Hello everyone! Welcome to this month’s devlog!

If you just stumbled upon this, I am Adrienne, also known as insertdisc5! I’m the developer, writer, artist, main programmer, etc of the game. The game being In Stars and Time, a timeloop RPG, which is also the next and final game in the START AGAIN series, following START AGAIN: a prologue (available here!).  You can find out more about In Stars and Time here!!!

LET’S GET TO IT. This month has Steam achievements news, and a third round of Q&A!

I’m very happy to announce… THAT STEAM ACHIEVEMENTS HAVE BEEN IMPLEMENTED!!! That’s right, the true Gamers(™) among you will get to have fun trying to 100% the game. 

But let me tell you, trying to make steam achievements work for RPGmaker was hell. I must’ve spent 3 months trying to make the (admittedly, somewhat easy) code work. Most plugins for it just use the magic sentence “refer to [someone’s plugin] for instructions on how to do it”, and guess what? SOMEONE’S PLUGIN ISN’T ONLINE ANYMORE. So I had to figure out how to make it work with the few crumbs I found on forums. And I still couldn’t make it work!!!

Thankfully, In Stars and Time’s programmer extraordinaire Isabella Ava took one look at it and figured it out instantly. And I tried it out. And it worked. And I yelled very loudly. Thanks Isabella for saving me once again!!!

(pictured above: ISAT’s testing room, and steam achievements unlocking for the first time. Yes I took a screenshot and I was so happy the screenshot is a little cropped. I was excited ok!!!!)

There’s currently 40ish achievements that can be unlocked in In Stars and Time, I hope you will have fun getting them all!!!

Overall, development is going well, from QA to localization to porting, and many things are in the works! Like, MANY things. I hope I get to share more with everyone soon because I am so excited for everyone to see what’s in store!!! Thank you for your patience!!!

…What? That’s it for this month? Well, no. Once again, it’s Q&A time! I asked the lovely people in In Stars And Time’s discord to send me some questions! So let’s get going!(Side note, you should join the discord channel teehee) ((Everyone is anonymous this time because it’s discord. Discord names are a very private thing, you know?))

What's everyone's favorite food/animal/both? Which character do you like or relate to the most?

I answered food some time ago, so you get favorite animals! Siffrin likes cats because of course. Isabeau might actually prefer cats over dogs but its a close one. Mirabelle is a dog person. Odile is cats all the way. Bonnie is right in the middle. Wait, that’s just cats and dogs!!!!!!

As for which character I relate to the most: Siffrin :) Closely followed by Odile!

does anyone in the main cast know magic tricks/sleight of hand stuff? if so, what kind of tricks do they do? where did they learn them?

Siffrin for sure knows some coin tricks and maybe some sleight of hand, which they’d probably learn while traveling… Being a traveler means you gotta know some of those right??? It’s part of the mystique???

I also think Mirabelle and Isabeau would know some basic sleight of hand as well, just because I can easily imagine the House of Change having this as a class…

How do you write the name of the island east of Vaugarde? The map from devlog #10 makes it seem like it's M Wudu? (Similarly, how do you pronounce it?)

Mwudu! And as for pronunciation, hm… Maybe with a soft oo sound for the U letters in there? I wonder… (<- never pronounces things out loud)

Q: Does Odile have a massive collection of books back home? Are there certain books that she took with her on her travels, or had to leave behind? Same for Mira, if she has any books outside of her collection in the House.

I actually don’t imagine Odile having a massive collection of books, just because I imagine Ka Bue as having libraries that are easy to access… She definitely owns books, but not a massive collection or anything. She brought the one book with her (her weapon!) but it’s more of a notebook than a book. But maybe next month I'll go "she has 300 books in Ka Bue"

As for Mirabelle, her room in the House is her home, so she doesn’t have anywhere else to put her books!

are there any deaths that are random chance? if so how would that be programmed? also. what ARE the gang's favorite books

No, not really! Mostly because it would be very fun from a story perspective, but hellish from a gameplay perspective. Dying for reasons that are just Numbers Said So and this can happen at any time is not very fun as a player! What about my sense of control!!! So, when you die in ISAT, you will know why. HOWEVER, a bunch of events are random chance <3

And Mirabelle’s favorite book is a book series called The Cursing of Château Castle. I’m freestyling for the rest of these: Isabeau would say it's some book like “How To Get Bigger Muscles For Dummies'', somehow I’m certain Siffrin’s favorite book is a memoir of some kind or a poetry book, and Bonnie’s favorite book is the current most popular comic book for kids in Vaugarde. Odile’s is a secret <3

Q: Are there any bugs you've made into features?

alternative Q: What do the characters think about freeze tag?

YES!!!!! YOUR QUESTION IS SO GOOD IM MAD I CAN’T SPECIFY HOW… PLEASE ASK ME AGAIN WHEN THE GAME COMES OUT <3 Without giving away too much, there’s a couple events in the game that are here because of a bug that I thought added a lot to the atmosphere <3

Most of the gang are adults so they do not think about children’s games. However I imagine that for most kids in Vaugarde, freeze tag is the new fun game to play. Maybe they’d call it King instead. Who’s the King? Don’t get tagged by the King or you’re gonna be frozen!!! (Bonnie doesn’t want to play tag anymore.)

what & when was your first exposure where you went: "time to make a game"? im just wondering what got you started

would there be an official subreddit for the isat community? i dont really use reddit much anymore but its something that croessed my mind a while back and by that i mean would there be official support for it or would it just be supported by fans?

whats your favorite track from the prologue?

A lot of things made me start making the prologue and then ISAT, but really: boredom from the pandemic teehee.

A subreddit… That’s a neat idea!!! If enough people are into it, that’s definitely something we’d consider, so if you want that you should make some noise :3

As for tracks, I genuinely think every single track Studio Thumpy Puppy has made is a 10/10, but the King’s battle theme holds a special spot in my heart… And Long Journey too ;w; And that’s not counting the tracks from ISAT which are just All Bangers All The Time (pst go get the prologue’s soundtrack here)

What’s something about working on the game or the prologue that was more difficult than you thought it would be?

The… scope… I truly intended to have both the prologue and ISAT to be very short experiences, and they became way bigger than I envisioned! I did know they were going to be bigger than I thought, but They Sure Are Bigger Than I Thought. For example, I intended the prologue to be a 30mn experience… And it ended up being a couple hours long teehee

with a scale from 1 to 10 how much will the poor guy suffer in the game

Aiming for 11 baby

You got to the bottom of this devlog! Have a Silly Little Picture, which I sent as payment to everyone on discord who sent in a question

That’s all I have to say for today! Let me know if you have any questions, or if there’s any aspect of the game development struggle you’d like me to talk about! See you next time!!!

AND DON’T FORGET TO WISHLIST THE GAME ON STEAM ALSO IT REALLY HELPS BECAUSE STEAM’S ALGORITHM IS MORE LIKELY TO SHOW OFF GAMES WITH A HIGH AMOUNT OF WISHLISTS THAT’S THE REASON WHY GAME DEVS ALWAYS ASK TO WISHLIST!!! OKAY BYE!!!!