MV - Fidel & The Pauper's Paradox (Sean Murray)

The streams just aren't the same without you:LZSwink:



Great! I'll mark it on my calendar! I hope I can show you some interesting things about my music making process!

Small update made to the original post. If you want to show support for my game, I've made some banners that you can add to your signature or...well anywhere else you want.

SHOW SUPPORT! GET A FORUM BANNER!
@Dalph started the trend of making this little promo banners for forum users (or really, wherever else you might want to show some love.) Though he didn't directly request I make one, who am I to deny the potential - especially when I regularly talk about the importance of things like this (in the form of a press kit).
If you wish to support Fidel & The Pauper's Paradox, you can show some love by downloading one of these banners. There are 5 medium sized banners and 2 small banners. If you want to show support but the banners are the right size for you, let me know.

I'll be back soon with a proper update on the game's status later, but if you can't wait, a few weeks ago I showed off a lot of what I have been working on during a stream. You can see all of that in this video:
- YouTube Feel free to jump around or set the playback speed to be faster.

This looks really good.
I really like the surreal concept of this game, I had something similar in the works (small girl into surreal world) although it's currently on hold for other projects.
Thanks for mentioning me though! I will support this game too by adding the banner in my signature, I really like the idea and what you showed so far!

I'm actually having a bit of difficulty in choosing the banner though, they all look nice, lol.

EDIT:
I chose the first because it fits with @TESTOSTERONE and @TRIDIUM banners, but I really liked the 4th one too. The banner is clickable and redirects to your thread.

Good luck with the game.

That's really cool of you, thank you! I really appreciate receiving your support, it's very motivating.
I feel it's only right for me to also include some banners of games I am looking forward to currently in development by community members, however I struggle to change my signature as the information is still pertinent.
Maybe I'll also make a banner for the graphics crash :LZSlol: It might catch more people's attention that way.

called it, blonde blonde and blonde.

Also, still waiting on this demo, am-dol. Any eta?

@TESTOSTERONE
I'm not sure if I would consider Scarlet from @TRIDIUM 's game to be fully blonde, her hair is more white\beige, leaning towards grey mostly. The yellow is very mild on her. Her sprite also has grey hair so...NOPE. She is not blonde.
I actually wanted to support @rpgLord69 stuff too, because I like his minigames but my wife is on this website too and she would be like: WTF are you playing there, eh??? lmao...

Back to Fidel & The Pauper's Paradox.
I'm also looking forward for a demo.

Technically it's supposed to be white, @Dalph, but it's a side effect of being an An0m@ly, so maybe she's blonde normally?

I stand corrected, Dalph. Blonde, ex blonde and more blonde. :D

Haha, imagining your wife looking at the forest of lesbians banner in your signature.

Also am-dol, you made some really beautiful banners there. I like them.

That's perfectly understandable @Dalph . And it's an "old" game already. For ep2, I'll see if I can whip out a banner of Amka stepping on Sam's crotch for you. That's easier to explain to your wife.

PS. And yeah, nice banners by the TheAM-Dol.

Hahaha, well, it's definitely nice to hear so many people are interested in the game. Again, it's a very empowering and motivating feeling to work faster.
However, I can't say for sure how close a demo would be.
I planned to do another round of closed beta testing to get some feedback. This second round of closed beta testing I hope to include all 3 levels plus some of the NPC's stories to be fully complete-able.
At this time, I am wrapping up the mapping of the third level. I still have all the events and stuff to place, plus the final boss of the level - basically I'd say a generous 1/3 of the level complete.

NPC stories have been neglected throughout development :LZSlol: Gosh I hate working in the tiny little message box window and putting in all the escape codes into the dialogue. Many of the stories have been fully written in a word document...but...you know...not actually implemented.

