March Goals & Progress Thread

[watermark]

So. February turned out well. I finished the Heartache RM fanfic as promised! If interested you can just click on my signature link. Feel free to comment on it.

Now.

Due to a life commitment, I will go on hiatus for about 3 months. Oh I shall miss RPG Making. If there's a RM Anonymous, I would be first in line. However, I can't do two things well at once, so I need to focus on my other real life commitment first. Come summer I'll come back with a vengeance! Who knows, maybe this year we'll have an IGMC.

I'm sure I'll still leave comments on forums from time to time, but no major game making for a while. Good luck to you all on your progress! Later, folks!

 

[Arithmetician]

March Goals:

- Implement all appropriate spells and equipment for the initial area
- Design the stats and abilities for the enemies in the initial area
- Continue various balancing tasks
- Expand the IconSet as appropriate

Though this is probably much too ambitious... grad school is going to get busier with projects shortly. But aim high...

Progress today:

Planned JP costs for most abilities

Created icons for Haste, Slow, and Stop in GIMP, found some icons from whtdragon and others that will be useful additions to the set. Also recolored the Guard icon for Barrier and Ward statuses. Tried to rework the Blind icon into an Insight icon, but it didn't work out so well.

Brainstormed names for Staff Weapons

 

[Marquise*]

@Ms Littlefish Hope you see the end of your problems!

 

[AceOfAces_Mod]

Goals for the month:
-2nd round of polishing Immortal Sins for release.

Progress Report #1
-Re-worked the skills for one of the battlers. Since for some weird reason, I can't set HP conditions for the skills, so I reserved some switches for these. Also made some animations for them.
-Making a custom trapdoor.
-Fixing up bugs.

 

[bgillisp]

@Marquise* : Oh, don't worry, it will be done. I'm just going on a deep mapping phase right now since work is making it hard to event (since it's easier to pick up and resume on a map than a cutscene).
@Schlangan : Never heard of a high level flower before. Will be interesting to see how that works out.
@Ms Littlefish : No banging your head into a wall!
@Kes : I feel your pain. I did some work on my ending today (see below) and it felt about the same. Ugh.

3.2 Update: Spent today working on a goulash of things. Started by fixing a map for Eastwood that was way off and had to be scrapped and started over. Got tired of mapping after a while, so went and rebalanced the Chapter 6 end fight (as it was too tough), then, once that was done, also wrote the starts of endings 5 and 6. Realized then that the final cutscene is going to be a nightmare due to the cases it will have to check and figured I don't have the time to sit down and fix it now, so you can only see the start of endings 5 and 6, then the game will just go dark and never resume. At least for now. To be continued.

 

[Arithmetician]

Researched more names for weapons... strictly speaking, it shouldn't be an immediate priority for the project, but it's fun.

 

[Lantiz]

:0
Two pages already!
Well... Feb goal was really easy and it was really good.
I'll keep this simple too.

This month I want to create a The Sims inspired interaction system with NPCs.
But I want to make it in a way that on every new game the NPCs' traits change.
Let's see how it turns out.

 

[Schlangan]

@Marquise* : Free animated critters. This is a nice idea !

@Ms Littlefish : Customer service... I hate that word. I'd rather call them customer annoyance service. But it depends, sometimes they are able to - almost - do their job.

@Kes : I've also known the "what ? all I did does not trigger, whyyyyy", which can be annoying at some point, until you find out that you made a silly mistake. Then everything goes smooth.

@Arithmetician : Icons. You make me think that I need to redraw all my icons too. Geh...

@AceOfAces_Mod : Do you use a custom script for HP conditions ? Maybe some compatibility issues.

@bgillisp : Seems you did many things. Though, you realize that you'll have to work on the final cutscene at some point

My update :

I'm done with the flower and the cutscene with the enemy leader found in the forest. One more map was damaged by his attacks, preventing the party to follow him. The fight Schlangan VS Himawari the flower is done. The player will lose (and gameover) if he/she is thinking of attacking straight. This time the attack pattern is important, as well as binding/defense skills.

Now I need to work on a few tiles, to add ruins to this forest. Then, in the middle of this will stand the owner of the flower, the first goddess we encounter in the story. While later on gods are comparatively as weak as normal monsters, this is not the case for now. What will happen to Schlangan and his team when faced by something more than 100 times stronger than them... ?

 

[Kes]

@Schlangan

What will happen to Schlangan and his team when faced by something more than 100 times stronger than them... ?

They will say "Let's sit down and talk about this over a nice cup of tea."
It won't get them anywhere, but they will have maintained a civilized level of politeness under trying circumstances, which is quite an achievement.

 

[AceOfAces_Mod]

@Schlangan , no. The database gives me a ridiculous number every time I set the HP percentages...

 

[Marquise*]

@Schlangan free animated frames/skeletons of critters.

 

[Arithmetician]

@Schlangan My custom icons aren't that great; I'll probably end up redoing them later.

 

[AMGLime]

Oh boy, where do I start with for this month. I have 2 games now, one is currently on hold while my Spriter gets more practice as she doesn't feel confident, and I'm at the point now where I need them, so to keep myself busy I've begun working on a Dungeon Crawler RPG.

The goals for this month is to finish planning out the Class Designs, I have the initial designs down and ready, just need to make them feel unique and have an idea for how each will play. There's a total of 12 Classes. I have a rough design for how the base in the game works, as well as how the dungeons work. There's 3 Dungeons, and as you clear them you head further and further into the areas. So the initial dungeons are The Coast, The Woods and The Mountain. Clear out The Woods, and you can head into The Ruins, Clear out The Coast and you find The Caves, etc, etc. The purpose is quests have you going into the dungeons for different reasons, and you also need to find items in certain dungeons to unlock other sections and stuff.

