Ob Iter

^^Yes, the image is dark. It's night time xD

Anyway, after rebooting into MV, i am finally.... FINALLY ... finished all the foundation work ... Character Designs, Database stuff, Storyboarding, Graphics organisation, Music, etc, etc... to the point where i can actually ... MAKE THE GAME! .. That is if i can put in enough time to actually make it. >,>

In a weird way, even though I've been working on this never ending project in some way or another since 1999, or this 2nd game since 2002, i think it was only a few days ago that the RPG Maker system itself finally matured to the point where i would be satisfied with the game i could make.

I was always dogged by the 320 x 240 limitations of RPG 2003 ... and XP was better but lacked the built in side view battle system and i never really knew enough about scripts at the time... and VX (Ace) seemed like a step backward ... so it was only really with the release of MV and Yanfly's hard work at realizing the full potential of it that i found myself with a platform that would make the game i wanted to make at a level of quality i could be satisfied with.

So here i am so many years later, in a position where all i really have to do is make the game...

I still honestly don't know if it will ever come to be ... it's so complex to make ... Even a 34 x 19 map (1600 x 900 resolution) takes me several hours to design ... since i'm using prerendered floors to get away from tiles, and using the doodads plugin + per pixel movement + region pass-ability + several dozen other plugins and i've got 25 pages of nots to remind me what the plugin commands are for stuff xD ...

And since i've drawn up the whole thing in advance i am certain that i will need to be really creative to keep the game under the systems 1,000 map limit if i ever finish the game, which i'll release in Chapters either way or else it truly will never stand a chance. I guess if i go over the limit there are ways to deal with that so i'll cross that bridge later...

But if it takes me 10 hours per map x 1,000 maps that's 10,000 hours to make this thing reality... and so the quandary.

How will it ever happen?
I still don't know, but... i'll keep plugging away and see.

Or so i estimate is probably left to do before i can finally release the first 2 chapters of this never ending project.

It feels like enough hours to still be daunting, but in perspective after the thousands of hours that have already gone into this project, it's also the light at the end of the tunnel. Will i manage to get this done before the end of 2015? I hope so. I don't know so ... but i'm close enough now that it's certainly possible.

I'm finally satisfied with the game-play foundation ... which has taken a lot of tinkering over the years. Part of the complication with releasing this in parts, is what happens if i want to go back and make a significant system side change later that wrecks the save file for those who have already started playing. I hope to avoid that.

I've got a choice system in the game which adds to variables depending on the player response, and then will start to make significant storyline branches later on depending on the values, so it's very important to cement those. I went with 4, which should be more than enough for combinations.

I've also got plans from Chapter 4 onward to implement a 'home town', where the player can recruit characters to live in the town. Therefore i need to plan ahead a bit in terms of putting these named characters in the game world ahead of that point in development. I've added variables for every one of them so that i can make branches later.

I also want there to be some non linearity involved, although the plot of the game is pretty linear ... i want the world itself to be properly filled out. I want there to be changes to places the player has already been to, and allow the player to revisit them. Side dungeons, town characters, etc, etc. So i've opted to just give the player open warp to previously visited areas right from the start. If there's a story sequence that would make it unreasonable to allow warping i can just temporarily disable it for that sequence. Given the linearity of the plot, it will always make some kind of not-sense to have warping, but i imagine people are not likely to complain about the feature. It's well worth having.

With all the work on the foundation in good shape, it's really the graphics more than anything that are the time consumer now...

Honestly, i have struggled for years with learning how to make the game look GOOD. It never came easy for me. This game looked like **** once upon a time. ... and i just can't put out a product i am not proud of. Inevitably, there will be the odd clash here or there that i won't have actively noticed. Or a design choice that will irk someone ... and i'm sure to have more lightbulb moments along the way, or take good advice to further polish this aspect. Thankfully, this CAN be pretty easily updated after release without breaking the save file.

I'm reasonably happy with the visual presentation ... FINALLY. Although it is taking a heck of a lot of work. The backgrounds are typically painfully slow to create, although worth it. I've also opted to work around the tileset and color limits by using objects as my tileset graphics in large part. Every map has a basic tileset that i've edited together to simplify things some, but vastly, it is an ever growing array of objects. Hundreds of different kinds of walls, dozens of floors, plants, paintings, lights, trees, etc, etc. So even when i'm doing a more tileset based map (by design interior locations are tileset based and exterior are renders), it still takes a LONG time.

