February Goals and Progress Thread

[Marquise*]

@Dreadshadow
*cybermentally jumps up and down!*
I wanna seeee now!

 

[Arithmetician]

Designed sprites for the Merchant class and its stat curves, which takes care of most of its implementation. It's one more job than I originally envisioned, but it opens up some more space for other classes and has its own flavor as well.

Spoiler: Merchant Sprites and Job Command

The exact divisor for Power of the Gold will be tweaked as I do more play testing.

Put together a spell animation using hadecynn's free animations, adding sound effects and flashes of my choice from the MV defaults.

Tested making a "Healing Staff" with Yanfly's unleashes, based on one of the more useful mid-game weapons in FFV.

 

[Reapergurl]

I tried forever to get a crafting script to work, only to have it be completely incompatible with another script.

Ugh. Failure is progress, now to find another crafting script...

Ack. I hate being sick.

 

[mogwai]

Spoiler: screenshot

I'm just going to go on a rant about my fighter game progress. I wrote more than I thought I was going to, so I'll use the spoiler.

Spoiler: rant

My title screen is going to look different when I'm finished. It's basically just something for me to look at while I playtest. I need to redo the typography at least; I don't like it. The game's title is still pending because I want to name the game after it's finished, after all the campaign endings and what not (the title "Mortal ComiPo" comes to mind as a play on words, but I'm more of a Street Fighter player).

Also those title screen fighters may be different depending on how their personalities turn out when I make all their moves. The moves variety actor-to-actor, I've discovered is going to be limited because I can only make moves out of the same bunch of poses. I'm going to have to get creative with it for character moves variety.

My progress is that I've given Miho and the computer Miho blocking and some punches 2 quick and 2 strong, plus a quick combo and and a strong combo. When I write the hitting and the life and stuff, the computer Miho is going to be brutal because she is quick to punch and quick to block. It's not really a.i., but a bunch of random number booleans and position conditions. I'll probably put in an easy and medium mode where the computer is not so brutal based on a slimmer random chance.

Left to go, aerial punches, crouching punches, kicking, and combos for Miho and then repeat for every possible character, and then animations for getting hit too. It's a long way to go, even though I have already made 39 png sprite animations for just one character so far.

The formula for success is to just make all the poses once and then all I have to do is copy the ComiPo file and change character on all models, with only some slight tweaking for personality.

 

[Reapergurl]

@mogwai Are you going to include finishing moves like MK fatalities and such?

lol Implement the Konami Code?

Looks pretty good thus far...

 

[Arithmetician]

@Reapergurl BABALITY. Okay, just kidding. But I couldn't resist.

More seriously:

- Reworked the descriptions of the Thaumaturgy spells for the Magus and adjusted one of the animations.

- Added Invocation Times to Thaumaturgy spells so they take longer to proc than standard attacks and that lower-tier spells have a speed advantage (because they take less time to incant)

- Swapped out two of the Cleric's skills when I decided they were redundant, and gave a pair of buffing spells in their place

- Thought about some ways for reworking the Astromancer's planned skill set.

 

[Marquise*]

@mogwai really good use of comipo!

And... just showing progress so far as I too a picture earlier.... I am now at mapping/texture feet.

Spoiler: this sprite line art... bitmap only!

Yay I finally found how to use spoilers... I hope I remember it now!

 

[Arithmetician]

Noticed that the Damage Cap set in the plugin menu didn't seem to be effective, but I was able to enforce it by putting the damage cap tags on the actors instead.

Decided I should probably cap Levels at around 50 - 60 or so. My game is balanced around the assumption of around Level 40 or so being endgame, and the stat curves start picking up very rapidly after a point, making maintaining proper balance difficult.

 

[Lantiz]

I remade my weather plugin after receiving some ideas from @Sharm.
It's a lot more useful now that it can actually play animations for each sprite on the screen.

 

[Llareian]

I have not updated in a bit, so this is going to be longish.
Edit: formatted to reduce scroll length.

