Remake for Star Story on the way

As we speak the entire game is being replaced by a new version of Star Story. And the old version has been removed.

But Jeroen, why would you do such a drastic thing?

A few, yet vital reasons. 

1. I noticed more and more than the original "LAURA II" engine had serious trouble on many newer computers. This even including my own. Yet the compiler of BlitzMax doesn't allow me to recompile this engine any more, and BlitzMax NG gave me even more headaches.
2. Yet I did want to preserve this game a little while longer. I put my heart and soul into this game, and didn't want to make it get lost just because of a broken compiler.
3. I also wanted to put some improvements into the game, that never made it into the original and would even require me to rewrite too much from scratch, so I had to redo a lot anyway.

What is different from the original game then?

1. First of all in stead of just rewriting LAURA II, which was a junk engine anyway, I realized when I looked at stuff once more, I created a completely new engine. This time I used C++ to create this engine. Not exactly my favorite language (as a matter of fact, it's beyond terrible in my humble opinion), but this way I could be sure I would always have a compiler available, and also tons of libraries at my disposal, since most of them are written in C or C++ anyway. This new engine is called Apollo. Apollo has (just like LAURA II) a Lua scripting engine in it, but the game itself is actually written in Neil, a language I developed myself, in order to to able to write more complex scripts and debug them more easily. I used SDL2 as my graphics and audio engine as that was simply the easiest way to go, and an engine so popular, I don't expect too much trouble with it in the future.
2. Now the game is also able to handle bigger and smaller screen sizes.  Many people already requested this for the original game, but it was impossible to do there without rewriting the game from scratch. Well, since that is what I did now anyway, hey, win-win-situation, eh?
3. The support Game Jolt API has been removed. And no, once the new game is released the old versions will also no longer be able to handle to, so don't even try it.
4. A few thing were simplified from coding's perspective. This to prevent needless bugs in the longer run. This can make a few things easier or harder in the gameplay, depending on who you ask, I guess...
5. The story line will be the same, although some language errors I found has been fixed, and a few adaptions to the scenario were made, but overall, most things are unchanged here.
6. Mac support has been discontinued. 
7. Linux support is being investigated, but is not yet promised. I am dependent on other people here, and that makes things really hard to get done. Since Apollo is open sourced and already on Github, people may take a look already to see if they can help me on this. Keep in mind though that the engine is still being modified on some deeper core features, as not everything works the way it should YET. My core trouble is that I used VisualStudio for the engine, and therefore the code contains in the deeper core functions that GCC may not support.  I am still looking at this though. #ifdef is a wonderful feature after all.
8. Save game files will NOT be compatible with the new version. I am trying to create a tool to transfer some data, like character stats and spells/abilities/inventory/etc. If this tool works, the savegame file created will begin at the prologue in the Yaqirpa (first dungeon) though. Since you'll likely be overpowered then, this should be no trouble right.
9. I did forget about a water based attack for the party, well, it's there now. I added the "Water Gun" ARM for Crystal. This was planned for the original version, but forgotten. 

On the moment I wrote this I was working to get the final dungeon implemented in the new version. Since the game data like maps doesn't have to be recreated this may go pretty fast.  However no ETA is yet set. If you are interested in alpha testing, I do have a secret page here on itch.io where you can download the engine and game files. Please note, they are two separate downloads you'll need to assemble yourself (the release will have this in one big package, of course).

And so far this update, folks!