Originality is important too. I want to keep away mostly from the standard rips that everyone has seen a dozen times before ... although i'm giving myself some slack on that. Some flowers, a nice looking piano, a bookshelf. Selective stuff that can fit in. I can replace them later if need be. In all, Google images is my friend. OK, not entirely as though i drew everything by hand, but a brick wall texture i will consider to be freeware. If it's not, i'm giving credit.

I guess really, it comes down to me being satisfied. In the bigger scope, the project has just gotten so massive over the years that it feels impossible to finish. That's where my choice to go episodic came in. I can buckle down on these first two chapters and have them out with another 500 or so hours work. That's something real. About 10 hours of play ... ish. And with the foundation in place, the rest will come quicker, and it will be easier to be motivated. So things will keep rolling along.

Self motivation is always a bit of a constant inner struggle while i plod along with this project. The old phrase 'best game ever' is generally not something to aspire to, if only because the claim itself doesn't work. Still, i expect of myself a certain level of overall quality that i cannot compromise on. Certainly this game would have been finished by now if i wasn't constantly asking the question, 'how can i make this better'?

There is an abundance of content on this site. So much so that it is almost i think, even too much to expect to stand out. No, i think it would be a mistake for me to compare my work to others directly in an apples to oranges kind of way. Rather, i want to ask myself, 'Am i satisfied'?

Well, 8-bit color depth is something that always has irked me a little about my chosen platform. Finding ways of maximizing the colors is one part of the graphical presentation i must do my best with. I always admired the Saga series for its world immersion, and graphically, the point at which i am satisfied is when i feel that my game can be looked at also as an artistic experience.

So long as i hold on to Rm2k3, so far as i know, there are no 24-bit options. But what i do have is a virtually limitless array of content storage. The 256 color limit is per map and per layer.

So i did at first apply this to mixing pre-rendered backgrounds and chipsets. A bryce floor texture is less repetitive and works on its own 256 palette. It also takes some strain off the map chipset since i can effectively erase the floor tiles. Adding a transparent glow through pictures on lights or for any shading purposes is also its own layer. Each picture is its own. To the best of my knowledge, there is no way for the picture to be beneath the chip set graphics and character graphics, and this presents a very real limitation.

Ultimately, i have come to that point once again, where a very time consuming task simply has to be done because i don't want to settle for less. That is simply, to turn the vast majority of my entire chip set graphics into object files. Object files are each on their own 256 color palette, and so in theory, each and every tile in the game could be its own 256 colors. Of course, this isn't entirely necessary, but it does mean that i could display thousands of colors on each and every 20 x 15 map (which the vast majority of my currently 1000+ maps are).

I figured that since objects are events, i would have to leave a few things on the chip set, like tables and chairs. If i want to place a beer bottle object on a table, i cannot have two different events graphics on the same tile unless i move one event on top of the other during map transitions, which ... maybe is just taking it a little to far. But for most anything else, like bookshelves and walls or carpets when they don't have something on them, or lights and shrubs and plants and barrels and just about anything else, they can be object events.

Better yet, any of the objects can be used freely on any map, like having one giant chip set file instead of being restricted to a map specific tile set.

I suppose again, if one wanted to make a custom graphic of the table or the wall with every imaginable combination of objects pre-placed onto it (or use pictures instead of objects), then there would be almost no further need for the chip set whatsoever, except for animation tiles. I have decided not to go quite that far. This simply because for a marginal chip set, 256 colors still goes a long way, and i can change them with every 20 x 15 map.

It has been one week since my last update, so i thought it time to post another.

I wrote earlier that i thought there was maybe 1,000 hours of work left to do in the game as a whole, but i badly under-estimated that number. It is likely closer to 3,000 hours. In any case, i am committed that the episodic release format is the only way this story will ever be completed. For Chapters 1 and 2 i believe another 200 hours work should do it.

My immediate goal is to have the graphics design largely completed in time for the Olympics. Given that i am now re-modeling the last area of Chapter 2, this should easily be met.

During the Olympics, i will be glued to the TV to watch them constantly as i always do, but fortunately i have 3 monitors. This means that production on the game will continue on one screen while i watch the Olympics on the other. It's a good multi-tasking approach which has always served me well. Currently i am catching up on my favorite radio program while working on the game.