I'm also planning a major overhaul to the tutorial/intro of the game that better suits the narrative (also the tutorial and intro story in it's current form are 2 separate parts of the game. The new intro integrates the tutorial into the story itself making it both more exciting and making the intro much faster - I'm really happy with it.) Point is, I think the new intro might leave a better first impression, so maybe I should have that finished before the beta test as well :LZSskeptic:

Definitely stay tuned, I'll be posting about that here. Closed beta testing in this case is just as simple as sending me a message saying "Oooh! Ooooh! Me! Pick me! I want to play test!" and I'll give you a secret download link to access it.
I don't do open beta testing because I want to make sure that the people who are play testing are actually going to provide feedback. People tend to feel more obligated when we are in contact directly :LZSwink:

Gah, I want to try this so bad but at the same time...I don't know if I have time. Def keeping an eye on it!

Hey folks!
Time for a monthly update of what has been going on with the game's development.

I want to start off with a little bit of an exciting story...well, exciting for me.

Somon has been my artist for over a year now, helping me with the art in this project. However, during that time, it has always been business, business, business. I hardly knew anything about her (I wasn't even sure if she was a she). While she does live in the same country as me, she lives quite far away. So meeting up to discuss things in person has never been possible.
So it was to my surprise, this past Monday morning. I sat down at my desk at work and checked my email to see I had a new message alert on Pixiv. "I'm going to be in your area to meet some friends today and tomorrow. Do want to meet afterwards?"
I was shocked :LZSlol: I was actually really busy both those days - not to mention her flight home the next day was too early for any person with a day job. But I left work early (shhhh, my boss doesn't know) and was able to meet her!
I didn't have any time to buy her a souvenir from the area (it's a custom in the country, not to mention, just plain ol' polite) so instead I hastily cooked up a book of memories for our time working together. I wanted to share it here, though I've edited it a little bit.
Warning, if you don't watch my streams and don't know what I look like, you'll get a surprise face reveal on the last page of this little art book. It goes over a brief history of the art with the game's development.

Mind you, the language is simple so that Google-sensei could translate it easily, and also...I mean, I only had like an hour to put this this together, so like...rushed doesn't even begin to describe how quickly this thing was thrown together.

---

Now for some updates!

Actually not a lot has gone on since the last one.
I spent the past month working on mapping. The forest map has been fully mapped out:


I haven't been very happy with how flat the maps look. I'm not talking about cliffs and stuff (although those do help a little), I mean that I feel like the game feels so...unprocessed - missing some cool lighting effects, you know?
So, I started playing around with parallax mapping. Now, doing a high quality parallax map for every map in the game would way over scope things, so instead I aimed for speed-parallax mapping. Basically 2 simple layers that I can quickly run a brush over and call good within less than 40 minutes. And so far, it has worked well enough. Just adding some additional shadows and ambient occlusion helps give some more depth to the map without doing a bunch of additional "off-grid" detailing.

Since the game was built around tiles and not parallax maps, I (of course) created the option for players to remove parallax maps. In Options -> Visuals, Parallax quality can be set to Max, Low, or none. This will either show all layers, show only the bottom layer (ground layer), or remove all of them. This doesn't impact performance a lot in the forest, since the forest itself is small 50x50 chunks, however, where I really wanted to use this Parallax mapping is on my humongous Seas map, and here it definitely impacts performance.
This map is 255x255. Now, we've all (hopefully) seen the discussions about how a parallax map of this size can bloat memory usage. But I had to see for myself what it does.

While testing this, I made an interesting discovery. It heavily spikes RAM usage at first and really slows load times down when entering the map (or opening the menu), but it barely exceeds 1GB of RAM utilization, which I would say is within the safe limits. Once the garbage collection comes in, it drops down to a more reasonable 350~MB. Actually, what's fascinating about this is that that 350MB is barely more than the forest map with all the parallax maps enabled. It makes me wonder if there is some sort of image culling or compression that is done by the engine. But it should still be in RAM...I'm not sure what is going on here.

Anyways, to speed things up, the parallax itself has been split into 3 major chunks, which allows the engine to load them more efficiently to reduce the load time when entering the map.

This is obviously not the full map. The map is so large that by the time I shrunk it down enough to be able to upload it to the forum, all the parallax detail wouldn't be visible. This is just one small chunk of the map.


Along with this, I have wanted to rework how enemies function in the game.
To most players (who beta tested the game) likely won't notice much of a change, but it's a huge change for optimization as well as control of the types of encounters plus some general polish!

