2024 Goals and Progress Thread

Bein the little overachiever that I am, I am now at 19/52 things for what the MZ RTP is missing. It gets harder though to find stuff that I actually feel like making. Well, we'll see.

Here is what I made so far:

Beep, beep! One merged post for @Avery coming right up! It's OK. I'm still in that "deer in headlights" phase when I'm dating a document.

Finally got the Xbox build to start without the debugger. Turns out that the more files you have with more space taken up, the longer it takes to enumerate the game, which resulted in the startup process timing out. Luckily I didn't have to sacrifice any visual assets as the bulk of the package was in a large amount of plugin code that I wasn't even using, so I trimmed that down and everything finally passed startup testing.

Beyond that, I started the process of implementing percentage calculations for the Xbox achievements and added the progress completion display to the achievements screen. I have also rewritten the expected villain to have a twist to her past that sets up for an even bigger threat which must also be dealt with in order to complete the game.

I been doin' great progress on this li'l game I've dubbed Shadowloom: The Last Dragon Nymph. :kaoluv:The entire first dungeon is mapped out and written (one out of four total), the battle system is kinda bare-bones but developin', and I've got almost all the assets I want, sans sound and music! (I know, I know, it's backwards, but.)

I'm torn on wantin' to make a thread for this, but I know things are goin' to get not-entirely PG-13 down the line... :kaoswt:

@alice_gristle Make a thread! Make a thread! Seriously though, you don't have to put anything specific that is > PG-13. You could always just generally reference + content. Think of it as a tantalizing teaser for the grown up forum dwellers with lots of vagueness and subtle nod, nod, wink, winks. :wink:

I made a good break through on my Sudoku Game by figuring out why I was getting sporadic, seemingly random performance slowdowns during the random puzzle generation. Of course, while I was figuring it out, I also broke it, making it not run at all.

In fact, I seriously almost posted a HELP ME thread a couple of times to ask for suggestions on how to troubleshoot performance slowdowns, but then further, step by step testing with Show Text messages at key spots helped me narrow down what was happening and where.

Turns out the puzzle generation was getting stuck in an infinite loop at a couple of points where I didn't think would be possible to get stuck. Stupid Math and stupid Zombie logic!

And I still need to explore implementing a faster way to generate the random puzzles that I can understand. I love the concept of using something that I completely Evented myself, but so far, it is taking between 15 seconds and 3 minutes to generate a puzzle. That higher end of the time spectrum will be problematic for modern day players who probably won't want to wait that long unless I figured out a way to distract them if it was taking longer.

My last two BIG hurdles are figuring out the best way to make the random auto hint selection and how to best allow the player to make a couple of notes on free squares before assigning what they think is the correct value. I think the last one shouldn't be too hard for things like numbers, letters, and colors, but I am still pondering over the portraits and icons puzzle types.

Oh, and I was able to start my very first Game In Development thread for this project so...YEAH!

I second posting that thread! And as far as infinite logic loops go...I can't pretend I know much math or anything but I do know I've accidentally done those sorts of things before too many times to count, where some variable isn't being set or whatever and I'm stuck wondering why. I swear I need to make some kind of actual map for these, complicated as they can get.

First post in here was kinda vague, so, I feel like I've got something more concrete here to share. Some of what I'd planned to post on my profile the other night, though, I don't feel like typing it all out again. Basically boils down to going to try and finish my project within the year. Maybe not likely, but may get a demo done sooner rather than later that way. I've got some early concept stuff done, and managed to get at least one characters' sprites mostly done. They're not great, probably placeholders, but it's a big deal for me getting anything that works at all, especially not too into animation when it's not simple 16x16 sprites.


Didn't realize the Gelly one cropped weird. Must have been tired when I scanned it. Anyway, some ideas already scratched, maybe I'm giving up to soon on some but probably more important to focus on the basics for now. Lot of these animations are just stills, probably going to think some through more but really don't plan on having anything very fancy for a silly game like this. I'm just glad they seem to look somewhat consistent at all.

