Progression on progression

Lots of reworking being done with still plenty to finish.  Been also trying to design easier to use sprites so I don’t spend nearly as long working on them.

Accelerating with Excel

I think I’ve gotten more done these last few days than I have all year.  I’ve decided I’m going to use Excel to keep detailed information on everything, which I’ve been fattening up like mad.

I’ve been retooling the game quite a bit.  I wasn’t too fond of story and was having a hard time making it work.  The story is going to be still there, it’ll just a lot more compact with most of the unnecessary filler cut out.  Does this mean the game is going to be really short?  Not at all.  I’ve decided to switch over to a chapter format.  What was originally the bulk of the game will now be just a few chapters of it.

The main reason for the change is because of the world I’ve created.  Every game I have created, or planned on creating, take place in the same world and in around the same frame of time.  They’re actually all related to each other with its heavy lore, I just originally started making each of them as their own separate game.  This unfortunately meant I had to really cut down any referencing to other games so that the player doesn’t feel utterly confused (ie Azure’s demon rambling on about stuff in WoS).  This means that my older games, Heart of the Ancients and World of Shidel, will be part of this game with slightly altered and trimmed storylines.  Painted Red is excluded from this as I feel it belongs as its own game.

I’ll detail how this will actually look in a future post.

 

Try poking him to see if he’s still alive

Finally done with school.  I missed working on my game but I had so little free time.

Ideas have piled up over the months and be getting some work done.  One of the top items is trying to reorganize this site.

Power Overwhelming

Struggling to keep motivation up for Mystic Voyage.  Sometimes I just feel overwhelmed knowing how much work needs to be done.

Doesn’t mean I’ve been doing absolutely nothing though.  One thing I’m interested in doing is switching over to a side-scroll view for the maps.  This allows me to use the same sprites for both on the map and in battle, not having to make downward and upward facing sprites, and just generally have a fun time working on maps.

I also been reworking Lilly’s design to fit with the view and battle sprites.  She’s not quite done yet; I need to finish her boots and add her belt and gloves, then fix the shading.  I really should work on Tal, poor guy is supposed to be the main character and he’s had the least work done.

Thanks to some positive feedback and a strike of inspiration on my game, Painted Red, I’ve sort of been messing around and doing designs and making sprites for new parts of the game.  Since I wouldn’t be stuck in a short time limit, I could finish what I originally wanted to do as well as add the extra chapters so that it’s actually a fully completed game.  I had to cut so much and throw the original chapter one ending together in 2 hours, so it was a disappointing product.  This game would take far less to do since it’s meant to only be a few hours long and doesn’t have battles.

I’m a little indecisive with the first 2 pairs of sprites for which one to choose.  The red eyes might be too creepy.

Time is short, mortal.

Week 3

Have been trying to work on tiles.  Nothing all that interesting to show unfortunately, it’s mostly just rough sketches before I start pixelating them.

Busy busy

Week 2

Didn’t think school and stuff would dig into so much my time.

Mostly worked on database more.  Not the most exciting thing.

Drive it Home

Entered another game making drive.  Since I’m in school now, I won’t be updating quite as often.  Instead I’ll be posting weekly digests of what I did over the week.

Week 1

Been working on the item database.  Most stuff had generic names and no descriptions.

Not much else to say, week has been busy with preparing and settling in for school.

Map Concept and Painted Red

Apologies for not updating lately!  I think the game-making drive kinda wore me out; I’ve been having a difficult time getting myself to work on my game.  Also its the end of the year so I’m consumed with shopping and soon Christmas festivities.  Unfortunately it might get a lot slower since I’m taking a full-time course starting in January.

 

Mapping

Sometimes I wish I was good at making scripts.  I’ve been pondering about possibilities of creating maps in more of a side-scrolling fashion sorta like what was seen in Valkyrie Profile games.  Most games follow the standard top-down view with grid puzzles or the likes.  With a side-scrolling map I could easily incorporate gravity,  some platforming aspects, and a bit of action into the mix.  It might also make cutscenes a bit more interesting since everyone would be facing left or right allowing me to show various emotions that would be difficult to notice when a character is facing up.  Plus it’s something different that very few traditional RPGs  have done.

It would definitely make mapping a whole lot easier due to VX Ace’s lack of a decent layer system and I can actually use parallaxes as slower scrolling backgrounds to give a level of depth.

I need to search to see if someone already made this.  I doubt they would have everything I need, but it would be a nice place to start.

 

Painted Red

In other news, I’ve been thinking about fixing up my mystery game, Painted Red.  After receiving some nice feedback on it, I’ve developed a little bit of motivation with continuing with what I started.

Things that would be added or fixed:

• Finishing up animations for Adelyn and other characters.
• Replace all the placeholder sprites.
• Redoing the “current” ending for Chapter 1 since it was done in 2 hours to get the project completed on time.
• Making a tileset of my own instead of just tossing the whole thing through an image filter to meet the deadline.
• Fix the bad lag when outside.
• Re-add the puzzles and items that I was forced to cut.  There was actually puzzles planned with dealing with the not-supposed-to-be-dead-yet bird and carnivorous plants.
• Create Chapters 2 – 4 so that the game is actually complete.

There’s no guarantee that I would work on the game again but it is in my interest.

Say No to the Dress

Between not feeling well and a recent WoW patch, I haven’t gotten a whole lot done in the past week.

I decided to scale back on the size of my battlers.  As cool as it would be to have large sprites, they’re more difficult and time consuming to make … as if the smaller ones weren’t hard enough.  Currently working on Phanoire; who also got a few touch ups on her design such as an added necklace.

I don’t like how her dress came out, I’ll have to work on it more.  The bottom doesn’t form around her leg properly and the right leg is crooked.  I should of designed my characters to be nekkid or have skin-tight clothing so I didn’t spend so much time making it look right.  Her base sprite took me about an hour to make while adding a stinkin’ dress took 3.

Victory!!!

Day 30: Final

The Game Making Drive has come to an end.  Apparently I did about 90% of the damage to the sudden chain break that struck Team Emily near the end, yay.

Looking back on the past month, I didn’t seem to get a whole lot accomplished… but that’s kind of to be expected when working alone.  Most of what I did was revamping and refining characters, making some tiles, and putting some of my ideas onto “paper” since I’m usually lazy about that.

It was a good experience, although trying to accomplish something every day started to wear me out.  I’ll still keep updating, although probably not as frequently (for all 1 or 2 of you that actually bother to read what I post).  Even if I don’t post, I still get work done here and there.  Maybe one day this game will finally see the light of day… or hopefully at least be playable so that I got something more to show than just sketches and sprites.