@Sharm I agree with what's been said, artists have to eat. I hate when people suggest that others should give away all their hard work. You're being generous by giving away a sample!
@Arithmetician I love the Omega Blast image. It looks devastating! Also, you and @Andronius , are there people who AREN'T fans of Lunar and FFT? Hard to imagine!
@Kes I love the look of your menu! It's very distinctive. I'm also a fan of the vertical character sorting so you get more image of the character and less image of the data.
@Marquise* Still loving that creature. Keep up the awesome work!
@mlogan Oh God, it's not Windows 10, is it? I'm having my own intense BSD issues with it right now. It MIGHT be more of a pain in the butt than Windows ME was, and that is saying something... My sympathies on the computer issues, either way.
@Reapergurl Real life progress is AWESOME. For some reason I'm getting all giggly girl about it and wanting to know more (although obviously here is not the place). Sorry you got sick. Clearly it's going around!

Project Goals update - February:

Spoiler

1) Don't give up on the project!:
So far, so good. However, I haven't exactly been working on it much. I blame Sami Maaranen, because I've been sucked into playing UnReal World again. A lot. Oh, it's @Archeia 's fault too, because Efflorescence looks AMAZING and learning about it made me want to play a crafting-heavy game which is why I'm back on URW. ~.o

2) Get the game flow roughed in with map transfer events (maps need not be complete).:
Accountability time, I'm putting it here...I have this done except for TWO MAPS. Why?! I need to do this!

3) Rough draft skills, armor, weapons, and items.:
This is turning into a more complicated project as I've decided I want to do armor modifications instead of new armors, for game flavor reasons. But all I have done for now is the main character's base gear, the weapons, and a few items, including the key items. Call it 30% of the overall goal.

I'm also realizing that five chapters, however short they are, was an ambitious first project. Ah well, I'm pretty set on it now. The only way out is through!

 

[Alexander Amnell]

Late to the party but I've been spending the last month or so reorganizing and reinstalling programs and trying to find resources since airport hell has claimed possession of my old computer and my external drive and it doesn't look like I'll ever get that miraculous call saying they've been retrieved. Thankfully all of my text file design documents and catalogues of most of the technical stuff I need are still in my possession on a keychain flashdrive and I'm currently transferring all of that rabidly out of sorts data into ArticyDraft to reorient myself with all of the information chronologically and re-immerse myself in my own game world.

That's my only goal for what's left of this month, next month I'll start actually resurrecting Aftermath:Revelations (formerly the Mercenary's Daughter) for my overall goal of releasing the game by my upcoming 32 birthday as this is the third time I've refitted the thing and I need to finish it up and move on already and figure the pressure of a time limit will hopefully inspire me to get it done for once; we'll see.

 

[Sharm]

I love the community here. You're all so supportive! Plus you guys are really doing a good job with getting things done. It's inspiring. Sometimes too inspiring, a few of you are working on projects that have me wanting to start something similar.

The last two days have been pretty good for getting things done. I've finally finished fixing the doors so that they're arranged properly for easy RM use. That took me way too long, but I added a ton more variations and fixed a few errors. The past two days I've also been doing some recoloring of an older set and I've hit the point where there's no more recoloring, just fixes and updates. Some of the updating is going to be a bit annoying. There were a few things I did with the set to make it work with the quirks of Despain's original graphics that I'm going to have to remove now since they are in the way with the way I'm doing the same things. It's minor things like alignment and a few hard edges to cover things that don't exist in my graphics. Stuff like that. Still, not looking forward to it. Thankfully that's not something I need to deal with for a few months.

For the past couple of months I've been feeling stressed, frustrated, and unmotivated to work on my set. It wasn't burnout because it was still what I wanted to spend my time on, but I just couldn't get anywhere. I tried all sorts of things to get past it including surrounding myself with more inspiration, trying to work on other pixel art, not working on pixel art at all, and trying to figure out if there was a problem my subconscious was trying to tell me about but my conscious self was unaware of. Nothing was really helping. But yesterday I did some writing for the first time in a long time and suddenly I'm feeling much better about everything. I'm going to try to get back on task and actually working towards goals now as well as do a few writing goals, to see if that really was all that I needed to do to get unstuck. We'll see. Here's hoping!