I had a similar thing happen with my Xbox build. What happened is that I was storing a JSON list to temporary storage which contains the achievement information that is downloaded from the respective servers and then loaded from that when the game is initialized after which the temporary data is removed from storage. Problem is that whenever the game is reinitialized through a startNewGame call, the achievement list was being completely erased as I was doing it from within the plugin that I had customized for this.

I debated loading the list at the time that the plugin's global values are set, but of course this wasn't possible since it relied on asynchronous execution and you can't await a result in the global values section. So ultimately what I ended up doing was to create a function on the C# side which returns the list in string format which I wait to be made available on the Javascript side using a while loop, after which the achievement list is parsed into JSON format and loaded into the respective global value, thereby solving the problem.

Speaking of achievements, I also ran into a matter involving the utility menu in my game. For some unknown reason, I had deleted the script evaluation that awards the special code entry achievement which is tied to that menu screen. Aside from that (and also starting the process of setting up the mechanisms for counting dungeons,settlement points and other percentage-based achievements) I'm almost at the point where I can go back to working on the story structure (which I did a small bit of modification for in regard to a later part of the story to fit in with how the reawakening of the sacred guardians works in terms of lore structure).

A few development notes to close out the week. I have begun the process of replaying my entire project from the very beginning owing to changes in skill unlock timing and the fact that I had changed all of the defense and HP counts on the enemies at later stages to match the effects of these skills, effectively creating a soft lock of all my progress files past the point where I had made these changes. As such, finishing my story development has taken a back seat to ensuring that all of the balance changes work from start to finish. This has also given me a chance to more fully build out the prologue and begin adding an autosave function to make it easier to reload from a checkpoint.

Are we allowed to make threads of games that aren't out and may never come out?

It would seem that the Games In Development section would specifically be for games that aren't out. And from my limited experience with the RPG Maker community here, there is never a guarantee that a game project will ever come out.

I think it is a known reality that many, many people have the best of intentions, but they are never actually able to complete a game for many different reasons.

So, yes. I believe it would be appropriate to make a thread in the Games in Development section if you have the best intentions to actually finish the game.

Even if you said, you know, I don't think I am ever going to actually release this game because it is a project just for me, I still don't think that necessarily means you couldn't make a thread about the development.

But I am certainly not an expert on the rules.

Yeah use the Games in Development thread if you have a decent amount of progress, Ideas and Prototypes if you have a small idea and are just starting out. Also check the pinned rules to each as there are some requirements.

January Update:

24 Hours:
-Drew a sketch of the maps for hour 6, implemented the first 3 of them. Got 13 more to go.
-Small bug fixes.

Montagor's Legacy:
-Been working on sketching out the plot, tried an idea on paper had to drop it as that didn't work. Still working on it.

Rest had no progress in January. Onto February.

An unfortunate update regarding my project. No, it's not canceled again- just that I have to redesign two of my characters due to licensing changes with the 3D reference assets that preclude me from using them in any sort of visual output software (e. g. Maya, Blender etc.) that is not developed by the company that provides the assets. Obviously I am disappointed in this, and the really bad thing is that I only have a few days to do it because of the RPG Maker event on Steam that's coming up. But I literally just found out about this off the change log for the software in which I assemble the 3D models, so unfortunately development of the remaining parts of the story are going to have to wait until both the reference models and pixel art have been updated.

In the meantime, I have decided to make a personality change with one of the characters based off some of my own personal habits. In this case, I decided to give one of the heroes a toy bear as a sort of cuddle comfort (which I personally admit to doing myself!) and that means test assets to help build this out. As usual, they're only intended to be temporary (and for obvious reasons) however it did give me a chance to practice my pixel art.

EDIT: After further discussion on the legal aspect of the matter, I have withdrawn the assets that were previously mentioned here and reclassified them as private practice material for my exclusive internal use.

