November Goals & Progress Thread

[Kes]

@Lantiz Another nice thing about a short project is that you get to experience the satisfying feeling of seeing something come to completion.  You can take that forward into a future, larger project, knowing that you can complete.  That can be a great support when you're 40% through a big project feeling like it will never finish.


@Marquise* No, you're not mad, you're an artist who wants to do things to the highest standard that you can.


@EliteZeon I like the development of the cut scene from the original to the new version.  It gives a real insight into the story of that place, the prevailing attitudes, the lives of the people, in just a very short time.  That's quite some to-do lists you have there.  It's good that you have clear ideas about where you want to go and what you need to do to get there.  My advice, for what it's worth, would be to put the Chapter 2 list in a desk drawer somewhere and ignore it until you are ready to move on.  Otherwise it might feel a bit overwhelming.


@bgillisp I think your monsterball schedule is a brilliant idea, especially if you do use it for NPC dialogues.  It will make your world seem much more cohesive.  And I think it's great to have people talking about things which are nothing to do with our heroes and their quest to save the world (or whatever).  Because that's what life is like.  There may be tempestuous events going on, but people still want to know if their team won.  (And to slag off the manager if they didn't.)


My update


So that I don't burn out on mapping, I didn't move on to the area outside the cave exit.  Instead I've been working on a complex cut scene.  Because the player can do things in a different order, they may have already seen this, discovered that they can't get a boat just yet, and why.  I've got to set up a ton of switches and branching dialogues to take account of whether they go to the harbour first or get thrown in jail first.  Anyway, the cut scene is done (full of strange and exotic things), now I've just got to map the harbour, shipping office etc., where the event which triggers this cut scene (which happens elsewhere) takes place, and so on.

 

[Vox Novus]

@Lantiz Lol, those were pretty simple maps so not worth showing, not to mention at this point I'm just focused on getting the game out so people can see the maps by playing it.


@AceOfAces_Mod Faces are lookin' good!


@ksjp17 I'm glad the reference is recognizable then; its much more obvious in-game as the monster's name is Alice and at the beginning of the fight he says some paraphrases of lyrics from Alice Cooper songs. I like that there's sort of an element of the player taking the adventure in their own direction there for your game; you're quite the guy though! You get tired of mapping so you move on to something else extensive in its place. 


@bgillisp You definitely want to finish a chapter strong, it should have something like a cliff hanger or a nice summation/closure of what's happened while leaving you wanting more. The player should be hankering to load up that save and be eager to see the next part. That doesn't sound like a waste of time, all the incorporation of blitzball (best mini-game ever in a rpg right behind triple triad) in final fantasy X made the world feel very connected and much like our own.


@Canini Okay, sounds cool. Keep up the work.


@EliteZeon Interesting how this is an idea you've evolved so much from when you were younger. There's a lot of reasoning and lore there.


@Marquise* Just hang in there Marquise! All your "mad" work will be worth it when its done. Yet another nickname for you; The Mad Old Geezer Animator!


My update 11/19/2016:


Might yet do a bit more tonight but here's the bulk of it. Have since tweaked my secret boss fight making it a little more difficult, mostly slightly increasing stats and adding 50% resistances to status ailments. Its definitely beatable early on in the final dungeon with little equipment upgrades if you have a lot of healing items but upgrades and the right accessories make it much easier. Finished mapping out one of the four sections that make up my final dungeon, the player needs to complete all four sections to open the way to the final boss. The sections sort of are themed around each of the individual characters that are a member of the party, for example: In The vampire's section you progress by trying to gain information from "people" to determine if what they tell you is accurate or not by using his ability to enthrall, then you use the proper information (a password, or something) to progress to the next room. 

 

[Marquise*]

The wings looks bea...beuark... and are really worth it.   I am still on them...  Dragonfly wing textures. How many of you folks ever see fly wing textures on a sprite?  -_-;  Something tells me one half of my brain tries to turn the other half mad...


@bgillisp, @ksjp17, @Vox Novus Thanks for the encouragement.  and BG?  1 000 might suffice?    It might be worth 10 attack animations of a big dragon sprites.


Ack I am just finishing the walk cycle now.

 

[AceOfAces_Mod]

@Marquise*, @ksjp17 and @Vox Novus, my artist says thank you.


Progress Report #8:


-Tweaked Elena's sprite a bit.


-Designed new clothes for an NPC. This was a bit of a pain, as the character's face graphic is unconventional (unconventional to the generator graphic that is). I used Game Character Hub to design it as best as I can do. (See pictures in the spoiler)


-Fixed more bugs.

