Good News, Bad News, and Something Spooky...

Jesse - PVGames · 2018-09-13T07:13:15+0900

So, there is good news and bad news. Bad news first. After some setbacks, I simply can't find the willpower to continue on with the Medieval: Infernus resource pack at the present time. I've been working on the Medieval line of resources for about 3 years straight now, with about a dozen full resource pack released in that time and a pack of freebies, since MV was released. I feel that the Medieval line of resources was a substantial upgrade in terms of quality (and quantity, not to mention price value) over the High Fantasy resource packs that I first produced for VX/Ace several years prior to that. I am very proud of the work I accomplished, and am proud of making a system work (relatively anyway) that allowed for game-makers to create their own characters, complete with complex animations that went far above what RPG Maker allows by default. I am also proud of the design choices for the decals that allowed for very natural-looking landscapes and maps, even if it meant more people needed to adopt a parallax-mapping approach (don't blame me, blame the arbitrarily strict editor!) Although I greatly streamlined much of my workflow process when I made the switch from High Fantasy (and Wild Steam, and Sci-Fi, and Mythos...) to Medieval, a great deal of the work was still very much manual, particularly in regards to the character creator pieces. Every single clothing item that can be equipped to a template to build a character was made using a Hollywood-style "green screen" effect for the character as a stand-in, which required manual editing to remove. For the most part this wasn't a big issue, since GIMP and Photoshop both allow you to select an area based on a color. The time-consuming part is that there were always bits of green that bled over into the very edges of the clothing that would always require manual editing to remove. Needless to say, it is a time-consuming process. I've developed some methods of speeding it up, and have done tons of research and experimenting to try and make the process less painful. But after three years of it, I am finding it a bit too mind-numbing to continue on with that particular method of resource-creation. Combined with the character creator software's developer disappearing awhile back with some outstanding bug issues with the software, it all has left me rather drained. So I am going to stop making character pieces. For now, anyway. This means that Medieval: Infernus is going to be put on hold. So... What is the good news, you might ask? I am definitely not retiring from making resources. On the contrary, I am going to go forward with another overhaul in terms of resource quality and implementing new methods and skills I've developed over the past few years to further refine the workflow of my resource creation. My goal from the beginning was to always move towards making the process as automated as possible in order to save time and my sanity. Some things will always require a personal, human touch, but I wanted to reduce the "grind" aspect to nothing if possible. I definitely developed some new work-flow operations that make my life a LOT easier, I just haven't discovered anything yet to make the whole "green screen" work load any lighter and I don't think I will. With Medieval: Infernus on the shelf, I wanted to start something new using the new methods I developed recently. I am quite pleased with the results so far, and it is leading to... Mythos: Reawakening What you see below is all preliminary work and subject to change. Tile-wise, shadows are now created as part of the tile instead of something I draw in afterwards. Same with all characters. This creates a consistent level of shadows for both tiles and character sprites, all with a consistent light source. Further, all characters and tiles are created with said consistent light source, so the characters should feel more a "part of" the world, though I am still going to make all character sprites have a higher contrast overall than the background tiles so that they stand out a bit more. My approach to walls is going to be a lot better than what I had been doing in the Medieval resource packs. I not only want them to LOOK better, I want them to be easy to use, including the 45 degree angle walls. (Above: Strange occurrences bring the Detective into town to investigate... Mythos already features a great many outdoor buildings, vehicles, and other environmental tiles.) I've implemented a whole new animation system that allows me to mix all sorts of various animations together to create a full library of animations for a character. That library isn't huge at the moment, as I only created the basics for what I need so far and cannibalized some of the animations I have developed over time for the Medieval resource packs. What does this mean exactly in terms of what you will be getting? Your characters will all have over 500 frames of animation. All characters will have some basics in common such as walking animation…

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Started by Jesse - PVGames Sep 12, 2018, 10:13 PM 43 posts Page 3 of 3 View original ↗

toasttoasttoast

#41 Oct 12, 2018, 02:18 AM Source

I am highly appreciative of all of your hard work, Jesse. I can't imagine the workload, I'm the kind of person that succumbs to the pressure of even having to flesh out a single character as an individual being in written form, let alone rendering tens of thousands of images for a sprite xD.

At this point, I am inspired by the available Medieval resources as they stand to make my own Ultima VII spiritual throwback, somewhat like you did with Aleph. Britannia was mostly temperate forest and caves, as far as I can remember. Things like the Silverleaf trees could be done via hue/contrast edits, if I needed some funky colored flora and fauna. The only thing I would need at this point are some magic-users, snowy biome tiles and buildings, and the Infernus pack monsters and buildings. Pre-made characters don't bother me. We've got enough unique pieces for character creation that a few dozen or so pre-made characters wouldn't be a problem, in my opinion.

Even if those things were never made available, I feel what Medieval currently has is enough to make a full length game. I have a lot of grand ideas for an Ultima-like game, most of which I probably can't do by myself but I'd love to try anyway. At the time, the graphics were incredible, but what made the games so great were the nuanced characters, the world and its lore, and the narrative. Sure, some of it was standard fantasy stuff, some of it was downright bizarre, but Ultima was a successful franchise because it told stories and put the player on a path toward grand adventure with so much freedom you could quite literally destroy the entire world with a single, ridiculous spell.
Jesse - PVGames

#42 Oct 12, 2018, 12:21 PM Source

After Mythos: Reawakening I will revisit Medieval stuff. I will start by firing up Infernus again and getting that worked out.

I will continue making new character creator parts, but will focus on creating large pieces (such as full outfits) instead of each individual piece. So a pack would contain like... 3 templates for each gender, 8-12 outfits (body only, not head), and 4-8 headpieces (hair, facial hair, helmets, etc) and whatever weapons. This would greatly cut down on the amount of work required because right now it is the templates, then hair, headpieces, torso items, hand items, arm items, leg items, back items like capes, footwear, main-hand weapons, off-hand weapons, shields, accessories... it's just too much to do by myself ad-infinium.
Oceansize

#43 Oct 13, 2018, 08:04 AM Source

Great news, I'm in the middle of starting a project using your medieval resources, however I have another project in the pipeline which would greatly benefit from the Infernus pack as most of it would play in some sort of underworld/hell and there are almost no resources for that kind of setting, so I'm hoping to see the Infernus resources come out at some point in any kind of form. Just to show there are some silent supporters who appreciate your resources and are hyped for Infernus! :)