By the end of this weekend I plan on having the rough storyline planned out, and I'll likely throw that and the initial design up in Early Project Feedback.

 

[Marquise*]

Not done a lot today but just reorganized the pangofly dragon folder. (It was an enormous mess!!!) Must take a day or three with IRL thought!

 

[Kes]

@watermark Hope all goes well, and looking forward to seeing you back later on.
@bgillisp I know that feeling - something is going to require so much work that there's never enough time in one stretch to do it. No other way than to eventually bite the bullet and just do it - as I'm sure you already know.
@Arithmetician Sometimes things that aren't priorities but are fun help to keep us engaged. Go for it.
@Schlangan Are you going to tell us the outcome of this cosmic confrontation, or do we have to wait to play the game to find out?
@Marquise* Sorting out essential folders counts as progress.

My update
I've been doing a polishing run. For the most part I've only had very minor things to sort out, though I have re-arranged some patches of dialogue so that they flow more smoothly. I did find a couple of extremely weird bugs, but the ever-helpful Trihan agreed to do some debugging for me and sorted them out in next to no time, whereas it would have taken me several hours of probably fruitless labor to do.

This run needed to be done at some stage, but I'm doing it now because I couldn't face another uninterrupted stretch of mapping.

 

[bgillisp]

@Arithmetician : Fun things like that can help us to keep going, and it does need to be done sometime. So I say keep at it.

@Lantiz : That sounds really ambitious. Good luck.

@Schlangan : I know. I think I'm going to wait until I write down what I want the true ending (ending 8) to be, then go from there.

@AMGLime : Can't you use placeholders while you wait for the sprite? I used nothing but a big bouncing blob for a while when I needed a placeholder. Maybe try that instead of two projects, as it's easy to never go back to the first.

@Marquise* : I doubt it's worse than my resource folder though.

@Kes : Yep. I think I'm going to wait for that spring break before tackling it though.

3.4 Update: Finished that map of the Eastwood Forest that was giving me such grief. I still say I'm going to make my next game in a desert...with nothing but sand. Glorious sand. But anyways...

So I finished the map, populated it with monsters, and the quest item you need which is located there. Also put NPC's in the outside of Eastwood (still got to do the NPC's in the shops and Inns and such though), and drew up the map for the outer area of Winterglen. Screenshot below.

Spoiler: Winterglen Outside

As you can see, Winterglen is the last stop before a LONG hike East, and since the party never goes that far East, it is the most Eastern town in the entire game.

 

[Lantiz]

@bgillisp Really? I'm not sure, not even started yet hahahaha.
But anyway, it looks doable in my head... my head is weird, better not believe it.

And I like you light overlay.
I just think it would be more immersive a city entrance that is asymetrical.

 

[Ms Littlefish]

@bgillisp You definitely can't skip leg day if you hope to make it through that journey.
@Kes I always like to tinker with the dialogue after stepping away, too. It's so hard to let things be done sometimes, but a time or two definitely tends to yield an improvement.
@Marquise* Organization is pretty important. Use the time now, spend less later! It's funny, though. I have a type of muscle memory, and just memory in general, where even after I organize something I knew my mess so well that I still look where it used to be.
@Schlangan Have to say I'm pretty intrigued to find out the outcome.

March 4th: Maybe unironically I had a migraine Thursday. Today was retail Hell, but that's off topic. I've managed to really get going on some new music either way. I don't have anything shareable, but I've been working on a new little song with the new sound library. Since it has been so long since I've sat down to compose, and due to the learning curve of new instruments, it's a pretty simple song in nature. So, no inverted chords with diminished 5ths and a 9th stuck on them because I say so. No wildly syncopated rhythms. Just cute, bouncy, springlike. I think tomorrow I'm going to take it over to the piano to really flesh it out. My score page is kind of becoming chaotic with chunks of ideas, so I'm going to go glue it together before I fully arrange it.

 

[Marquise*]

@MsLittlefish *sends prayers and good cybermental positive thoughts to defeat your migraine*
@bgillisp I doubt your ressource folders have 40 bits of the same characters in 2 type of movements (Static or Gifs), formats, versions, roughs, templates, pieces for two different programs and that 4 heads of an $Evilgod are on them! LOL And I thought that changing the kitty litters was a chores! LOL
@Kes I realised that when opening the new folders I was like... and now... do I do sub folders? It feels as awefullsome as my photoshop layers and group files for one copy of the very same work. XD

Progress:
All right, today as I powered up P2 (Make-up to my androïd) to busk, I listened the video lessons on PixelEdit... I still have mix-ups between transfers and cells and layers and I am rather inefficient at mapping a palette. But, it is definitely possible to work very close to my CS4 modus operandi trough layers. After that if I practice correctly, remap angles and limb corrections after CS4 image treatment of the rough will be so fluid, it will be a huge improvement to what I once tried to do in GCH.

BTW, it was the White Night of Montreal In Light and my feet are so sores... But first time in life I saw a green in my pale!

 

[mogwai]

ComiPo Manga Fighter is on hold because I took up a project to convert Ace rvdata2 in MV json.
(credit of concept goes to @Wrongful )

I've made the interface and I've successfully converted a small game data folder into JSON, (excluding the scripts.rvdata which would be insane to try to convert because that one is a language, not a database).

Now comes the most arduous part: studying all these property by property and tweaking it one by one until each JSON is finally accepted by MV.

Spoiler: my big awesome project

Here's hoping for my beginner's luck.

EDIT: The properties seem to be pretty close!
I just compared a generated Ace JSON to an MV json on http://jsondiff.com/ (different games)

Spoiler: so very close

I'm just uncertain about the tile numbers...

I think this thing https://api.jquery.com/jquery.extend/ will do the trick.