As i am preparing this for a release, i'll need to comb through the database and fix up all the small things that i've been 'leaving till later', so this will easily be accomplished during the Olympics. It's a small task, maybe 20 hours worth and easily suited to the situation.

I've also got a couple areas i want to fix up graphically, but nothing hugely complex. I also need to add a couple cut-scenes, most especially in chapter 2 to glue everything together properly. There's a lot of characters and it't important i keep track of them so that no one is forgotten for extended periods, or their locations at crucial times unexplained. I may want to flesh out relationships a bit too, we'll see. All small things adding up to i'm guessing about 50 hours work.

So there's 70 hours there, and largely i feel i can accomplish this during the Olympics. That way i can go into final testing afterward. I might at some point feel compelled to add a new area or something, but in general, that last leg isn't too complicated. It's still 10 hours of game time though and i'm aiming to play through it 3 times, but maybe 2 will do, it depends. The final test through will be off the game disk i create. A couple weeks should do it, so for now i think Mid-March is pretty realistic.

My body might fight me pretty hard trying to adjust to Russia time though, and if that's the case, i'll be zombie brain and things will slide back to late March. I'll keep you posted.

In the words of an old teacher of mine,
'You have to release this some time, or you'll never release it'.

That is the development story of this game.

So i've been turning that over in my head the last few days,
what do i do with this?

As the years have wore on, the once new and shiny RM2K3 is now the older program to the newer and shinier XP, VX, and Ace makers. Still, the old RM2K3 battle system is perfect for my needs, and no newer maker has updated it. Of course i could create a custom system on a newer maker to replicate what RM2K3 offers... so shouldn't i do that? I could handle the task of transferring the resources over, and the battle formulas too, but unless i could just directly copy and paste the maps and events..., no, if i had to remake all the map designs and events it would take forever.

So i take a step back and look at my game and the RM2K3 platform. It does do generally everything i need to make the game i want, except for three factors.

1) The 320x240 pixel depth
2) The 4:3 frame instead of widescreen (i'm not a fan of stretching).
3) The 8 bit color depth

Thankfully i have resolved #1.
I found a copy of cherry's old Hq2x program and will include it with the game. Many of us have used it in emulating those old PS1 games, and it looks wonderful. The screenshot below is using it.

I am also not overly concerned about #3,
if only because the screenshot below shows how far 256 colors can go. The trick obviously, is to limit the color range per picture. This one has primarily only the greens and yellowy browns in the spectrum to share it, so both color ranges look full. If i added Blue and Red to this screen, the shared load would create a noticeable drop off in quality. Obviously i'd rather have some sort of tool or plug-in or just be using a program with a higher color depth, but i can work with this.

That leaves #2,
Which i have no idea how to work around without stretching. I suppose the individual player can make that decision on their own. If i could, i'd make my game with triple widescreen support, but, if there's no way to modify the original RM2K3, at least none that i know of, i guess i go with it.

So that brings me back to the idea of Episodic release. The more i dig into the scope of this project, i am reminded that i'll never finish it.. and what i mean is, that even if i finish this entire story arc, i've still got more stories to tell in this world that would be entirely separate games. Finishing this particular chunk though (9 chapters at the moment), is doable within a couple years.

I have minor concerns about the episodic release format. One is that i'd like to have a gameplay mechanic where the player makes choices which change variables and branch the story-line later on. With episodic release this becomes problematic because i am always making changes to this. My second concern is more simply that i am always tightening up small things across all chapters and i push forward. Maybe remaking a map, or cleaning up dialogue, or tightening a battle. I suppose neither concern is game-breaking though. I could keep tweaking things forever. Certainly asking a player to re-download 500megs in today's day and age should not be too massive an ask?

The character customization element in my game is extremely deep and i'd like to allow the player to carry their builds over from start to finish. For this reason it makes the most sense for the entire game to remain on a single platform. Still, releasing the game in chunks would make a change to a different maker possible later on with less headache. Certainly it would make it more of an option to consider. Also, giving people something to play would substantially increase interest in this project (or not if everyone hates it, haha).

Probably the benefits of episodic release far outweigh the drawbacks.
So that is what i will do.