Hello everyone, and happy new year!!

The OMORI team is happy to bring you our latest OMORI trailer! We’ve gotten a lot done this year, and we’re excited to show you some of what we've been working on. Although the team tried our best to make our previous deadline, the release date of the game will have to be delayed again.



When the Kickstarter was launched, I underestimated the amount of time to create a video game and I now know pressing such a short deadline on myself and our small team was naive and placed an incomprehensible amount of pressure on us as the release dates kept getting pushed back.

OMORI’s delay has had a lot to do with the game engine we are using, RPGMaker VX Ace (now MV). We’ve had our fair share of bugs along the way, and transferred to RPGMaker MV from RPGMaker VX Ace in order to have Mac available as a platform. By upgrading platforms, some bugs were fixed, but as always, a slew of other bugs came after. As you all know, Archeia works directly with Degica and is a part of the English RPG Maker Dev Team. She has been majorly responsible for the updates for RPG Maker MV since its conception in October 2015. Since then, RPGMaker MV has upgraded 34 times, from Version 1.0.0 to Version 1.3.4.



The change of OMORI’s game engine from RPG Maker MV to VX Ace was necessary for OMORI because RPG Maker VXAce is an outdated program, meaning it wouldn’t receive updates after RPG Maker MV was released. RPG Maker VXAce has some major issues, like not running on some computers or getting major lag based on the user’s operating system including Windows 7. If we stuck with our previous deadlines, OMORI had a large chance of not running at all on most computers and would not receive any updates to resolve these issue. Reports of this issue from other games Archeia has released contributed to the decision to change OMORI’s engine.

Around Version 1.3.0, RPG Maker MV also had to upgrade its graphics engine from PIXI2 to PIXI4. We had a lot of issues with graphic performance, and PIXI4 fixed a lot of these problems. It also allowed us to use technology in RPG Maker MV that otherwise wouldn't be possible in its older iteration or with RPG Maker VXAce.

Because of the aforementioned milestones in the RPG Maker MV engine, we had to change our core system multiple times to solve performance issues and to be compatible with the newest version.

Due to these necessary upgrades, we had to recreate our plugins for every major change, including Ruby to Javascript (1.0.0) and Pixi2 Initial Creation for our TileD plugin. (1.2.0) We also had to remake the entire base for Pixi4 (1.3.0), which also meant we had to remake all our maps and battle system as well.

Also, RPG Maker MV's uses JAVASCRIPT+HMTL5 for their programming language, as opposed to previous RPG Maker games which were in Ruby. Because of the change of technology, we had to start to worrying about resource management, something that was barely a problem on a C++ engine like RPG Maker VXAce. This means that everything we do graphically has to be formatted with Javascript/HTML5 standards in mind in order to prevent dips in performance. An example of this is that we have to keep images under 1024x1024 which affects how we format sprite sheets, animations, and so forth. We have been developing tools to extend RPG Maker MV's sub-optimal editor, because it does not adhere to these new standards.

Right now, RPG Maker MV has some issues involving cache management, meaning there is potential for a memory leak and massive FPS drops the longer you play the game. While the English Dev team has been trying hard to resolve it, the responsibility majorly goes to PIXI developer that is helping RPGMaker with this issue.



TL;DR: Some RPGMaker MV updates have broken a lot of our plug-ins, all of which have had to be remade. Although Archeia and Yami have been able to fix everything, it still does end up delaying the production of the game. Since OMORI is so graphic-heavy, the updates are necessary, but we are currently looking into sticking to a future RPGMaker MV update with cache management implemented in order to prevent and further delays.

We hope that everyone understands that we are far from slacking off on this project and have been extremely busy working on the game while keeping up-to-date with everything technically. As we have mentioned before, some of us have even been developing health problems related to overworking and stress.



We were aiming to resolve our programming issues sooner, but it looks like that won't be the case. For now, we will be fine-tuning the gameplay and graphics, and reworking some story elements. I am aware that another release date delay will come with a fair amount of backlash, but we can’t just “pump out a game”, especially one that performs inadequately. Our team is extremely dedicated and has been working on this game almost every day for the past few years. We want to give you something that shows our work to it’s fullest potential, so we will continue working every day this year to bring you that experience.

That’s all, and thank you for your support this past year. It’s been tough! We hope you look forward to our game.

- OMOCAT & Archeia