 

[Arithmetician]

@Llareian Omega Blast's animation is just the default Neutral All 2 animation with its hue adjusted, and maybe made a bit bigger. But yeah, it does the job.

Working on some of the animations for the healing spells now.

 

[grem333]

You can now buy and raise chickens in my game, Rustic Tales! It wasn't too annoying to implement, either- I got it working pretty fast! Now, I have to add sheep and cows, which will probably be a bit more complex.

My goal for the rest of this month is to finish writing the dialogue for the characters. I made an excel spreadsheet that keeps track of what they say depending on their friendship to hopefully make things easier. The only thing I'm worried about is the different townspeople sounding the same/similar because I'm the only writer...

 

[Archeia]

I tested out my 48x48 tiles, since I kinda got a considerable amount of them done already. And as well as to see if my original VXAce sprites will still work out somehow or do I have to completely make a new sprite style...again...

For nature tiles, they seem to be! But if I put them on interior maps, that's where it all goes downhill hahaaa... But it's nice to know I can make dungeons later with smaller sprites and still work out somehow.

Spoiler

However, there's still a lot of work that needs to be done. I learned that I was a moron and I could've done my game resources a lot more efficiently. I could've just made all my tiles smaller than the sprites. For example, 32x32 tiles, with a cabinet for example taking up 6 tiles, walls for 3 and 48x80 sprites or something. That would've saved me a ton of time than making everything 48x48 and then worry about 1:1 scale.

Or I could've made 32x32 tiles and then just scale them up later since I'm not using the default map editor. I like how 48x48 fills space but there could've been so many ways for me to have done this. But I'm so neck deep that I have to commit to this mistake now. The regret overflows ahaha...

 

[Sharm]

@Archeia Oooh, pretty. I understand the frustration. Scale is so tricky when planning out tilesets. I'd like to see a small interior shot, curious how badly the sprite is out of sync it is with the furniture.

 

[Archeia]

@Archeia Oooh, pretty. I understand the frustration. Scale is so tricky when planning out tilesets. I'd like to see a small interior shot, curious how badly the sprite is out of sync it is with the furniture.

Funny enough, the moment I whined hardcore, I managed to make a sprite style I'm happy with. But here's how they scale.

 

[Marquise*]

@Sharm If love, purring and time would be renown currency, I just hope you'd be filthy rich for all you do here!
@Llareian yeah,me too it appeals my eyes. It was a commission as an alternative for the existing dragon since the person commissioning it just asked for it when Daughter Cat needed EMERGENCY treatments at the vet. You can imagine that Pangofly dragon sprite saved a small elderly kitty life... Can't hate it even if it bites, can I?
@Archeia Woah what in the web is all that mosaic of awards under your profile? Does that means we can click somewhere to show ours?


Progress;
I am so tempted to post another dragonesque picture here as I restarted to map back the textures and similar positioned limbs of the Pangofly dragon from the side. I kinda can imagine that I am at the 2/3 done on that position maybe... Soooo.... It is still long,but it is nothing than getting everything from scratch! I might do some sort of animated .gif once over on that side pose!

 

[Amysaurus]

WELP. I was doing fine on my goals, but I ended up catching the flu last week and that threw me out of whack. It's not all bad, though! I ended up really thinking it through, and decided to give my project's map/sprite style a bit of an overhaul.

Spoiler: Before

Spoiler: After

I'm still experimenting with the character and shading style (and the map overall is still in progress), but this is definitely closer to what I'd been wanting to make.

 

[AceOfAces_Mod]

Progress Report #11
Immortal Sins:
-Edited some of the battlebacks.
-Editing part of the maps a bit.
-A bit of bugfixing.
NEW: Re-applied the water reflection on the new tileset, along with finding a way to switch between parallax backgrounds.