Spoiler

 

[bgillisp]

@ksjp17: What's funny is I was thinking before you wrote that of having someone in Chapter 9 (when all is falling to pieces) calling for their team's manager to be fired. Nevermind the fact that war is about to break out.


@Vox Novus: It's not the finishing sequence itself, it's more like the last few sets of events to get us there seem illogical. It feels like I was trying too hard to slow down the Chapter more than anything before you get to that end.


@Marquise*: That wasn't an accurate number, but it sure felt like it!


@AceOfAces_Mod: Well, it seems fine to me. But I'm fine with about anything for art that is functional, so maybe wait for those with better eyes than me on this one.


11.20 Update: Early update today, got to go to work some today before the holidays. Managed to finish making all my NPC's! Took a while, even with the generator helping, but they are done. Or at least, as done as they can get short of special ones my artist will have to draw, but I'll take that victory nonetheless.


With that done, I started populating the maps again. Decided to start small with an optional town of Riverdale, which (at least for the part you can go in) is only 4 30 x 30 maps (plus insides), so it shouldn't be too hard to fill up. Got one of them done for Chapters 2 and 3, need to add in Chapters 4 onward NPC's next.

 

[Kes]

@Marquise* If you're up to finishing the walking cycle, then you're nearly there, no?  Keep it up!  You're doing great.


@AceOfAces_Mod Sprite Generators are a gift of nature.  Use them.


@bgillisp Ah, that perennial cry "Sack the Manager", all sports, all times, all places.  Why not "Sack the Players"?  Double congrats on finishing all those NPCs.  Heroic-sized piece of work.  And you know you'll love your maps more once they're in.


My Update


Doing this a bit early as I may not have time later.


Did the essential mapping for the Port and Shipping Office.  Polishing can come later.  Decided not to launch straight in to doing the dialogue, as I'm faced with a quandary.  There is a huge and dangerous sea creature blocking the sea lane out.  How it got there is part of the story line.  What I would like to happen is for the guy in the shipping office to outline 3 options.


1)  The sensible option  - wait 4 - 5 weeks for the mating season to end and it will go back out to sea.  (Well, we know that no self-respecting bunch of heroes is going to accept that, so we move on.)


2)  The risky option - go to the Western Hills and see if there is any Hygrod Stinkwort around (your reaction to the name is probably similar to that of the party).  This will drive the creature away.  (No fight, no exp, no loot, just having it in your inventory when you approach it in a boat is enough.  It skedaddles.)


3)  The utterly insane option - they could try and fight it, but at their level of experience and gear they would have to be very, very lucky and very, very good to survive.  (But lots of exp, and a wonderful piece of loot.)


The astute will immediately notice that there's a fourth option not mentioned.  I do want to give players the chance to completely bypass this road block, but I have a problem.  How, in side view, can one possibly have a battle between humans and a sea creature?  They cannot walk across water (despite delusions of grandeur on the part of one of them), and the sea creature cannot come aboard a boat - it's a sea creature, for crying out loud!  Unless I can come up with some solution, I'll be stuck with the usual road block scenario.


So instead of doing the dialogue I worked on my title screen.  I have now got the foundation images in place.  To finish it, though, requires the character art, and that won't be coming for a loooooooooong time.

 

[Vox Novus]

@ksjp17 Sounds like you'll need a battleback for that fight where the party appears on a ship while leaving enough space for a monster to be placed in the sea water; you could just have the head of the monster poking out the water. Another option is that you make the sea monster a part of the battleback image itself and the party is only doing battle with something like it's tentacles; which would serve as the actual battler.

 

[AceOfAces_Mod]

@ksjp17, what do you mean exactly? If you mean a character generator, the clothes shown on the face graphic don't match with any of the parts.

 

[Mimironi]

I've been a biiit lazy this month, but i finally planned the setup for the main menu yesterday.

Spoiler

thinking of having the hp/mp being displayed in the middle of the character's portrait

 

[Vox Novus]

@bgillispGot you, don't want to force a scene/chapter to end earlier than it should.


@Mirpono I like the layout, I'm not sure about the HP/MP being in the middle though, I'd prefer it in a spot where it obscures as little of the important aspects of the art work as possible; basically the bottom area or potentially the very top.


@Marquise* Oh, so are you doing more than just the sprites walking poses/animations?


@AceOfAces_Mod The npc event in the upper right? The clothes look fine to me; a nice fancy little outfit. Is the character selling something or in charge of something awesome or important?


