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The next few chapters

  • Pladough
  • 03/14/2011 03:57 AM
  • 383 views
With the release of Chapter 1 out of the way, I've been slowly working on the next few chapters. The first episode was a nice learning process for me. As you can tell, the first dungeon was my first dive into RPG Maker VX. Gosh, looking at it makes me a sad panda. Thankfully, I don't have any dungeons with that bad a layout.

There was one thing that really bothered me about chapter 1. It was how closed off the last few moments of game play were. Once you reach a certain point in the demo, there was no way back to town or back to the field. Thankfully, I took into account if the player were underlevled or poorly equipped, but there's going to be more instances were I can't keep doing that. I remember playing Final Fantasy Tactics and I was completely stuck at one part. The battle was so difficult, I could not beat it with my current set up. There was no way to grind or buy my way out of it. I had to start over from the beginning.

In future releases, I'm opening up the design a bit more. You can freely exit dungeons and go back town or where ever you want. The only exception would be if you're at the cut scene before a boss. I don't want the game to suffer from non-stop battles and cut scenes. I want players to explore, buy supplies, check out the extra stuff I'm implementing, and take a breather every now and then.

Another feature I'm putting in is revisiting old dungeons. That may seem like an odd feature, but bear with me. Because I had no world map or traveling system, there wasn't a good way to get the player to the dungeon they visited. After you complete chapter 2, it will unlock the feature. It will be intertwined with the lore of the game so it's not just a plain system.

Something changing from chapter 1 is the battles specifically Maria's skill set. Her auto attacks were outdamaging her skills, which defeats the purpose of her system. I'm increasing the damage with her skills as well as tweaking a few things to make it rewarding for a player to charge her up.

My next release is going to include three chapters. Two of them will be about the same length as the first. Maybe even longer. The last one is going to be significantly long. I want that story arc to be the first real test for these characters. I hope to make it compelling enough for the player to sit down for 3 hours and finish it. I have a lot of work done on chapters 2 and 3. Finishing those up won't be a problem. Planning and executing that last one is going to be a lot of work.