The Princess Oracle is a project I’m currently developing in RPG Developer Bakin.
Originally submitted to AmalgamAsh’s SGB Revival Game Jam, the project started in Smile Game Builder. However, I quickly realised how much I’d moved on from that engine; the transition back felt awkward, and the end result was definitely buggy and “borked”.
I guess I’ve grown so accustomed to Bakin’s workflow that returning to SGB felt like a step backward somehow rather than a true nostalgia trip. Since the entire plot and lore is already written, to do the concept justice, I’ve decided to rebuild the game from scratch, taking full advantage of Bakin’s advanced features.
What Happened to The Afterlife?
Before I shifted focus to The Princess Oracle Bakin, I was developing a project called Afterlife. The core idea for this game was deeply personal: I wanted to adapt a collection of short stories my late partner and I wrote into an interactive format. Each of these stories explored the paranormal and the supernatural, weaving together a shared, interconnected world.
During the development of Afterlife, I realised that translating our short stories into a game was a far greater challenge than I had anticipated. After several attempts, trying to make it work, trying to fit the pieces into game format, ultimately, I felt the current direction didn’t – couldn’t – do justice to my other half’s memory or the stories we built together. So, to truly honor her, I decided to step back until I could find the right way to tell these stories and chose to pivot my focus onto The Princess Oracle instead.
Development on The Princess Oracle
With my focus now firmly on The Princess Oracle, development has officially begun. Because the plot and lore were already fully established for the SGB Proto-Demo, redeveloping it in Bakin is absolutely the right call. This isn’t just a port of the original version; it’s a complete reimagining.
Now that I’m working within a more familiar workflow, I’m spending time on implementing the menus and systems that just weren’t possible in the original SGB build. While SGB relies on custom menus through complex eventing, Bakin’s layout tools allow for a much more stable and reliable format, making it easier to recreate the entire menu system entirely.
One of the key advantages Bakin holds over SGB is its plugin system. In SGB, informational popups are quite rigid, requiring a common event to trigger a static message on-screen. Bakin, however, provides the flexibility to create something far more dynamic.
To take advantage of this, I wrote the Rich Text Popup plugin. Instead of relying on manual, static calls, the popup messages now display dynamically, animating upwards before fading out. I’m really pleased with how well it’s performing in the current build; it adds a level of polish that just wasn’t possible before.
Here’s the video of the plugin in action and the intended menu system:
I’ll be sharing more progress as I continue to develop The Princess Oracle, so watch this space – as well as on X and Itch.io – for more updates.
