Game Making Drive Feb 2014

Day 20



Mapping, basically. I started mapping the Wrecked Coast, which is basically an island where boats and ships wash up after they sink. It's very much a work in progress at the moment. I decided apon having the intrepid duo originally split and to start with Lise instead of Dell right off the bat. This allows me to just force the player to jump straight in to action, seeing as Lise is mute and doesn't talk. As Dell's Guardian, she's up and looking for her wayward partner as soon as she's awake, which works with wanting to get the player straight into the game with little to none information. ^.^

I also figured she'd run across Tania before Dell. This introduces Tania's skills while Dell isn't around, and allows Tania to expand as a character, being the only person in the party who can talk. Dell never really talks about the world or any kind of sense so having someone dialogue about events before-hand to set up the game works best.

Here's that wip. It's a bit large.

...I need better palm trees. And wreckage. orz

February 23, 2014

Did drawings on how some characters should look like when you talk to them. I used Azure Dreams for Inspiration, because I loved how AD's character art for textbox incorporate such dynamic gestures and expressive faces.

Adrian, 90% done with the cutscene script! :D (he told me he'll finish it tomorrow, after that, he'll focus on the items/weapons/magic inventory)

Feb 23 2014

The Seven tower

- Alright the Video Animation is going through and no lags during recording, It took me a ton of Eventing in the engine to make it good.

- Intro scene is still being made.

Here's the update I was supposed to give about 11 hours ago? I fell asleep at my desk doing some capstone research and my neck feels awful.

As far as Databasing goes, I've added 12 new monsters and corresponding troops, about 20 new skills, and am still trying to balance the way weapons and armor work. For some reason each level gives +1 to each stat per character, and I don't know how to change that.

Anyway, as far as plot is concerned, you're going to be able to use 6 characters by the time you get to the first dungeon, but I will split you up as soon as you get there, and for good measure.

Mapping of the city as a whole is nearly complete. I just have to make a bar and write some notes with the EST Notebook system to add more lore and 'gossip' to the game. Think Final Fantasy tactics when it comes to that.

Eventing is coming slow. It's not my strong suit and I'm sure that if I were to sit down and get into it, I could do what I need to do as far as NPC interaction and cutscenes more fluidly than have event plots all over a map.

Anyway, I know it sounds like a small update but I spent most of the day working on this when I'm not on Google Scholar looking up articles for research.

Day 20

Continued working on the starting skills for each party member. Depending on the element you choose for the main character, the skills change based on that element + they are different for both Orion and Kacia. I just finished theirs while trying to make them unique, as the rest of the skills are gained through augmentations. (Either Tech or Magic powers, but only magic users can equip both skill types.

I'll probably continue working on skills (base skills for the other chars) tomorrow too since I'm on a roll with them. I have yet to make their animations though, that's another ballpark altogether. Not sure whether I should take forever to make them myself, or see if there's any pixel based ones out there I can recolor. We shall see.

What I learned today: More creative ways to use skills + common events. I hope it'll be as fun to use them as it was making them.

Holy crap, my internet is slow today. OTL

GMD Day 20 - February 23, 2014

Welp, today I worked on some emotion edits of the MC's face--there's only two left now and then I'll have a full faceset. However, because of the aforementioned slow-as-butt internet connection, I don't think I'll be posting pics.  :(

Feb 21-24, 2014





- Oh well, not much productive since the 21st... still trying to make the the tiles fit a more "front" view perspective


here's a screenie with mlogan's edits of the cabinets... http://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?/topic/20006-game-map-screenshots-4/page-62#entry230207

DAY 9 ~

Well today was mostly testing and learning how to use my newly implemented Scripts. (I nabbed a Quest Journal Script, Day/Night Script, and I am still looking for a certain type of Alchemy script, as I want it to act more like a store, through a specific person and maybe figure out how to have it as a menu option only when they are in the party.)

Of the scripts I have only mastered the Day/Night Script (But I doubt the Quest Journal Script will be too difficult to figure out).

