Game Making Drive

What I did today?

I did some serious planning for a certain game mechanic of my game. It's called the Magia Matrix. But after talking to Yanfly, we discussed about how to go on about it. The plan end up being too big for the game as it is now and is reserved for a future project. But for now, I thought of incorporating the elements of the Magia Matrix, Robin's Idea and my old Magia Saturation Idea. In the end, it became similar to Valkyrie Profile's Soul Purification.

The Idea is that if you manage to do a series of critical hits against the enemy, the Magia Matrix will activate and you can perform team combos. Once a team combo is performed and the enemy is overkilled, they turn into Fragras. These fragras can be used to trade for Sairen's alchemic services, skill cost usage, changing the field effect of the Magia Saturation.

I also finished a new battle transition thanks to Fomar!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCkZO4neBh4

Today I worked on Forest Map Madness - a collaborative game that I have going for the Halloween contest on RMN. It's basically just a lot of maps done by everyone who signed up and 'sewn' together into a cohesive game by myself. I add story and most eventing to make an atmospheric adventure game.So I started the evening spriting a backpack for Emi, the main character, to carry around. It ended up looking pretty good, but it also reminded me that I needed to start working on a Custom Menu System.

http://rpgmaker.net/...mi_backpack.avi

I tried to brainstorm a few ideas of what I might need. I was originally thinking something along the lines of a four item carry limit, but the coding would get too troublesome, so I instead decided to just have all the slots already open at the start.

I ended up with eight slots and a whole lot of space. I then worried about whether I wanted items to be auto-placed or player-affected in that aspect, but since I'm working on a deadline, I decided to go with auto-placement. It makes eventing it a lot easier. It took a while to figure out the colour scheme and type of style I wanted the menu to look like, before deciding to stick with the colours used in the sprited back-pack. I then realised there was far too much empty space, and remembering that some of the maps had codes and hints, decided it might be a good idea to add a notepad.

Took me a while to get it looking like I wanted, and I ended up re-designing a few times before I got something I was happy with. I asked for some opinions on it from a few friends and juggled the placement a bit before I decided it was perfect. Then came the eventing.



Went fine until I tried it out. I realised that for some reason the pictures weren't showing up for when the cursor moved. It took me a while to realise that it wasn't really the event code that was an issue, so much as I had set the pictures to 100% transparency. >.<;

But I was kinda glad I did forget, since I managed to catch an issue that would have had me using more pictures than I needed. :D

Ended the session with a play test to check that everything worked okay, set up dummy pictures that I can fill in when I have sorted out all the items I'll need to add and found another bug that didn't let me scroll from the last spot of the bag to the first. It's now all working perfectly~ I just have to add in the text parts of the notebook, which shouldn't be too hard as I already set up some dummy pictures. I'll just need to know what needs adding for that too, and the menu will be completed. ^.^

Oh, and I did a fast mock-up map that turned out to look pretty good, so I'll have to join it up somewhere along the way. Tomorrow I'll probably start eventing and mapping some of the maps that will join contributed maps together.