Valor Emblem

Yeah, so I've been away from Valor Emblem for way, way too long. That's all about to change now. I've finally got all my shit together IRL, all the dopey side projects out of the way, and finally finished this one damn Chapter (stage/level/you know) that kept hanging me up.

If you look at the main page, I've updated the game's description ever so slightly. For example, I've removed the obviously outdated Completion Target of 2012 and changed it to something that hopefully won't meet the same fate. And in order to report my progress frequently, without relying too heavily on the use of things like this blog or some vapid screenshots, I've added a little meter thing.



Basically how it works is, I've quantified what remains of this project into stages of development; each Chapter having Conceptualization, Mapping, Writing, Implementation, and Play Testing. Every time I advance one stage, I add the appropriate % to the meter. That way if you check back a week later and see that it's gone up by 0.9% even though the gamepage has been inactive, you know I'm still hard at it.
Don't worry about it seeming so low right now. If I included all the resource gathering, editing, and arranging, the whole thing would be more like 80%.

Support refers to Support Conversations which are less critical to final playability. If I finish the game but only have, say, 40% of them done, I'll still release it, then add the remainders as I churn them out.

So why the hiatus anyway? Well, it all began in 2012 when my computer's hard drive failed and I couldn't even boot the damn thing anymore. I'm in the habit of backing up my work periodically, and my most recent backup had coincidentally been 2 days prior so I lost literally nothing. The problem is, my computer was my work station. Whenever I sat down in front of it to gamedev or write, I went into the Zone. Any creative artist out there knows what I'm talking about.
The interim laptop I bought didn't cut it, and the brand new state-of-the-art machine I got later gave me new "problems". For example, it turned out my old CRT monitor was actually really fucking dark. So dark that what I thought I was spriting in black was actually a dark blue. Those of you with a good memory might recall me fiddling with new graphics and posting a few comparison shots in the Screenshot thread. To fix this, all the graphics underwent a manual palette overhaul. ALL of them.
Twice in the case of my attack animations.

Then there was some other shit too, IRL-wise. Government exams to write, a new job to hunt for and subsequently settle into, moving to a new part of the country, and getting a handle on the next step of this thing we call Life. I did work on bits and pieces, here and there, to and fro. But for all the non-RM bullshit on my plate, I just couldn't really get back into it.

But here I am. I finally overcame a major hurdle and am officially back in business. I'll be posting things now and then to prevent my game profile from falling back to page 185 or wherever it was when I posted this blog.