December 2020 Goals and Progress Thread

[orochii]

Ok so hobefully in Sebtemper I finish all revambs/fixes so I can assure myself a new chabter finisheq at enq of Decemper (tybos intentional).

 

[Kupotepo]

I am just finishing creating https://mobile.twitter.com/kupotepo27/with_replies for the game developing if anyone want to just joining and get update, please welcome to do so.

Tomorrow, I will have to come up with my game design vision statement, my mission statement, and value statement of why I am doing the game making in the first place.

It is not a major success, but I have to plan out a clear direction and narrow down of what is realistic or not to do. Thank you for understanding.

 

[Another Ned]

@Marquise* : Nice to be remembered, and good to see you! Really cool and flowy work, too!

Progress update:

• finished the mood/reference boards for the three areas and the intro scene
• also made a preliminary colour palette/guide for myself per area
• had some more thoughts regarding gameplay. Not many, or any in-depth, but more than before
  • still debating on whether or not there will be combat, since that would have an impact on the story and lore of the place
  • also, since I have two protagonists and no other characters, I've been thinking about how being able to change POV in addition to whom the player controls might be potentially interesting
• slowly getting a better idea of the intro scene as well as story/why those guys are even there in the first place

That's like half my September goals done. Would be nice if I managed the rest this month, too.

 

[BreakerZero]

So after some cross-checking I figured out one thing I did wrong with the Xbox build: no Dragonbones assets were included, hence my startup crash. So I added it back in and rewrote the bosses to where they were before, and this time I made absolutely sure that I included the required files so that the animations are processed as I originally intended. I also renamed at least two bosses based on their assets, and updated the boss rush yet again so that it's a sacred trial against the divine forms of the eight associate guardians. I also put together my first draft of the ice boss during the course of updating the boss rush, though I still have to nerf him for the initial encounter.

In the meantime the IARC came back for my original, discontinued concept which gave me some rather unanticipated yet still notable limitations: it turns out that the assigned ratings are only intended for use in IARC-compliant systems (so GameJolt, Steam etc. will still require me to do long form in order to include ESRB material). Needless to say, I had to reprogram my entire legal slideshow to accommodate this... and it required some serious work to properly detect user agent, platform and app root so the ratings are hidden from the sequence on non-compliant systems and services. (It also means that I won't be able to use a single package installer because it relies on the appx root which is used by the Universal Windows runtimes to differentiate between the Xbox and Windows versions of the game package.)

One final note in this update is that I have also finished writing the nerve agent scenario that leads into the mess involving the third guardian. (Obviously I was hesitant to do anything involving a biologic threat due to Covid19, but I ultimately decided to put that concern aside so long as I get it done right.)

 

[kaukusaki]

Working on weekly levels challenge

 

[Dust]

The heroes withdrew to a remote hiding place in the mointains...

Currently working on the endings of my game Numina. I always planned for it to have multiple endings and it feels a bit surreal to be finally at the stage where I get to do them after all these years.

Some of them are definitely in the "bad ending" category although I still want them to feel like full-fledged endings that just don't take a happy turn. My goal is to finish them within October and then go into full-on testing.

 

[Dalph]

I never post anything here but I'm working on a game with MZ after 3 years of procrastinating, development started exactly 1 month ago and I have a lot done already, but will probably take another month to fully release it if everything goes well. Life keeps me busy and I'm a perfectionist.
I'm also making some custom assets for it (and pestering my brother too for them cuz he's even better than me with graphics) and that will take even more time, but will be so worth it at the end.
This project started as something trollish but eventually I got attached to it, saw its true potential and turned it into something pretty epic. I don't wanna share details yet, I never do because I feel like it ruins the surprise.

 

[cthulhusquid]

My plan for October:
Battle Castle:

• Rewrite most of the dialog in the game to make it more realistic and less like a novel. Certain characters will still have a more flowery way of talking, but that will be limited to one or two side characters based on background and location. The villains will still be hammy, because they are limited by their experience of bossing their minions around in Hell.
• Break up the dialog so there is no more text walls, or info dumps unless they are absolutely necessary.
• Add more depth to the combat system. I've already started to give weapons unique attack skills that should give you more tactical options.
• Make sure characters are consistent in their actions and morals, Draxus especially.
• Make the main quest have more urgency, at least early on.
• Change many small things.

If I can get this stuff done, then I can continue with these:

• Go through all of the dialog in my other two projects, the Cube Trail and The Wastes, to break up text walls, toss flowery dialog, and make sure characters are consistent.
• Whatever else I want to do with those projects.

 

[BreakerZero]

Just settled on a major design change. While designing my initial casino implementation I decided after several sessions to switch to an autosave system. The downside is that it comes at the cost of data flexibility (only one file is possible now) so if you screw up and reach a checkpoint then you're screwed in general if you haven't sufficiently prepared. This also plays into the casino of course, and is the only reason I made the change in the first place; otherwise it would be too lenient and you'd be able to restart with your take or loss unchanged. In this way it's a sort of anti-cheat measure, as well as a risk/reward proposition - so if you're luck runs south you can't just quit to the desktop and retry. Thus why every new round begins with an autosave call now, and even if the game crashes you can only roll back to the last saved result.