Before, enemies functioned as so:

• Enemy occupied a region as a parallel event to update enemy coordinates.
• Game also ran a parallel event to check player coordinates and region
• When the player enters an enemy region, change enemy AI behavior to pursue player. If the enemy coordinates matches the player's coordinates: start a battle.

The problem is that the battle would usually trigger once the X&Y match, but due to how grip movement calculations are done this would make it appear like the player and enemy pass through each other. This didn't necessarily cause any problems, but it did look unpolished. During some early testing, I realized lowering the wait frames on coordinate checks reduces this problem, but doesn't outright remove it. So I had settled on that for awhile. (of course, less wait frames is not ideal for optimization)

The second problem I wanted to solve was making enemies random.
Before, enemy encounters were "scripted" in a sense that each placed enemy event would be a specific fight. While this is necessary for some fights (as often the first fight you encounter in each level is meant to be the easiest troop for that level to act as a "tutorial" for the new enemy types) most fights in the level should be random! So I wanted to devise a way to handle this...I could technically make every single enemy do a random check before starting the encounter, but that's quite cumbersome...

The new enemy function!

• Regions are no longer important for the enemy function (but still used to determine other things). Instead, events are used to mark when the player enters or exits an enemy's "territory" (region).
• These events change a self-switch on the enemy to change it's behavior (change to a pursuit or move randomly move route depending on whether player is entering or exiting the territory)
• The enemy itself is marked as event touch, so now combat begins much more reliably and no longer does the player randomly pass through the event before entering combat. This looks way more polished!
• The encounter itself has been moved to a common event. Each level now has it's own common event where it will pick a random troop encounter applicable for the level. Additional logic has been added to the random encounter event to prevent it from selecting the same troop encounter twice in a row. And if I want specific troop events for specific encounters (such as the aforementioned tutorial troop), I can just assign the battle processing for that troop to the event and skip assigning the common event to it.

Although I still need enemy regions and player coordinates for my lightning rod mechanic, it's not as high priority, so I have been able to increase the wait frames on the parallel events, and of course, every enemy is no longer a parallel event itself, so I got some performance gains! (But not as much as you would think because I had built a special parallel event culler so that all enemy parallel events are not being processed at the same time)

---

Finally, I am making steps to rework the intro. I briefly talked about this...somewhere, probably in a previous post in this thread...
The intro has always been this ham-fisted thing that was quite long. No subtely in the message and themes of the game, too much talking...it just needed to go.
So I reworked the intro.
Not only is the intro much snappier, but it also acts as the battle tutorial. So effectively, I was able to roll the story and the tutorial into a single section, which reduces pacing problems later.
I have only remade the map and written the new script, but this has not been fully implemented yet. Somon is making some very, very special (and expensive) art for the intro. Since I was working on the Forest level prior to getting distracted with this new intro, I want to go back to focusing on the Forest until Somon is finished with the art, and then I will fully implement the new intro. Maybe once the new intro is complete I can run a second beta test :LZSskeptic:
Anyways, here's that map:

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That's all I want to report for now!

Thanks for reading all this :LZSproud:

noted!

but nice art, hope you had a great few hours you met her :)
as well the development goes well as it looks really amazing.

I'm gonna get so lost running around that huge forest I can just feel it.

And you two look pretty excited to finally meet face to face.

Hopefully not, I tried to give each map a distinct look and feature. Granted it's all forest, but hopefully moving through it will make sense. Each block is named of the compass direction too. for example the block in 1-1 is named "Forest, Northwest".
However, the default vanilla "map name" display is easy to miss since it just sneakily fades in and out in the top left corner...I may just use a more picture based method of map name display to make sure people don't miss that.
Even if you do get lost, that's okay. This level is unique in that there is no set destination other than the center (which, don't worry, I'll make that very clear to the player that "to win, go to the middle") which can be accessed from the very beginning, which is unlike the other 2 levels where there was a linear or semi-linear path to clear in order to access the final room. However, the main goal is to collect resources, so the other 8 maps surrounding the center map are totally optional. Although it wouldn't be efficient time management, it is built in a way that players could theoretically stay in a single map to collect enough resources.

Perfect, if they are optional, that makes it more fun to explore.

