Omega Quintet first playable build arrives!

Hi everyone.  Quite a bit has happened since I last updated you on the status of our games.  While we've been continuing our work on Lost Dimension, the big news here this week is that the first playable build of Idea Factory's brilliant JRPG, Omega Quintet, has arrived!  I've already done some of the early testing for it myself on Steam, and it's certainly been great to get my hands on this amazing game again :).

In most cases, testing the first playable build of a title usually involves seeing how far you can progress into the game before encountering easily reproducible crashes.  These crashes are then feverishly reported back to the programmer to track down and resolve.  While Omega Quintet isn't an exception to this, I’m happy to report that I managed to get considerably further than expected, especially considering that this is only a first build.  Clearly, our lead programmer has been working mightily hard to produce a very stable version of the game first time around, with no major sound or graphical issues to report!

Now, I'm sure that having a first build may not sound like terribly exciting progress to some of you, but in fact, just getting the console game compiling and running on PC is a major step forward.  It means that our lead programmer has successfully completed rewriting the console libraries to run on PC, and that’s possibly the most complex task in porting the game!  The fact that the game is already fairly stable at this early stage is a very welcome bonus :)

Of course, this certainly doesn't guarantee that the rest of the port will be straight forward, but given the wealth of experience our development team has with Idea Factory’s well-crafted code, we’re very happy with this early progress and things are looking good.

So, what are the next steps?  Well, along with the ever-present bug squashing which will keep us all busy for a good while, we will be reworking the User Interface to function with mouse and keyboard, integrating middleware where necessary and re-rendering the movies.  We’ll also be adding new features such as cloud saving and achievements, plus generally adding as much polish as possible to the PC port to make it the best version we can.  While it's too early to give you all a more precise release date, the good news is that we are well on course to get the PC version of Omega Quintet to you all this year :).

So far, one of my favourite aspects of the game has to be the music themed battle system.  Of the many JRPGs I’ve tried, this has quickly become one of my most highly regarded JRPG battle systems.  While it is at heart a turn-based system, the addition of precision range attacks and the importance of manipulating the turn order really add some hugely enjoyable complexities to the gameplay.

If you're wondering whether I’m being a little biased towards this game :) here’s what RPGSite had to say in their solid 7/10 review: "Far and away, the best feature in Omega Quintet are the battles themselves.  Compile Heart put a lot of work into providing a complex system."  I'm sure that all you JRPG fans out there are going to have a truly great time with this game and I'm really looking forward to being able to share more details with you over the coming months.

That’s all for now. I’ll be back soon with more news from Ghostlight, but until then why not follow us on our Twitter and Facebook pages, our Youtube Channel and our  Google + account, where we’ll be posting all the latest news from Ghostlight. You can also follow me on Twitter for a more personal take on all things Ghostlight.

© 2017 IDEA FACTORY/COMPILE HEART. All rights reserved. Omega Quintet™ is a trademark of Idea Factory.  Licensed to and published by Ghostlight Ltd.