April Goals & Progress Thread

[Arithmetician]

Brainstormed a new idea for an Elementalist passive.

 

[Marquise*]

@AceOfAces_Mod Thanks for paying attention to those concerns. I like annon comments, but yeah if there is abuse building up... sadly...

Times flies here; yeah I am working on my Pangofly tail (I was to forget the work verb and just use dragon in the sentence and it sounded wrong in my mind. XD) I'll scale it tonight... *looks time and it is almost midnight* well, seems it is the right limb to have fun on until tomorrow!

Wings are next and they seems/feels they will be a wee bit more tricky this time on 3rd pose rear from the way they contract.

 

[DragonVine]

I have met the goal of finishing my Masters degree!

Goals about game making shall follow soon haha.

 

[Milkdud]

Got my batteries for the power supply, so I'm back up and running. Only problem is I've gotten sucked into Persona 5 (and giving Destiny another chance) that I've neglected game making. I did work on it a bit this morning though and I plan on working on it a bit more once I get home from work. Not much to report on but I hope I can get more than enough done on it.

I hope. Wish me luck!

 

[Arithmetician]

@DragonVine Congratulations! It's a lot of work just to get one... and I'm nearing the end of my coursework for a second Master's degree.

@Confederacy I completely understand. I've played over 60 hours of Persona 5 in the past month, obviously at the expense of game-making. I'm on the 5th Palace now.

But onwards to progress. I had some time to brainstorm today, and I think I finally came up with a passive skill set that I like for the Elementalist class.

Spoiler: Elementalist Class Skills

Job Command: Summon - Inflict heavy / severe area damage, with a summon for each element, but these are very slow to cast and cost tons of MP

Job Level 2 - MP + 20% - Maximum MP is increased by 20%
.
Job Level 3 - Geomancy - Adds a new equippable skill set, which lets you achieve random attack spell effects for free, with the available skills depending on the terrain.

Job Level 4 - Evoke - Adds a new equippable skill set which lets you quickly summon an elemental to achieve a support effect at a lesser MP cost

Job Level 5 - Attune Elements - Adds a new equippable skill set that grants elemental attributes to an ally's normal attack, and increases the power of the chosen element temporarily

Job Level 6 - Nullify Elements - Adds a new equippable skill set that grants an ally immunity to the chosen element for a short time.

Also, charted out all available passive skills for all classes again, and planned a few tweaks, such as a change to the Warrior's job command and a re-ordering of some skills by Job Level.

Edit: Did a bit more playing around with Double Casting to see if I could find out why it doesn't work with Concentrate. No luck so far, but it isn't affected by the Ward state, so that's at least a new bit of information.

 

[Amysaurus]

I'll tweak the wings some more later on, but I'm calling the harpy portrait done for now. I'm pretty happy with how she turned out overall. ^^

Spoiler

As far as my uni work goes, I ended up finishing my first full website for my coding final, and I'm most of the way finished with my 3D character animation final.

 

[DragonVine]

@Arithmetician - I just finished my second Masters too, actually!

@Amysaurus - That looks fantastic!

Goals for the rest of April and into May:

• Finish mapping my main map for a game I'm working on.
• Finish critical gameplay systems (i.e. investigation minigames)
• Write the first few scenes of my story. (I have an overall plotline in mind with a beginning and end, but I need to outline the major plot points of the story and flesh out the background for a few characters)

 

[EliteZeon]

Been practicing my Overworld Sprites and today I finally got around to making the template for human male characters. Now like 4 more body types to go. T_T (The goblinoid/ork Race, a four armed insectoid Race, smallish people and children, taller people) that's not including female body types... so crap, that's 9 body types total. I think I need about an hour for each body type. I just need to find the time to sit down and feel like doing it. I can see why some recent RPG indie games I've seen have unique characters stand still a lot such as Undertale and I believe One Shot also had quite a few NPCs with unique body types mostly standing still.

In my handdrawn world, I got several conceptual thumbnail sketches made and I'll share them sometime later. Been trying to sketch out ideas for custom tiles, and then I realized the ones I made wouldn't work with the birds eye view for RPGs.

In either case, I think I need to explode all my current maps and I will probably swap over to Ancient Dungeon tilesets fused with my edits and own creations since my new sprite style causes the characters to tower over the vanilla stuff. I'll toss my wallet at the screen next sale that comes around.

My setting takes place in a post-magical war era, so I like the idea of having deactivated golems and tanks covered in plant-life placed here and there on certain maps. Plus there aren't much "magitek" styled tilesets I've seen around.

Spoiler

Eh I think the walking Up and Down sprite could use some work. The template isn't meant to be super proportionately accurate, since I just wanted to have a rough idea where body parts go. Plus I mostly plan on having characters with somewhat layered clothing.

These are characters I designed for my party in Roll20, for those that don't know, Roll20 is basically a online tabletop gaming site, IE Online Pathfinder and D&D. I was testing to see how well my sprite template would work overall. Apparently one of my party members wanted to be an exact copy of Sabin from FF6.

Pen thumbnails for battler ideas, overworld sprites, scenes, lore and tiles. I thought it would be cool to have WW1 styled tanks or Studio Ghibli styled tanks be placed in this setting and have them powered by magical forces. I also went with the idea that the Insectoid Race has a bit of a Cowboy or American Frontier styled fashion and culture. Imagine a Four-Armed insect wielding revolvers in each hand!