Got a mid month update here:

24 Hours
-Redid skills. Axed some useless ones, and moved some skills between characters to better match their types
-Rebalanced hour 1 and 2 fights. Now it flows better in terms of battle dynamics.
-Redid how status ailments are distributed. I figured it would be better to introduce them gradually instead of here are 5 status ailments just because. So the first you have to deal with is Poison, then I add in the -ATK/-DEF ones, and escalate from there.
-Redid dialogue lines for flow reasons.

So, two things. I've put development of The Cube Trail on hold due to personal issues with it, so instead I've started a new project called Savage Lands. It's very heavily inspired by 1st and 2nd Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, so it'll be old school in all the best ways (including the sound track, which is dungeon synth). I've already created the basic weapons, armor, items, classes, and have already started working on the mapping.

You can play as a Fighter, Thief, Healer, or Sorcerer, and can hire up to 3 more party members of any of those classes for free (important, because if they die during battle and you don't revive them, they are dead for good). There will most likely be other classes too, but you'll have to get them in other ways. Of course, since feats didn't exist back then, classes have "actions" which are highly limited abilities they can use during battle to turn the tide (my own design, which was an early concept for the Cube Trail). You start out with one Action at level 1, and gain another per level, so you'll have to think hard about if you want to use them or save them. You can only gain Actions by resting, or with an Action Potion which will be costly.

Got another update:

24 Hours:
Changed up skills to move the game to a party of 6. This will mean we will have 4 or 3 in battle at once now instead of 5. This was done to make things easier to balance overall. Also this means the element system can be a full 6 elements + physical instead of having one element without an opposite element.

Montagor's Legacy:
Yes this has an update! Over the last week I stared at word a lot and...I wrote out the plot!!! That was one of my goals for 2024 so I can mark that as a finished goal now!

This also means dev can resume now that I know where in tarnation the story was going. I always knew what I wanted the end goal to be but the how do we get there part was eluding me for a long time.

Late to the whole goals business since two months have already eloped, but I hope to finally finish mapping for once so I can work on implementing the story/combat into the game. My plot notes can barely wait to escape to broad daylight... err game-light.

I'm makin' pretty good progress wid Shadowloom: The Last Dragon Nymph. I've got two out of four dungeons mapped out and populated wid evil dark knights and tasty treasures, I've got cutscenes up that cover, oh, about half the game, and... I drew some sexy beach pictures... :wub


I guess my descoping policy is kinda workin', 'cuz this game is progressing really well and altho it won't be SUPER, at least it'll be DONE. :biggrin:

I am only 10 "filled slots away" from making one thing for what the MZ RTP is missing for every week this year.
Here is what I got:

It went really well so far and I'm looking forward to mentally wrap that project up.

I'm so happy to post that my beta-tester got to play a fully-implemented demo of my prologue this morning! No game-breaking bugs, no major issues. There's still a few things I need to clean up before I'm comfortable releasing a public demo, but soon! It's coming! Wow!!! :LZSjoy:


One thing I'd quite like to do is playthrough the prologue myself and put the video up on my youtube. Add it to the to-do list, I guess! Along with... so many things. Never-ending list...

A bit of a change with how I plan to work out some of the dialogue in my game. I decided that I will not simply be doing cutscenes on in-engine maps but will instead be creating anime/manga visuals from 3D renders using a combination of Unity and Blender that will be image-captured and sequenced into slideshow format in a video editor with one or more music tracks, the requisite sound effects for the scene and a subtitled Japanese voiceover for each of the characters that's involved in that cutscene (with the exception of those in which a character is narrating their past experiences rather than being in a conversation with someone else). Of course, some of the mentioned sound effects are a bit on the heavy side and I acknowledge in my communications on this that there may be potential sensory issues for certain people, so I'm also building out an accessibility requests feature that includes the option to replace the cutscenes with text dialogue.

I've added a few examples of the cutscene slides that I'm using for this to give you an idea of what to expect in each sequence. Since they have a connection to the story and may be emotionally sensitive, I have spoiler-tagged the images in case you have issues with them (or simply don't want to ruin the concepts for yourself).