If I started work on a sequel to Fleshcult, what would you like to see changed?
I have lots of ideas myself, and I’m mulling over a Patreon campaign with a detailed roadmap, but first I’d like to see what everybody else is thinking without tipping the discussion in a particular direction.
(If you’re wondering, yes, this does mean my G-rated games business got indiepocalypsed. Oh well)
You should check out Regalia. It’s an enhancement to the (unfinished) HTML export in RAGS Designer 2.4. You run the export, run Regalia on the export, and then nobody has to install the godawful RAGS Player to play your game.
It’s open source so there’s a pretty good prospect for it eventually supporting every feature in RAGS.
RAGS is a graphical adventure game creation system that’s popular in several different adult video game scenes. Unfortunately it’s Windows only, tricky to install correctly, largely unmaintained, and has a couple of mutually incompatible versions.
The biggest source of the trouble is that the .RAG format is a renamed SQL Server Compact Edition database. This is an undocumented binary file format called SDF (no relation to signed distance fields). RAGS player relies on SQL Server Compact being installed in order to open the databases. That’s why you have to run two separate installers to install the player. Microsoft is dropping support for SQLSCE in 2021. The old installers will probably work for a while after that point, but there’s no telling when OS or .Net changes will break them.
.RAG files are a terrible way to distribute games and we should stop doing that.