Slightly early still since I could get more done but I accomplished a good amount for an update. Update 11/20/2016:


Finished the next section of my final dungeon, this one was themed on the game's main character; the witch. You gotta use the witch's power to fly across gaps and hit switches on platforms to open the door to the next room, eventually you reach the end room and hit a final switch that lights a torch in the main part of the dungeon (like all sections that make up my final dungeon) and transports you back there (to start another section).


I noticed a number of errors that could occur while flying that I hadn't noticed before since the player is set to through to fly. Basically events that have graphics need to be set to below or above otherwise it looks funny when flying across them. So I had to fix that by turning on a switch when flight starts to set them to below until the player lands. Not sure why I overlooked this as I had to do something similar with changing the tileset so that certain tiles that had a star passability would be temporarily an x passability. Anyway, to end this little story I had to go back and adjust some stuff on my previous flight maps to fix the errors; tested it briefly so hopefully everything is fine now.


Will probably draw a mock-up of the next of my four dungeon sections tonight and map it tomorrow; I will likely work on the feline party member's section next and it will be a small maze where you need to make use of his ability to enter crawlspaces to reach another side of the maze you couldn't normally. 

 

[Marquise*]

@Vox Novus Yeah it is a Zelda type of game.


@Ksjp17 Seems like you got GM capacities of narrating.


Progress;


I finished the wings... If I decide that I finished the wings...


.........


*sigh*


There must be some more space for transparencies and textures and color rappel...


(Something tells me the ol geezer animator title will grow up like there is nothing to stop it.) 


BTW, unless Dymdez edit his post, you can see the following;


View attachment 52576


If someone want to steal this with the backdrop and guide, I already feel his/her pain.

 

[Lantiz]

@LantizI am about to get dragon transmitted finger arthritis if my metacarpal don't start hurting me on those *&^&*%^(*&^*&^%&%$^#$%%$#$&%&^ wings!

Well seems to be bad... is it still a funny thing to do? Making a game shuld be a lot of fun.

@Lantiz: I feel the same sometimes, and often find myself wondering what could I get done if I didn't have to handle all the other obligations.

Yes, exactly! I also think about it.

@Lantiz Another nice thing about a short project is that you get to experience the satisfying feeling of seeing something come to completion.  You can take that forward into a future, larger project, knowing that you can complete.  That can be a great support when you're 40% through a big project feeling like it will never finish.

Good to know. It's being awesome.


My "big one" is just starting, but I'm happy about the fact that I choose to create a demo/alternate game before the big project.


It's helping me a lot in testing the plugins and all the eventing tricks that I may need.

@Lantiz Lol, those were pretty simple maps so not worth showing, not to mention at this point I'm just focused on getting the game out so people can see the maps by playing it.

Seems like a good reason to not showing some pics, fair enoug, I guess hahaha


Well... I had a trip this weekend so, no progress :/


I think it's going to take a little bit of time to be back on track. Not sure, maybe I'm just too tired to say now (and I am really tired atm).


I'll keep following your works, everybody.


Keep it up.

 

[bgillisp]

@ksjp17: It was a ton of work, agreed. I'd been working on them on/off over the last two months. Even with a generator it was still tough going at times.


@Mirpono: Looks nice. Luna engine? Or custom coded?


@Vox Novus: What you outline is why I've avoided flight in my game so far. Good job finding and fixing it!


@Marquise*: You forgot to make it break dance *runs away*


@Lantiz: I once did a side project that was all about battles to test a feature in my game. You can always use a side project (or small one) to work towards your big project If you focus it like that. Plus, you don't have to release it (I didn't, though that is because I know that with no story and no purpose for the characters to be there no one but me would want to play my side project, unless they really want to test my battle system out for me).


11.21 Update: Early again as I work later this evening this time. Managed to place NPC's on another part of Riverdale, and caught a couple mapping errors while at it. Also set up and made it so that you can finish 1 side quest and start 2 more in this town (there's 5 total in this town, but 4 and 5 require me to map the nearby mines for those to be doable). Now either need to place NPC's inside the shops, or the other two little segments of the town you can walk in next time.

 

[AceOfAces_Mod]

@Vox Novus, She is the Lieutennant of the Corsairs. She is quite important.

 

[Marquise*]

@bgillispBelieve it or not I was really messaging about it to the person who REALLLY wanted that dragon   I typed about victory dance to not disappoint this tread as it is now a recurring joke.  XD  Dunno...maybe I would be faster now that the color scheme and scales have already been layered out.