You haven't told us--- what was it like to meet your artist face to face for the first time after working together for a year?

Sorry for the wait, I wanted to make sure I told this story well and yesterday was not a good day for storytelling :LZSlol:

Well, I personally felt like a little kid again; too excited to go to Disney land the next day to be able to fall asleep. Honestly, it was so weird for me to be so excited I don't normally get that way. I guess it was because of the spontaneity of it all that I just didn't have time to mentally prepare and so it was just so much more thrilling.
Prior to the actual meeting, I was actually a little nervous - once again, rather strange. I am often meeting new people, and I never get nervous. I guess having spent a year together talking business but never really getting to know who the person is can make emotions high.
But, she met me at the station and greeted me very friendly and warmly.
Her flight out was in the late afternoon, and of course there is all the security, baggage check, gate finding procedure nonsense at airports so we didn't have a lot of time, so we just went to a cafe at the station itself.

After we got our coffee we started talking.
She's warm, polite, and friendly, but also a little bit shy. Though she (like most Japanese) is pretty good at masking her emotions, she told me that she was very nervous meeting today. So I told her I'm glad I wasn't alone :LZSlol: I'd say that her art gives a pretty good representation of her personality. The only thing it doesn't represent well is that she's a little bit of a party girl as well. She enjoys going to bars with her friends.
She's also a gamer. The purpose of her surprise trip was to meet her friends which she met while playing Overwatch. She also really enjoys Final Fantasy 14....so much so she delayed my character art for 4 months :LZSlol: (see art book above)
Because she likes to go bar hopping and drinking with friends, I told her about my upcoming birthday party and invited her to join. It's unlikely she will join, (but she said she will think about it...but I know Japanese people :LZSangel:) Anyways, she said maybe during the winter break she'll come. We'll have to see.

We talked a little bit about her new home that she just bought (sadly it doesn't look like her house in my game.) And talked a bit about my own life happenings - which if you've been keeping up, has been a lot. So I appreciated having her support and sympathy. Actually the current expensive art project we are working on, she has been kind enough to let me pay for it across a few months instead of all at once like usual. And from that conversation lead into discussions about the current project. So in the end, our meeting did eventually become about business as well, but it's so much easier to collaborate in person than over messages (especially messages that get read/replied only every other day or so).

All in all, I think our meeting was about an hour and 20 minutes. I showed her to her train (because she even admitted the station is rather confusing - she's not alone, everyone gets lost there) and then said goodbye.

I hope to see her again, but if not, I'm just glad I got to meet her once. I'm very happy to have her as my artist.

Awww, that sounds sweet. You guys got to know one another a little better. I too would probably feel a little nervous, so totally natural.

Haha, I love the part... "Sorry, AM-Dol, I can't draw your art right now, I am too busy playing FF14... for the next 4 months"... hahaha. I mean yeah, priorities!

I can't believe she met some folks online playing Overwatch and then went to meet them in person for real. Is that pretty common in Japan?

Her art is pretty cool, and I agree I didn't feel the party girl vibe looking at her Fidel portrayal.

So when's your upcoming birthday and what are the plans?

No idea, most of my friends here aren't gamers. But I think so. Cities and communities often offer plenty of places and events to facilitate those kind of things. Just a guess though.


October 26th is my actual birthday, but it's on Thursday, so on Saturday the 28th, my friends and I are going to go out for dinner and drinks. I want to taste home, so it's undecided; I may either go to American-style diner with delicious hamburgers that drip fat and freedom, or there is a rare Taco Bell in the downtown area that tastes like every Taco Bell; delicious unhealthy fake meat that results in toilet visits shortly afterwards.
Indeed, home.

I don't want to accidentally inundate other people who might be following this thread with non-game related updates, so if you have other questions, feel free to message me. I'm an open book!

Came here 'cuz I didn't want to derail the Dime thread more than I already did. Just wanted to say that you gotta come up wid a snappier term for "ConP". Summat like "Guts" or "Grit" or "Pluck", I dunno what exactly. But it's gotta be something else than "ConP". Not giving you a deadline, but I wud really like a Christmas present! :kaoluv: