April Goals & Progress Thread

[Arithmetician]

@Kes @Marquise* And now Guard is sealed for all characters! I didn't put in a state to to that. Another bug! ARGH!

Edit: And the Guard bug seems to be affecting my backups too now when I try loading them! I thought I checked that everything was functioning normally last night.

Ugh... this is disheartening. First, everyone, friend and foe, gets revived every turn, now guard doesn't work. If key gameplay features keep breaking down without a clear reason, and persist even when I turn off the plugins, I don't know if I'll even be able to finish my project at all. It will do me no good if the game's unplayable and my backups display the same pathological behavior.. Why?

On the bright side, it doesn't seem that my RPG Maker is completely out of whack... some of my older side projects still display normal functionality, so maybe if I start completely fresh I'll be free of these bugs... but maybe I'll just try to put together something simpler this time.

 

[HexMozart88]

Oh gosh. I have so much to do.
- I've gotten some sprites done, now I need to polish them a bit (and add different views, because right now I only have three quarter, and it looks quite odd.
- Taking a break from animated cutscenes, because I cannot get myself to sound like a fifteen year old boy to save my life.
- Make my tower defense system
- Finalize my classes
- *Try* to finish with the island of Mazoku so I can get to the island of Kemono, which is the most important place in the game.
- Finish my menu system (The main interface is quite boring right now).
- Redo a couple of portraits because my anatomy is off.

 

[GoodSelf]

April is here, and I have my biggest plan yet!
Finish an early dev build of my game, and make a project topic! Wish me luck!

I think in order to reach this goal I have to forgo a couple of back story cutscenes, but it shouldn't take away from the overall demo.

 

[OhTeeDubb]

Hey this is an awesome topic! I'm working on an rpg and I've always loved when games have playable card games as mini-games so I've designed one to be put into my game. In order to play-test the game and make sure the rules/game/cards work I had them actually printed though a card printing company and they should be here tomorrow. So this month my plan is to play-test and perfect the card games' design and continue writing the main story for my project.

 

[Arithmetician]

Well, I think I found an older backup that doesn't yet have the critical flaws that the other ones have... yet. Still, it's frustrating having to do basically the same work for a third time.

 

[Vox Novus]

Been away for a bit because internet was out. Then when I got back I wanted to get some things cleared up first to start over fresh on the monthly updates. Released a project on the forums (gave the progress thread a shout out in the credits for all the support during my making of the project) and just about done with an exterior tileset I was working on. Basically just doors left to do and a recolor of some water.

So this month I'll be ready for something new, time for me to move on to MV. I guess a goal for the month for me right now, is to decide on what I want to make in MV. I'd like to keep it on the short side but other than that not sure what yet. Good luck with the goals everybody!

 

[Lantiz]

^ this, I was waiting for this post xD

My goals:

• Create an over world procedural map generation extension
• Put together an introduction for the game
• Define monsters database
• Start eventing the over world

 

[HexMozart88]

@Vox Novus oh. Why is everyone leaving me alone? I'm the only one who uses Ace anymore.

 

[Arithmetician]

Yes! I managed to isolate the cause of the Guard bug! Well, where it was, if not why. Somehow, the skill seemed to be corrupted (in that if I transferred it over from one project to the other, the problem would immediately appear). And then I didn't have to tediously redo all the work I did before - I was just able to copy the rest of the data over once I knew what was bad.

I've now created a new backup of the last known working version (today's), and I'm back on track, assuming no more nasty bugs like that decide to rear their ugly head. No need to abandon my project after all. Yeah!

Edit: Anyways, as for the actual progress that got overshadowed by debugging, I made a number of balancing tweaks to several skills and redesigned one of them.

 

[Shinma]

I did pretty well with last month's goals, so I am going to keep it simple again this month and do mostly pre-production stuff. It really helps keep my workflow going.

• Get my tilesets set up.
• Get things into my spreadsheet.

Once I have all of that wrapped up I will be back into the production phase.

 

[bgillisp]

@HexMozart88 : Nope, I still use ACE. Might move to MV once the current game is done, but that decision will be made then.

@Arithmetician : It could be a passive state that you gave the characters that sealed Guard? After all, it is skill 2 in the database? Or maybe a skill type they needed? Either way, may wish to investigate, as those things don't happen at random.

4.2 Update:

Managed to place a few more NPC's in Blackmire. Now all outdoor areas have NPC's, just need to finish up the shops. Then it is onto the side quests for that town.

 

[Reapergurl]

@HexMozart88 I too use VX Ace; don't know if MV will ever be in my dev tool kit.

I accomplished one goal over the passing of ten hours.