 

[Mimironi]

@Vox Novus yeah, I'll figure out somewhere to put the hp/mp bars. Just gotta do some testing


@bgillisp unfortunately it's not luna and I cant code all too well, so I'm using moghunters menu script plugin to get the effect. It's going well, so far.

 

[Lantiz]

@Lantiz: I once did a side project that was all about battles to test a feature in my game. You can always use a side project (or small one) to work towards your big project If you focus it like that. Plus, you don't have to release it

I understand, this is exactly what I'm doing. Mostly for testing combat, map generation... debugging.

 

[Vox Novus]

@bgillisp Yeah, I'm not even sure If I've really caught everything but I intend to open the game to play-testers before full public release. Its only on a few maps so I definitely wouldn't have made it available the whole game for the headache it would case me. I wouldn't be so sure about your side project you never know people might enjoy it; you don't have too much to lose for sharing it with others do you?. People enjoy playing boss rush style games. Just trying to give you some encouragement here! Sounds like things are coming together in that part of your game; mapping errors are so easy to make, sometimes its as simple as you accidentally dragged the mouse to a spot you didn't intend and hadn't noticed it.


@Lantiz Hope the trip goes well; everyone needs time to recharge. Just put your cord in an outlet and you'll be back to top form soon enough (bad joke sorry). Hope you get back in the game making mood soon.


@Marquise* Oh a zelda type game; I see now. Cool! Dragon looks fantastic, thanks for sharing. 


@AceOfAces_ModI thought she was important, those duds were far too fancy for just a regular character.


My update: 11/21/2016 (Technically, 11/22/2016 now but it was for yesterday)


Didn't do too much today, finished mapping my sort of maze which is one of the four sections of my final dungeon. There wasn't much to map since the maze has tight corridors and I didn't have space to add a lot of extra stuff to it other than some pots and lights here and there. It was mostly just making sure the spacing for what I wanted was right. I didn't go too crazy with the size of it either since if the player goes down a wrong pathway or crawlspace they have to backtrack.


Just need to do the last section of my four sections of the final dungeon, the section themed on the vampire character. I mentioned it earlier but it will be themed on using the vampire's ability to enthrall the mind of npcs and gather more accurate/hidden information to advance. After that I get to begin doing the combat stuff for the final dungeon, data-basing and balancing and the like. 

 

[Lantiz]

@Lantiz Hope the trip goes well; everyone needs time to recharge. Just put your cord in an outlet and you'll be back to top form soon enough (bad joke sorry). Hope you get back in the game making mood soon.

Actually it was a martial art seminar, I've never been so tired in my life hahaha (don't worry, love this kind of joke lol)


I'll probably get back to the game making on tomorow's night.


Your project seems to go well.


By the way, good luck on:

doing the combat stuff for the final dungeon, data-basing and balancing and the like. 

Dang, wish I was free to work on my game now :[

 

[Arithmetician]

I sketched a bit of a world map prototype a few days ago, and got around to starting to design the actual world map for the game.  Some aspects of it are based on the plot ideas I already have, but I also think actually having a world map will get my creativity going and generate additional ideas for the plot, towns, and dungeons.  


I've included an image of the northern half (and then some) of my world map so far, which is where I've put the most effort into so far.


The World Map

Spoiler

Anyways, some features of this world map:


The forested coastal area with some peninsulas and towns is the Kingdom of Vanet, which one of the player characters (Lorelei) will be the princess of, and the protagonist (Arthur) will be investigating an anomaly there.  


The dark, blasted-looking area in the upper right corner of the northern continent is where an advanced civilization used to be before it was destroyed about 20-30 years before the events of the game.  Brenna, another player character, is a half-blooded descendant of the survivors of this civilization.


The island surrounded by the deep water, with mountains, a castle and observatory on it, at the western edge of the sea between the northern and southern continents, is Academy Island, where Arthur studied.  


The castle on the island connected to the mainland by a bridge is the kingdom he hails from, although he hasn't been there in many years.  The bridge is a small nod to FFV's Big Bridge.  I also intentionally made the opposing coastline vaguely resemble a dragon's mouth, and I placed a volcano at the northern tip.


Angela will be based out of the city at the southern end of the strait between the northern and southern continents.


The Empire's capital is to the south of the desert at the bottom of the picture.


I've included the Boat, Ship, and Airship, but these are just for playtesting moving about the map. The player will start in the Vanet area.