((
Oh that's quite exciting!
Grove is one of my favorite games and one of the first NSFW ones I've played, so it's always a joy to see its possible future.
The sprite update is something quite nice, sometimes I'd pretty much forget that the armor had broken, so being able to guess that visually (and the possibility for some sprite animations in traps) make for a pretty nice visual update, as I see.
Hope the change in engine goes well!
Thanks for your encouragement!
Man you almost gave me a heart attack with that title!
Hah, sorry, sorry...
Glad to see you guys planning ahead for the better of your projects. I know changing engines has been rough for others, so I wish you luck!
As for the character sprite size change, I'm not too much of a fan personally, primarily because the head looks very disproportionate right now and ends up looking a bit too uncanny.
The single-tile sprites make things much easier to scale and navigate because since everything is consistently the same size, it's easy to figure out the hitbox or what pathways I'm allowed to go through. I actually had a few moments already struggling to find out what paths I'm allowed on sometimes.
Changing this to a bigger sprite might lead to a lot more tweaking with some of the maps, cutscenes, etc. as well as room for potential clipping through tilesets. I'm worried this might slow progress as this would mean checking almost every room for this issue.
This is a more personal note the smaller sprites allow more room to interpret actions or expressions. With a bigger sprite, those types of actions may end up feeling a bit clunkier. The consistent 1x1 tile sprites kind of force you to use your imagination to picture scales of certain characters or how they're reacting, if that makes sense.
At the end of the day, you guys still decide what you think is best for the project but my opinion on it is that it should stay as the smaller sprites.
Something else would be the combat options being on the right. Your eyes are likely to want to focus on Grove (either for armor or grapple CGs) so it would be preferred if the options were on the left so you can keep an eye on the action and to make the flow of reading the text and actions much easier. Keeping it on the right would be a bit of an inconvenience, but maybe that's more the fault of the engine itself so I'm not sure if you're able to change that.
REGARDLESS, I'm still very excited about this news and how this will allow you and the team to make this game. Prowler's features have shown everyone capable of so much more when given more tools so I'm looking forward to how all this can boost Grove's potential.
Edit: I noticed in the new battle sprite preview, I noticed Grove is missing his tail! Thought I'd let you guys know!
HEY UPDATE! :D
I've seen people have alot of problems when transferring engines. we wish y'all luck and hope you don't suffer like others do. happy new years!
Thanks a lot! We're gonna try our best, and we're optimistic about the engine change given our early testing!
While unable to see the links at this point in time, it does make me very happy to know Grove will be prioritized for the near future, and that you both have put so much thought into your 2025 plans:
I’ll admit I wasn’t the biggest fan of Prowler’s mechanics, but it certainly looked beautiful, and it made me wish that Grove would get a similar facelift. Assuming you guys will be charging for your projects from now on, I would gladly pay money for updated art assets alone.
Regardless, I’ll look forward to the rework and whichever crowdfunding service you end up going with. Both of your games have shown a genuine quality rare for most furry projects. I have wanted to financially support your effort for some time now, so it’s good to know I’ll be able to do just that.
Thanks so much for all the kind words and the support! We really hope to make the project feel worth your time and money if you do feel like subscribing to a potential Patreon / Subscribestar, and doing our best to bring as much positive learning from Prowler over to GROVE (whilst still keeping the core GROVE mechanics)
To add on to the last comment: You need to host your images somewhere other than discord now. There was a semi-recent update that made it so eventually links to discord images no longer work after a while. Why? To reduce "server costs" I guess.
But yeah the images no longer work because of that.
Appreciate the head's up!
Just letting you know that the image links are all missing. Not that they are essential, but I found them nice to look at :)
Thanks for letting us know!
You are welcome.
Also, I personally like a larger sprite size because it's 1) easier to see; 2) nice to view clothing status outside of battle.
Start the process for a Subcribestar right now. Patreon can and will have a problem with what you make. But will decide that it a problem only after they have taken money for your supporters and deny you access to it. If you are going to do it then at least use both.
This is the Year 🥹
Is patreon a good choice though? I'm not familiar with the details of it, but as far as I know they're ridiculously zealous against hypno/noncon content, even going so far to dock you if you post it outside their platform.
We're going to be considering places like SubscribeStar instead, yeah. This is why we didn't immediately start it, so we could gather some more opinions and information.
Yeah, I don't know substar's policies at all, but I also don't know of any artist friends who got driven off it for inane reasons. Ko-fi seems fine too.
For me, this amazing game is number one on itch io, and I am very glad that it is developing further! I'm always looking forward to hearing from you) Since you are redrawing old sprites, including Grove himself, I can't help but ask: will you experiment with his lower part? The question is that his penis is more human-like than scaly
I don't think we'll be changing Grove's penis type I'm afraid! Consider it our personal preference as artists.
Hopefully that won't ruin things for you!
Wow, this is the greatest gift of the new year for me!
Sounds great! I was afraid you gave up on Grove. It's my favorite adult game so far)
I wonder when this will be released.
Oh no, looks like I'll have to play through Grove again and see everything all over again. What a shame.
ikr? such a tragedy having to replay amazing content.... so tragic.
I definitely think that switching to larger overworld sprites is a bit of a mistake tbh. Just in the screenshot you posted, Grove looks absurdly taller than everything else around him. To make it look good you'd have to change the scale of EVERYTHING, not just the character models. Really, you should stick with the shorter, simpler sprites, if for no other reason than saving yourselves a LOT of unnecessary busywork.
I agree the sprites looks really good, you could instead do it like prowler and show the changes grove is going through the menu screen for example and that give you time to focus on the game overs screens, even try animation like prowler
Thanks for the feedback! The general consensus has been similar to your words so we're taking that into account.
Revisions on the Grove sprite is still on-going, and we'll likely settle for something closer to a 1x1 tile sized character
A work-in-progress of this (red indicates tile size):
- RegalBuster
Oh i actually think that's perfect!
I love this one's style! You can see his body in whole as it's not obscured by his head like current Grove, and the body itself is much more proportioned and pleasing to the eye but still retaining the chibi charm!
I, for my part, also think that the shorter tall (1.5 times) sprites are a great idea, not only for the reasons listed in the devlog above and the preceding comment from typoking7, but on top of that it would give the game it's own character and set it more apart from other RPG Maker projects with its visual identity, since the characters aren't confined to a 1 tile square and looking as sqashed in comparison.
For my personal opinion like with Mad Father and Stray Cat Crossing as an example for games that also use taller character sprites, I think that change modernizes the look and feel a bit more compared to classic 16 and 32 Bit sprite-based RPGs from which RPG Makers visual style was inspired from.