Greetings, game makers!

Some of you might have noticed that it's been a while since VNgen last received a version update--over a year and a half, to be exact. In this post, I wanted to both address why and what's coming next! This won't be news for those of you in XGASOFT's Discord, but for everybody else, you might want to strap yourselves in!

New GameMaker Studio

VNgen is built on GameMaker Studio by YoYoGames. This choice of underlying platform was deliberate: VNgen's goal has always been to provide an engine that isn't limited to a single genre of game. Whether you're making a pure visual novel or a fast-paced platform action game, robust dialog sequences are key to telling your story. GameMaker offers one of the best balances out there between user-friendliness and flexibility.

Of course, it also has its limitations, and VNgen has had to live within them. This has had a significant impact on VNgen's design and capabilities. Many functions that already existed in GameMaker had to be reimplemented for VNgen simply because GameMaker's out-of-the-box solutions weren't good enough to meet VNgen's demands.

Thankfully, those days are nearly over! With the release of GameMaker Studio 2.3, YoYoGames dramatically expanded the engine's capabilities, including support for many of the functions and data structures VNgen desperately needed to grow. Since then, YoYoGames has consistently drip-fed more features and improvements as well, all of which provide new and exciting opportunities.

Even better, you can now use GameMaker totally free with Opera! That means you can also give VNgen's free trial a go at your leisure.

New Quantum Framework

If you've already been using VNgen, you might be aware of the Quantum Framework, but not really familiar with what it actually does. That's because until now, it's been available only as part of VNgen, even though it is internally developed as a separate product. The name "Quantum" comes from the framework's ability to execute the same code multiple times and return different results based on context.

... Still not sure what it does? Ok, fair enough. But the distinction between Quantum and VNgen is about to get much clearer.

Simply put, Quantum handles all the event/action code that goes into your VNgen script. It's the heart of VNgen! Until now, it's also been extremely minimalistic and required deep customization to integrate with other products. But thanks to GameMaker Studio 2.3, that's finally changing.

The Quantum Core Framework 2.0 is nearing completion and will be released as a standalone product, available for intermediate developers to freely build on. An advanced, reimagined design takes care of the hard work for you, so all you have to do is focus on writing action functions. Your code will automatically inherit a variety of benefits just from running within Quantum, like the ability to independently control when and how much individual blocks of code are executed--and hit "undo" if something runs when you don't want it to.

New VNgen!

Quantum 2.0 is also inheriting many duties from VNgen, creating a clearer distinction between the two. Moving forward, VNgen will essentially be an "action pack" for Quantum--all core functionality will already be part of Quantum itself. This also means both Quantum and VNgen can be updated independently without breaking your projects.

Quantum will be a paid requirement for VNgen 2.0, but don't worry: existing owners will retain access to the latest versions of VNgen for GameMaker Studio 1.4 and 2.0 (also compatible with 2.3+), and multiple packages will be available for flexible pricing.

Why upgrade? VNgen 2.0 will initially share a lot of functionality with previous versions, but with an entirely revamped syntax. No more forced arguments: all modifiable properties can be declared by name in any combination and any order. That means fewer duplicate functions for similar tasks and overall cleaner, simpler, more readable code. Xtend support will also offer full-fledged real-time scaling for responsive design across desktop, mobile, and web platforms.

What's more exciting: this is just laying the foundation. With a more modern engine and more modular framework, future VNgen features can be added much more easily than before. Existing features can be re-examined and upgraded individually as needed.

Coming... When it's Ready

With a teaser like that, I'm sure the first question on everyone's mind is... "When can I upgrade?" The answer is, soon... when it's ready.

As a matter of fact, there have already been multiple release candidates of Quantum 2.0, but none have quite made the cut. Whether it's been feedback from beta testing or further updates to GameMaker Studio, Quantum is foundational, and it's critical to take the time necessary for making it the best that it can be.

In the meantime, thank you for all your patience and support! (And feel free to theorize about the little snippet in the teaser image for this post. 😉)