2024 Goals and Progress Thread

Welp, I've really only got 2 main goals for this year.

#1: Actually finishing Dime A Dozen. Really ramped up the amount of actual time I've spent, not just "oh look, RPG Maker is open, I'm getting stuff done, where's my bagel?"
#2: Finishing my novella and publishing it.

I want to get a public facing alpha demo of my little horror game project. Before that though is learning that SRPG MZ plugin I was recently shown.

Coming into 2024 my main goal is to improve my pace of creation, both in actually working faster, but also in making more time for my project and more consistently working on it. Hopefully now that I have a less stressful and more satisfying job I will feel like working on my game more often, and less having to force myself to work.
My broad goal for the game is to, at minimum, finish chapter 3 by the end of October. Chapter 3 is both actually October in game, but finishes with an actual event on Halloween. As fitting as it might be, I would much prefer to be done with chapter 3 before then, as finishing in October would mean that it had again taken me a year to complete a chapter (even if there is more content and thus I did more).
On smaller goals, I hope to be more consistent through the year, with updates only one or two months apart. I intend to start having more complex challenges in the game (be it dungeon puzzles or combat), and start really diving into the characters and doing more unique things with them now that story is really getting going.

( I also uploaded an update with bugfixes and QoL things I mentioned yesterday)

Me: Let's start a new music project to test out my new plugins. Something simple. Ambient piano and synth pads?

Me: So... 20 MIDI channels later.

In terms of goals I guess it would have to finally use RPG Maker 2003 and make something out of it just to practice game design.
Maybe publish the small projects on itch or something, that would be interesting.

First goal for 2024 is to complete my first RMMZ project, a short demo adapted from a cool fantasy novel, hopefully before spring.

I also plan to develop a small RPG demo in Unity another-engine-that-is-not-as-fun-as-RM, just for experience.

I haven’t planned anything major besides these two things, will see how it goes and what life throws at me :LZSjoy:

I think I met my first 2024 goal.

I believe I have made all the updates that I am going to do to Krampus Games and I posted the updated version to my itch.io page with a decent amount of changes/improvements.

Assuming I didn't seriously mess something up, I guess I am ready to move on to something else.

Probably the Sudoku game I want to finish.

My goals for this year, simple right?

• Get out another demo for A Shadow's Echo.
• Get out a demo for The Wastes (I'm really excited for this one).

Giving that I had a holiday break I am at 16/52 new slots in what the MZ RTP is missing filled done - most are already released, I don't wanna hold the stuff back forever ;D
Though that sounds fantastic, every made resource also narrows the pool of new resources I can make if that makes sense... we'll see how far this goes. I won't force myself to do stuff I do not feel like doing. But anyways, good progress.

Just for comparison: one year ago the list sat at a whole different point!
With just around 62% overall completion and 36 all complete characters, it stands now at 83.7% and 113 all complete characters.
The amount of user made resources has more than doubled.

I always get so motivated when you talk about the progress you make @Avery !!! Iunno. Just seeing how little-by-little you always get those big results. Huge smile on my face. Can’t wait to see what you picked for these!

Resource-wise, I’m going to be focusing on restoring resources that have been lost to forum archives and a hard drive failure way back in 2015 before we had set up our NAS. I’ve already transcribed a lot of them from the recordings that remain. Just need to turn them back into…things.

I want to use them as exercises to apply what I’ve been learning about producing audio. I also want to use them as exercises to examine phrasing and chord structure + progression. I’ve always felt really comfortable with my sense of melody, but I understand a lot more about progression now.

I'm in the middle of teaching a 3 week stats class, so game dev is when I'm not dead tired.

Managed to go over the dialogues for hours 1 - 5 and check for consistency, and made the changes as needed. Most of the changes was removal of some lines as I had accidentally doubled up some things. The rest was shifting around who said what or how it was said to better match personalities.

Started working on converting my Sudoku puzzle experiments into an actual game. Unlike other Sudoku games, just for fun, I decided that I would let the player choose from the following types of puzzles:

• Numbers
• Letters
• Colors
• RPG Maker Portraits
  • Heroes
  • Villains
  • NPCs
• RPG Maker Icons
  • Food
  • Elements
  • RPG Gear

The player will also be able to choose the number of hints that are initially displayed:

• 14
• 17
• 21
• 24
• 28

The player will also be able to have the hints automatically revealed or they can choose where the hints will be displayed.

I plan to incorporate a puzzle timer to be used in in-game achievements and personal best times.

I am also considering letting the player input possibility notes in the squares for if they can't decide on what the proper solution for that square should be.

There might be more, but that is all I can remember right now.

For this year, I’m planning on HOPEFULLY finishing Cause and Effect. The ridiculous amounts of different dialogue trees and player actions that I have to account for is really gonna take a long time, though.
I’m also dreading making an interactive swordplay cutscene with QTEs.
If anything, I’m hoping to get it playable from start to end, and maybe throw together a demo if I have time. With upcoming graduation and exams, I haven’t had a lot of time to spend working on it.

2024 goal: deepening my understanding of the ARPG free dlc and making a small game with it.
Alternatively, making a third game in my Little Adventurers series. Being able to do both would be great.

This is the year I spend on monster creation. With a goal of 125 regular monsters, 25 for each dungeon, that's a lotta stuff to animate! The battle sprites and walking sprites taking a day each, usually. If I'm lucky it'll take just under 9 months, but I've got work and stuff, so I'm giving myself the whole year :D

Release a demo of my current project, Spirit Stone Revelation.

Also, good luck your goals everyone.

I'm only just starting out here, I guess, had made a bit of progress but realized I'd rather use MV than 2k3 so started over. Thankfully not a ton done, though now I'm figuring out some differences and how to work around those at a slow pace. I'd also found this "RPG Paper Maker", not sure if officially affiliated, and it seems like something I'd want to check out further for other ideas but, one thing at a time. Especially since I'm no good at 3D stuff.

So far, for my first project in mind, well, I've got a lot of character designs where I want them more or less, solid ideas for equipment, levelling, etc. I even have a basic outline of the story written down which is something I very rarely do, and its helping to keep the scope of this thing at a minimum level I can maybe handle.

Reading through everyone's goals is so interesting! I wish everybody good luck with their projects.

My goal for this year is to complete my first and current project, August Ends, and to at least get started on a small game that I want to use to figure out the combat system for 2K3.

August Ends is about halfway done at this point and I've even got a track that a friend kindly made for me, but in my poor beginner's judgement I've been working on the script alongside the game itself and it's pretty tedious at points so I'm stalling a little bit. It's like how anime adaptations go nuts on filler episodes when they catch up with the manga because they've got no more plot to work with.

In all honesty, my only goal for this year is just to finish a game. I have a game that I started working on a bit before the year ended, and I'd like to see it complete. It'd be my first ever finished game, too.

Well, I completed a HUGE hurdle in my 2024 goal of creating a Sudoku Puzzle Game. While I still need to do more testing, I made an Event that can randomly generate a valid Sudoku puzzle.

So far, it has never taken more than 10 puzzle restarts to get a valid puzzle and the longest it has taken to generate the puzzle is close to 3 minutes. But that can be greatly reduced by not showing any values until AFTER the puzzle has fully generated and by also reducing the number of failed tries before it triggers generating a new puzzle.

Here are some screenshots and a short video of the Event running to complete a valid puzzle. It takes a little less than 3 minutes this time with 8 restarts.

I can't express how incredibly happy and excited I am that this actually works. It took me all week to get it to this point.