2024 Goals and Progress Thread

I know I've edited it some since I posted it actually. Though the way the stairs are in the FSM tileset they are designed to end at the bottom of the wall in most cases. But can play with it more in the next round of edits.

Weekly update:
-Redid battle balance again for hours 2 and 3.
-Added motion to most events in hour 3.
-Edited ending sequence for hour 3/start of hour 4
-Added animations to start of slime village.

And a really awkwardly taken in terms of timing image in the middle of a lot of motion for when you arrive at slime village:


I've actually since removed the shadows on the far left and below, but can't take a new pic here at work to show it. So this will have to do for now.

Thread seems to have gone quiet. Anyways time for a small update;

24 Hours:
-I have now updated most cutscenes in Chapter 1 (hours 1 - 4). Battles have been all rebalanced and tweaked more
-Added optional mini-bosses to parts of the game. These come with a caution icon over them to warn you they are tough for the area. But if you can win the rewards will be great.
-Also have it if the mini-boss is too many levels above you it shows a skull instead. These are best taken on later when you come back.
-Oh and these mini-bosses get a different battle music too.

And made a video of one of the mini-boss battles. Things still in rough draft form, I've not touched the sound effects or animations yet:



Harold jam:
-Came up with ideas for games IF I enter it. Will ponder it more, may start Thursday or Friday.

Today was a planning day. Got half of the new talents figured out, as well as some misc stuff for the weekend. Praise be.

This past month was spent really getting back into game development after spending over a year and a half focusing on treating some mental health issues and getting medicated. I think I made great progress with getting a demo out in a month. The last time I did that was in community college for a previous project.

I want to try and get the full game released in the next 2 months at max. I'm in a weird spot where I have time to work on the game as much as I want, but for my own sanity I need to be able to say I completed a project in a timely manner. My mental health issues have cost me good jobs in the past, and while I'm doing much better thanks to (I hope) finding the right prescription, I need to be able to follow through on a project before I can feel more confident in being stable enough for a real job.

Idk thats my goal for this year at least lol

Weekly Update:

24 Hours:
-I added the monsters to hour 6. Now you can properly play through the content there.
-Finished the maps for hour 8. Though you can sequence break it as there's no checks or anything...yet.

And a screenshot. This is from a boss battle that was added this week:

Finished planning the 34 new talents and placed them into the game. Also fixed some bugs and created another dialog scene.

I didn't do a weekly update last week, so here it is late.

24 Hours:
-Added monsters, loot and such to hour 7. Monsters are added to hour 8 (no loot yet).
-Started dev on hour 9. Hour 9 is going to start with a small break as the party is waiting for something.
-Added team attacks. This took forever. @Trihan and @Puppet Knight helped me a lot with the code to get it working and the checks to make sure the conditions are working.

And a screenshot of the team attacks:

Been awhile since I posted anything (which is okay, seeing that I no longer have a lot to post about following the cancelation of Advent Heroes). However, I do still have a developer signed to publish their game, so I have been plugging away at the necessary code modifications to support the Xbox version of that game (which being in MZ where Advent Heroes was in MV required a few changes in regard to which functions I would overwrite for cloud saves, resource loading etc.) After several days of code edits and compatibility determinations (and a replacement TV for the dev area which is unrelated to game development) I have managed to get MZ to work on Xbox based on the following parameters:

• MP4 video is being forced because the WebM versions return an unhandled LoadError in the Xbox container.
• The WebView2 extension is used instead of the built-in WebView (which is actually carried over from when the container app for Advent Heroes was rewritten).
• Detection of game window activation has been removed from the code (and for the same reasons as with the creation of container apps on other platforms).
• Save data is not completely functional yet, although the entries for the files themselves are being loaded into the engine. (Also, I am overwriting the storage mechanisms which are normally used with NW.JS because of an incompatibility with localforage.)

I'll update further once all of the remaining matters are resolved.

EDIT: I figured out what happened with the save files. After comparing the data from MZ to the data on the C# side, I found that the data for game progress is being cut off when it's saved to the player's account. My guess is that there are character types in C# that are being misinterpreted because they would require escape codes (or are simply incompatible) so I'm going to create a Base64 of the game save during the account upload process.

EDIT 2: The upload process modifications didn't go to plan, so I moved the Base64 conversion to the JavaScript side (which is what ultimately did the trick, although I'm still working on some persistence matters).

EDIT 3: Figured out the persistence issue. I forgot to change the reference to a private variable from the C# side instead of the one that's available on the JavaScript side when I was checking for save data at game startup, so the existing files check was always returning false. Everything is now working as it should.

Update for last week:

24 hours:
-Made a rough draft for hour 9. Hour 9 uses the maps from hour 8 again so it was faster to do. Though the other reason was it was a break hour while the party figured out the next move.
-Made a rough sketch of hour 10 on paper, made the first couple maps in it.

And that is it for June though as I usually take a week or two off of game dev in the summer and I need a break. I may dabble in a map here or there but most likely I'm taking a break on dev til after July 7th.

First goal I'm making great progress on!

Second goal...

Got a lot done last month. Currently 2 months ahead of schedule.

Began chapter 7 yesterday. Its intro is almost complete.

Well, I finally did what I think I wanted to achieve in last year's thread, and put up a large sample of game!

Now to keep pushing through making the rest of it.

Way late to the party, but actually not going on many months long hiatus with my projects!

Then forgetting where I was going with it and just starting a new one instead....