Also I was trying to figure out a script to getting my maps converted to PNG images, however I kept getting an error so I might have to try and figure out how to grab them manually (Because thats harder on bigger maps). I went through this because I REALLY want to figure out Parallax mapping so I can use XP Tiles to the best of my ability, I mean I did put out a request for 4 Tilesets HOWEVER, If I knew how to Parallax Map, I can only improve the mapping, right?

FTLOP ~ Out B)

Game Making Drive, Day 17, February 23:

   So interesting weekend it's been. My eldest daughter came to me and told me she had an idea for a game that she wanted to make, and asked me to make it with her (which made my day.). So, since my drive for my side game has fizzled anyway (though that wouldn't have made a difference, but it was convenient) the three of us spent a large portion of today going over the story and everything, stressing the idea of keeping it short and simple (20-30 minutes hopefully, hard to curb her ambition but I have to much personal experience with how that ends). The game stars the family dog, and will hopefully encompass the rest of our animals as well. (provided I can get my hands on a llama and donkey sprite) so while we worked on getting point A-B down story-wise we also took a crack at finding tiles that would work and then rpgmakering our property together, which is a heck of a lot harder than I would have imagined it to be. (seriously though, with all the farm tiles out there for the people wanting to make farming sims there doesn't appear to be a single tractor, pickup or even a round bale for hay in existence, also stables are a challenge.) Also there's just to much about real nature that cannot be mimicked in rpgmaker's map view, I think all the people I see on the problems with rpgmaker games thread that talk about maps looking 'unrealistic' should try actually mapping a real place sometimes, it shows you exactly how 'realistic' it really isn't.

Some Screenshots

Posting early because soooo busy today:

* finished the final side quest!!!! They're all done, woo!

• made a biig decision: no more optional party members! For a lot of reasons that I'll probs blog abt later, they're gone!

* started working on regional battle backs. A third of the way there, would finish but like... Moving and cleaning and going to see a band x_x zero time for game dev today

On my bfs phone, can't work out how to post the image, but I'm TEAM BLUE

I'd like to post for today (the one where I'm supposed to post 17 hours from now) and tomorrow (the one where I'm supposed to post 6 hours from now) since I'd like to devote this whole night on msdn.

What I did is quite entangled with each other, so I'll put them together here:

- Scripting Custom Pixel Movement

- Working on msdn for WIN32API

- Working on DL::Cptr library

- Do script requests

No screenshot from my game yet since most trials have been failures so far, but I've obtained more and more data from every fail and I haven't failed on the same scenario twice. : p

Cheers,

Today I tried to figure out why I am struggling with the feeling like I am working but not getting a whole lot accomplished. I pinpointed that one of my biggest issues is dissatisfaction with my maps. I just can't settle on them. I flip back and forth between trying to parralax them and using the editor and not being happy with any of it.

So today I settled on making "clutter sheets" as I'm calling them. These are sheets of graphics where I am clumping items together to be used in the editor and give an appearance of parralax while creating maps in the editor. I think this will go far in helping me finish the maps. Here is one example, I have a couple of scenes where ships come in with cargo, so this sheet will help show cargo being loaded/unloaded.

I have worked on others as well.

Worked on Shade's portrait.  She's a brat.  I'll need to work on a better swirly design, since scaling it up didn't work out too well.  I'm putting her down for now and working on others for my second post later in the evening/morning.






We also worked on the St.Cuthburt Statue in Blender, gonna do a few poses and see which works better.




Have you no shame St.Cuthburt, going commando under your robes.  Resource artist is hitting this in blender like with the crystals.  I'm tried of failing to properly construct a pixel statue, so it's time to cheat with heavy handed technology.



Ulrika shares her thoughts on my world building as I begin to rework the INN and Tavern.




As you can see, my tables lower benches fail miserably >< I'll do the cheating overlay tile like I did with the pews if I have time. Otherwise they stay broken.  Too much to do.  Leave those bears alone Ulrika!



 

 

Day Gold aka I think Twenty


Unfortunately, I feel back into bad habits and missed the last few days. I did get some stuff done today, though.