As for the storyline, the third guardian is now complete and features a major plot twist that I won't spoil, but suffice that it leads straight into the situation with guardian #4 for which I decided to utilize some ancient legend material as the backstory.

 

[MerlinCross]

Map - 80% done(Mainly done need some tweaks
Characters - 70% done(gear mainly and some stat edits
Monsters - 50% done
Combat - 40% (Trying to get effects to take)

Plan for October; get the game out by Halloween. It's a small demo of maybe 2-3 hours rather than a full game. Taking the lessons I learned, what I liked, and hopefully feedback to actually make something with it.

 

[Marquise*]

Familiarizing with my Huion making some romantic scenes that I will keep secret. (Yeah for an incoming game).

Also both reading The Art of Game Design; A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell and the Krita manual as Krita might help me doing some animated sequences FMVs for my games.

 

[gabrieldiastche]

The heroes withdrew to a remote hiding place in the mointains...
View attachment 161676
Currently working on the endings of my game Numina. I always planned for it to have multiple endings and it feels a bit surreal to be finally at the stage where I get to do them after all these years.

Some of them are definitely in the "bad ending" category although I still want them to feel like full-fledged endings that just don't take a happy turn. My goal is to finish them within October and then go into full-on testing.

@Dust First of all... OMG I CAN'T BELIEVE IT'S YOU! SUCH A HUGE FAN!! Your game is amazing

So guys...I am only here to say that this was a really good month for me of work!
Some of my achievements this month were:

• Decided to put the demo of my game for people to see it! (Here is the link, just click it!)
• Made all the itch.io page by myself.
• Started my devlog on the page.
• Tried to talk more on the internet. (It's funny but I am really talkative outside my computer)
• Made the trailer of the demo of Luke Inn (This link will go to Youtube, don't worry ^^)
• Made a lot of friends in the Game Community!
• Got youtubers and streamers playing my game!

And now I will be saying this, the truth that a lot of people doesn't like to show... THE NUMBERS!

• Number of Downloads of Luke Inn in "one month" = 51 downloads
• Number of Views of Luke Inn in itch.io in "one month" = 290 views
• Number of Views of Luke Inn - Demo Trailer in "one week" = 231 views

So guys, I wanna say : Thank you so much for the RPG Maker Forum Community, because thanks to you all I know how to improve myself everyday! I am really happy to be a part of this and I hope I could help others like you guys do it with me! ^^

To end reply, I will leave a little fanart that @hiddenone did it for Luke Inn and it looks so amazing that I love to show this to everyone

 

[Another Ned]

@Dust: I remember playing a demo back in the day, quite a while ago (...Has it been ten years already? It's been a long time in any case). Great to see it's getting to a close. : D

___
Progress update:
Didn't get any of my bonus points goals done this month, but... Oh well. At least I did something.

• had a silly idea for the beginning of the game, which ties the narrative and one of the mechanics together
• did some thinking, mostly, to flesh out my two protagonists some more
• sketched a self-indulgent totally productive little moment of friendship between my protagonists which totally counts as progress

 

[BreakerZero]

Sudden change to my new save approach. The anti-cheat wasn't exactly perfect so I rolled back to the old save structure (however I am going to keep the autosave as a convenience measure). I'm also debating whether or not to fill out more of the endgame so that I don't have any implementations to hide for the purpose of content evaluation (seeing that I'm now thinking of a more thorough analysis because of that ???damn self-rating limitation).

 

[Ninjakillzu]

Surprisingly I haven't created a story outline yet. I've been brainstorming the next part of the story and have decided it needs to be done to keep myself organized. From this point forward I'll probably just work on the story and the parts of the maps where it goes. Filling out the rest of the districts will come later down the line.

As for the story itself, you'll soon be learning more about your past. This will lead to some rather interesting consequences and the involvement of forces not yet known to you...

 

[BreakerZero]

Well, I ended up scrapping the autosave. Unfortunately my Xbox build gave me game-breaking errors when using it (specifically in that it couldn't call the functions without "undefined" callbacks) so ultimately it had to go. That said, I still have it set up to support saving from (almost) wherever so it's not that big of a loss.

 

[slimmmeiske2]

Can't believe it's October already.

Goals for this month:
- Start working on my one map challenge game. I've done some of the writing these past few days, so I do want to start actual in engine stuff this month.
- Finish translating the launch plugins.
- Polish the second area of Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?. I'm reconsidering whether to do an updated demo after this area is done or whether to plough ahead and just wait until the game is finished.

 

[Marquise*]

Progressing into making space in the lab and some illustrations but I get RL in the way sometimes with health and... "visitors"

 

[Lihinel]

Finished the intro for a side project:
(The hickups are due to the recording program, the occasional speed up is ingame through holding the left mouse button pressed)

- Plan to finish the skilltree/skill unlock system for this game by the end of the month.

 

[BreakerZero]

Two major changes regarding the development of my project. First off is that I have fully optimized my Xbox build and removed several redundant plugins that were killing performance, and I am now considering a reevaluation by the Xbox team in the near future. Second of all is that several changes to the Xbox build which use my rumble plugin are being released to the community, so my "end of support" notice that I previously posted thereof is only "half accurate" now as I have updated the version number despite initially declaring that I wouldn't do so. (Incidentally I would like to have this updated on the forum page so there's no confusion between that and the actual download, but you heard it here first.)