Already updated my game in development thread, but I am posting my most two recent video demos here as well.

The functionality for my Sudoku game is now set so a player could play every pregenerated puzzle (currently 50 of 99), generated unlimited original puzzles and play them, change backgrounds, themes, number of puzzle hints, manually place their own hints, and more.

I still have a lot of functionality I want to add and I haven't even started on the music selection options. And I am still bug fixing as I playtest.

Anyway, here are the two recent video demos. The first is showing the current functionality of the custom UI and the second shows me playing two pregenerated puzzles while the background changes every minute.

Enjoy!

Six months after: I have spent some weeks at the beginning of the year studying and commenting the ARPG free dlc and I have more or less understood how it works. However, when the moment came to start making something I got doubts: I would like my games to be mobile-friendly as much as possible, but I discovered (someone please correct me if I am wrong) that games made with RPG Maker MZ do not support multitouch, which for a mobile action RPG is for me essential. So I left it aside.

Late Winter and beginning of Spring were a bit hectic at job. I started planning the third chapter of Little Adventurers (Little Adventurers 3 - The Great Spring Fair). Progress was slow at first, but in the last month it got momentum, and my planned date for its release is the end of October 2024.

Well, another one bites the dust. Found out earlier this week that I can't use my Xbox container anymore because of policy changes, so I ended up remitting the affected project back to its developer and pulled the plug on using MV/MZ code on console. I did try a third-party solution as a backup plan, but PIXI.js threw all kinds of errors when using it as it's not technically a full web view compared to what I was using before and therefore didn't have all of the required functionality.

Sadly, this is also going to be my last RPG Maker experience in terms of actual projects (although I do have an improvement that I would like to make to my text tools plugin to get it off the Yanfly dialog extensions before doing so, and I do still plan to remit my yellow devil implementation for other developers to use so that it doesn't go to waste). I at least owe it to the community to make my stuff available for whatever they may want to do, and in fact will be leaving my plugin page up on the Zero Break Games website for at least the foreseeable future (and may add a few things to it as well). But in terms of actual games, I'm moving on from RPG Maker (unless you count Unite, although that's not cost-effective for my budget right now due to the cost of both Unity Pro and the add-on package itself).

In the meantime, I leave you with a look at the Nefersila's appearance as she will be implemented in whatever comes next, both as my forum avatar and in full HD resolution. As you can see, she's evolved from the traditional definition of the mage class and into a full-blown knight, complete with a sword and shield. (She also has the feral traits that are responsible for her cat tail and upper ears, just as she did before.)




EDIT: Forgot to mention, but I also refined her scuba gear for when she has to get wet, which is a segment that I still want to implement in whatever I end up doing. More specifically, I added some protective bulk to the tail compartment of her wetsuit and gave her a bigger air tank to go along with it (although she does have to manipulate the curve of her tail in order to accommodate the size difference). Beyond that, I changed the visual appearance of her swimming pose so that her octo, gauge and vest inflator are positioned in terms of actual physics, and the belt for her weights now locks to her left side with the functional equivalent of a Velcro snap.






EDIT 2: Added Neffie's defensive and idle poses with her sword and shield drawn.

EDIT 3: Inflatable version of Nefersila's diving suit which uses air from her oxygen tank as thermal protection.







EDIT 4: One more update in terms of her diving gear. She now wears a hood that covers her entire head if the water is anywhere under minus 16 Fahrenheit (which integrates her safety mask in these situations, with a hole at mouth level for her breathing regulator to fit through).

So a bit of additional decision making with the diving gear, for which I ultimately ended up giving the cat girl a full mask instead of just half.





Of course, the human cop is not easily outdone:

I haven't posted an update in a while. Here we go:

24 Hours:
-Team attacks are set up for almost everyone. Also now it puts an icon on those who participated so you can see why they can't act.
-I mapped about half of hour 10, but it was feeling too samey. I need to redo it. Thankfully a new KR tileset came out that will work perfectly. It will now become the Sunflower plains!

The stat sim:
-I decided to switch gears here, and it is now:


Yeah I know there is a typo in there. That is just a default title screen for now.

I've been working on it for a week, it has all the main sprites (some extras are needed for intro and ending, I'll do those later), and you can walk around and go to most places.

Here is a WIP of the main area:

Still got to work on the HUD. Right now I just unga bunga'd in the one from the other stat sim (which is why it shows an image of Reid still, and some icons are off still) into here so that there IS a hud. I'll work on making it more fitting for this game over the next couple weeks.

This year I aim to actually make a playable demo for a game for once, rather than focusing on mapping/combat stuff but leading to a game that cannot actually be played normally.

Weekly update time:

Harold's Island Adventure:
-All trainers are implemented, most of the area is mapped. I need to map one last area and a few maps for endings.
-Two of the romance options can be taken to 3 hearts. The final event still needs to be added for one of them.
-Many endings still need to be added.

It's roughly playable though at this point! You can't get the last scene of most of the romances yet, and some zones for alternate endings do not exist. But at this point in time you can:

-Get every ending involving the ship
-Get a couple bad endings.
-Can complete Kaylee's route (one of the romance choices).
-Can take Viola's route to 3 hearts. Cannot complete as last event has not been written.

If I can keep up this pace an alpha build might be ready August/early September. It will be lacking a lot of polish at that point (as few if any cutscenes are animated yet for instance) but will be for testing the gameplay mainly.