I still have my whole team, but one of my dev team members is having some really tough struggles with Real Life.

 

[Arithmetician]

@bgillisp It had to be something related to the skill, but I don't recall creating any passive states with that function. And I certainly didn't create any the other day that was meant to revive characters at 1 HP at the end of a turn. Maybe it was some weird plugin interaction, but almost all of mine are Yanfly's, and the ones I've used from Himeworks have not caused me problems. I have also not installed any new plugins recently.

I did set a passive state for Yanfly's Victory Cry effect - but that does something completely different, and doesn't seem to be causing problems right now. And I don't think I even had that in the backed up data base. All I know is that substituting the Attack and Guard skills with a copy from another of my projects fixed the issue.

I'll just be glad that it's working for now.

 

[TriceratopsX]

Update #1
Figured out the "Thunderbolt" spell's damage formula was inputted correctly and that NONE of the attacks were dealing damage, even with a skill copied over from a brand new project. Which means that it is probably plugins conflicting. Yay.

 

[Arithmetician]

@TriceratopsX Fun. More seriously, that stinks.

 

[Amysaurus]

@Kes Oh! I have 14 to update, I believe. I'm in charge of making the idle/standing poses, while the other pixel artist on my team helps with the walk cycles.

• I didn't get too much done today (I had a paper and an animation to finish), but I did update one of my character's designs a little bit. It wasn't anything too crazy - I just decided that his hairstyle wasn't working out, and changed his eye color.

• Update: I ended up tweaking a second character as well. ^^ His face had been bugging me for a while and I couldn't figure out why, but I think it looks a bit better now.

Spoiler

 

[Another Ned]

I'd love to comment on everyone's progress but my ability to focus is severely debuffed right now so I can only shout the good old warcry "Yay, progress!"

Yesterday's progress:

• finished my first goal by typing down a list of things I need to do and picking three of them that don't require anything else to be done before. Chose three because, well, three is a nice number for amount of tasks. Also decided that if I finish one task before the end of the month, I simply replace it with the next task down the pipeline

So, Updated Goals:

• finish the item-related systems rework (to be replaced by task "implement reworked item-related systems")
• implement remaining skills (so I get those out of the way)
• figure out how to tackle creating battlebacks (never done two-part battlebacks before)

 

[Vox Novus]

@HexMozart88 Its definitely time for me to at the least try out MV and see what it has to offer. I've had it since 2015 and been using Ace for years now. Got to see what the modern maker can do to grow as a developer.

@Chiara I agree Three is a nice list of goals. Just finishing one means you are a third of the way done, sounds a lot better than a list of 10 and being a tenth of the way done. Two part battlebacks are only necessary if you want to mix and match or want others to mix and match. For a one off background you could do a battleback as one full image. Mixing and matching though offers a lot more possibilities.

@Amysaurus Its definitely little details that the eyes can catch for good or for worse. The eyes are the windows to the soul to right, got to make sure they look alluring with the right color!

@bgillisp Sounds like the town is really filling out. Is this a big city in the game or a smaller town?

@TriceratopsX Damage formula issues cause a real headache, especially when you thought they were put in right then wonder what in the world is going on.

@Shinma Definitely need some nicely organized tilesets before you can do much in the game.

Update, 4/3/2017

Finished up my water tiles and going to move onto doors. The doors are doors for wizards/mages though so they won't be normal. Thinking I might do some kind of barrier that goes into a swirling vortex til it disappears or something along that line.

 

[Schlangan]

Oops, I completely forgot to post during late March and now. Well then, congrats everyone for your progress and goals ! I will start with my update, which will define the goals.

My update :

I'm almost done with mission 22. Starting it was last month goal, so it was successful. Now, I've decided to split mission 22 into two, since a lot has happened already in that mission. I also want to release v2.20 soon enough, since I made a lot of tweaks. All I need to do now is changing the state icons by redrawing them. I should be done tomorrow.

Now, my goals for April, a few things :

- I will start by releasing v2.20 and mission 22. Thanks to this one, you will encounter the final boss for the first time.
- I plan to considerably advance mission 23. I will add a few things that are not written in the story, to give a bit more explanations. Mission 23 will be the last primary mission of the first game.
- And I will start working on mission 24 too, the bonus mission for characters lvl 99. Mission 24 will also add a bonus story extent related to what happened in mission 23.

If I can do this, the completion of the first game will be very close. It should be done by the end of May. I see the end approaching... finally.

 

[Hellpug]

Got some of last month's stuff done, but there's a lot so I will be continuing to work on it.

-Finish rest of the game script (hopefully)
-Finish character sketches