• Started and finished the next scene which I had been avoiding. Yay for scenes with lots of movement from party members that are triggered by talking to someone, so location and direction is variable. Turn 90 degrees and 1 Step Forward/Back are the commands for that.
• Said scene also needed a scriptlet to get the fade effect that was required. It's far from perfect, but it works for the 5 seconds or so it will probably be needed in the game -_-

Day: Something IV

So I did the thing that I was avoiding this entire time. I called it evil, I called it my worst enemy, I said it was worse than my ex. I told myself I'd never do this, never in a million years, because I feared it. It scared me, it was so intimidating that I just ignored it. Pretended it didn't exist. When others pointed this out to me, I feigned ignorance, and lied that I would fix it. I was scared of it, because it required work. I don't like work. It would take a ton of time to do, and I wouldn't be caught dead being inconvenienced to get it done.

But I did.

I got it done.

And guess what? It actually wasn't so bad. What was it you ask? It was renaming all the maps that I have made to fit a specific format. Yes. That's it. Looking back on it now... Why was I so intimidated by this? The world may never know. But I actually got it done with time to spare. Next time I'll probably tackle another thing that's been intimidating me, and that'll be completing the darn mines dungeon... I've got 2 more dungeons to go! Why is this one taking so darn long!? Oh and don't even talk to me about sidequests. Those things scare the heck outta me! But, heck, I'll tackle those when the time is right.

Praise Helix!

Day 20


* Did a lot of little mapping things including editing some tile colours for the third dungeon


* Made the map chips for the flowers who's busts I've been working on


* Wrote out the next couple of scenes (but didn't add bust guides or too much choreography for Rach yet)


Excitedly, I have actual art art like things to work on in my queue again. Best.

Sunday, 2/23/2014

Moved groups of enemies to the battles themselves, and continued to work on the Barbazu boss.  I have more to show for it now, but it needs more balancing...and to keep it under control, players kind of need to make sure their armor is up to date (as well as keeping kind to the healing).  Once Barbazu does Bloodshed, and if you're still bleeding, you lose a LOT of HP (estimated about 60-70% health).  I'll probably tweak that damage down for a little more control.  I've also been scaling base damage modifiers as the game goes on, and this is the point where the game starts getting a little difficult (with the final dungeon right around the corner).  So more tweaking must be made.  Next update will probably consist of class working as well as more items in the database.

I need to rethink these double updates on Sunday.  I've done a great deal of work on portraits, but I have nothing finished.  Here is an intermediate on Wolfe's layout and design.  As you can see the finished default of the emo set is just short of the bottom a little.  Ugh. >>

I'm in better shape than last week for production, and I've to finish up very little before I go into the Intro artwork and testing.  I'm nearly there.  I just have to stay focused, alpha .2 is on the way ^^

Today was all about scripting ;w; (it's a good thing and a bad thing - I love programming, but it's also my day job...)

On the plus side, I got to know a lot more about Fibers and the RPG::Event stack.

On the minus side, I got to know a lot more about Fibers and the RPG::Event stack.

Lots of small cosmetic fixes and compatibility patches to make things look and run smoothly, as well as some squashing of annoying bugs >:

Still on pins and needles about the RM Venture outcome, so that's partly to blame for my less-than-stellar week in terms of getting things done ><;

(that and good old-fashioned procrastination TT)

In any case...

Go, Blue Team!

GMD Day 19+20

Sorry for these double updates, keep getting caught up in things.

Day 19:

Did some searching for scripts for a particular system I want to implement in my game

Couldn't find one...

Imported a few of my Faded battlers ingame, current problem is since they're gray, and if they're on a gray background (since there's no color at that stage ingame), they blend in too much lol.  So I'll have to edit their darkness, perhaps add a light glow around them, something to make them pop out from the background.  Will mess around more with that later and ask for feedback.



Day 20:

Messed a little more with my combat system

Wrote down notes for another system that I want in my game, a color synthesis mechanic where you can combine items together.