This is a much older image I sketched with pencil about a year ago, but I finally got around to scanning it. These are design ideas for 4 possible villains of 4Runes. Their designs are based off real world creatures that may convey a sense of fear in certain areas. From left to right, its a King Cobra, a Black Cat, a Royal Moth, and a Lamprey Eel. I tried my best to make their faces reflect their personality.

I'm still naming them, but I think I'll name the girl on the left Claire and the lady on the right Mjrna. The male on the far right might get a full redesign.

Edit:
@Amysaurus You know what I couldn't put my finger on it at first, but I just realized that your character design there reminds me of Betty from VA-11 HALL-A. Perhaps its the eyes, or the angle, or the lighting on the face... Or that pixels can only go so far. Maybe I'm an idiot. Eh here is the character I am referring to.

Spoiler

 

[Marquise*]

@DragonVine Congrats on the degree! As well as the other projects.
@Amysaurus On the blue version I am confused and curious; what are the blue bubbles under the arm glove?
@EliteZeon Please tell me that the story and programming and game play and music will match that visual work on your game!

Sorry everyonne... they are putting stuff in my kitchen vs roaches Monday so the tail is done on the Pangofly Dragon... But...Sheesh... I got to move the kitchen now and... it is to rain Monday on the balcony... (yeah... need to keep my feline pride safe!)

Just the wings to do now... Send positive thoughts; I want more wings less poison and less troubles now!

 

[EliteZeon]

Well here is likely my last update for the month.

@Marquise* I really, really hope so. Its my first progress, and I am taking my sweet time on it. Since this is a solo, scripting bugs are common unfortunately, since I don't know code. Music and tiles are what I can afford from the DLC store, and story... I am going for a Studio Ghibli films meets Berserk and Claymore vibe. I got ideas for dungeons and where the story begins and ends, but unfortunately the middle portion is empty... and I've rewrote some good chunks of the beginning area since plot holes appeared and things didn't add up right towards the end.

For the most part, I am going over the direction of my game and thinking of reducing the scale overall.

At first I was going to go off and go full open world shenanigans with plenty of memorable side quests with large dialogue trees for EACH NPC. But the amount of effort I needed, the amount of things I had to learn, and the number resources I lacked really made me put things off. That aside though, I did write down every dialogue option I wanted in the first and second chapter of the game...

In terms of gameplay, there are four main characters and the idea is that they have four different subclasses for each character. But balancing and animating each skill they get may be tedious, I have a rough idea for everyone on what I want, but there is a possibility I may just do variety in equipment builds. I'll try to stick to the class system, I gotta play around with it more.

At the moment, since I am going to have to start rebuilding maps for my new overworld sprite style and thus nuking my old events... I think that I have to aim for a more linear experience and focus purely on story and minimizing on side quests. I still really want to add in these first few side quests though... the basis for one was that villagers were freaking out because strange noises were coming from an estate and the family was missing. So the adventurers reluctantly wander in and horror game vibes would start up. In the end, the family is rescued and turns out they thought having a pet basilisk would be a cool thing for rich people to have. That side quest was also going to be a tutorial on certain states and actions during battle.

In terms of mapping, I am using Ancient Dungeons Base Pack for my rebuild. Unfortunately I feel like it lacks some cool tiles and overrides that the RTP comes with, also I don't know if I am doing something wrong or not, but some tiles I want to work together have a habit of not matching together at all. Ah well, I will need to make more tiles anyways to begin with. Since I am having such a hard time with Ancient Dungeons, for whatever reason, I feel like I will want to swap over to making smaller maps in general. I'll toss up examples in the spoilers below. Another idea was to try and form up a team or get volunteer help in to help with unique scripts, mapping, music and such. But I am not sure I actually want that nor do I feel like I am fit to lead my own project without making people hate me.

Spoiler

Using RTP, my maps were planned to be kinda big and vast:

But the feeling I get from using Ancient Dungeons DLC, I get a strong urge to work smaller, such that an entire map looks only like this:

This means that a larger town may be separated into smaller split maps. I don't know why, but I feel like these tiles are significantly more harder to use when trying to make large maps. Maybe I should try replicating some of the sample images, or perhaps move over to parallax mapping, I feel like if I want the exact map I need, best option will be to put photoshop to work.

And here are some pen sketches for scenes, NPC designs, some tile ideas and vehicles.

 

[Another Ned]

Nice progress everyone!

The month is already over and since my last post, I haven't gotten anything done. Well, the lawn got mowed, but that doesn't count.
Before my last post, there really was a lot I got done, so I should actually call April a success. Except for this week. I need to find a better way to motivate/direct myself and not get distracted as much by life things/lack of motivation.

 

[Marquise*]

@Chiara I feel the same ^^&%^&% two exterminator visit in a week! %^$%^$ two doctor visits too... almost fainted earlier.
@EliteZeon No worries, just recently I saw that yet another composer offered free tracks. If you think of some special custom jobs in sound and music I would recommend you @Dimitris @Geoff Moore @Dreadshadow here if you want composer for hire. BTW @Dreadshadow is my special sensei and he also can code. But in coding, you can look around and also look the Yanfly catalog!