The scene above has probably been the most problematic part of this game since I've started it. I've probably redone it more times than I care to remember. Finding a decent way to introduce the antagonist of this story has certainly not been easy, but thanks to Neena and her sprites I was able to finally find a good way to do it.


I know he's performing a miracle, but sometimes I like to pretend it's a spotlight and he's going to start singing a song to all those people.

Also an update!

Sadly a lot of the work in the game is mostly scripts, which means I don't have a lot of ways to update that are not completely boring and technical, but I've been working on the maps in the game and I thought it would be nice to show the progress of the game.


Here is the shop. Not particularly interesting, but it does the job very well.


And here is the entrance to the secretive oasis city of Toral.


Here we see what happens after the end of the demo.


Inside the Inn in the town of Rabul.


I know it's not much of an update, but it's been a while since I've posted anything and I wanted to post something for the people interested in the game. If there is anything anyone is interested in knowing about that I may have not mentioned or posted about, let me know.

Thank you for reading and have a nice day.

I know it may seem sort of silly to do an update just because of 100 downloads, but it makes me happy to see it's being downloaded.

Before we get to the update, I wanted to mention something. I want to do or give some sort of prize to whoever downloaded the game the 100th time. So if you were the one who did it, let me know. I'm not really sure what kind of prize I can give out, maybe a scripting commission for free (15~30$ one) if you can use one or something else. (Just take a screenshot of the "Silver Heart.exe" file properties and it should show a time that matches up with the 100th download)

Now that is out of the way, some updates from the game.

I've been working with the feedback provided from various places where I posted the demo and here are some of the results.

One of the biggest complaints/problems was the lack of explanation about the battle system. I thought people would be able to pick it up faster without the need for a lot of explanation and while many did, some people would have done better with some sort of tutorial of explanation.

To address that I've been working on an interactive in-game tutorial.


(It's more animated and in the game and has a lot more information, it's just hard to convey that in a single image)

I'm also thinking of making it segmented, that way people can choose what they want to instead of being forced through everything at once.



Another big problem seemed to be the speed of battles, some people wanted battles to be even faster than they already were.

To address this, I added a fast-forward button, by pressing Right or Left in battle you can speed things up or slow them down.


(On the image you can see a >> that shows that the battle is at the fastest speed, one > shows that it's at medium speed)

The image above also shows one the biggest changes, which are HP/Action bars instead of text logs.

Another issue with the game seemed to be that enemies were way too hard for some people. Although I hated doing this because I enjoyed the fact that the game had a pretty good chance to get you. I decided to lower the stat of some of the monsters (Yes, rafflesias are no longer that big of a threat, but they do still do a fair amount of damage).

Aside from these updates I've been working on bug fixes and adjusting some of the formulas to compensate for the enemies being toned down (Like the escape formula).

That's all I can think of for this update, thanks for reading and trying the game and have a nice day!

I wanted to make the first blog about the first thing I usually do before starting a game.

Creating a core system to build the game and story around, usually a battle system.

I created the core system of this game which is a battle system as a sort of joke for a competition held by the official English RPG Maker site.

The competition was about making a cutscene and no battle systems which require input were allowed, so I spent a while thinking how I could get past that and how could I create a battle system which required no command input at all...

And then I remembered the "Half minute hero" series and how their battle systems are automated completely but very fun to play, and more importantly they require no input at all!

With that I started to research what I would need to build the battle system and created the first "Wire Frame" image to work with.



Yes, that is how a battle system is born when you can't draw. This is what I use to start creating any kind of core system.

After knowing how the battle system was going to look and where things were heading, I started to research one of the most important aspects of the battle system which is the "Bumping Attacks" when two sprites collide with each other.



Knowing that no one on their sane mind was going to make me large sized sprites for testing (Tired of begging), I settled for just having them zoomed in for size changes.

The red boxes represent the hit area of the sprite and the numbers are just random numbers that appear whenever two sprites collide.

At first I was very worried this would not work due to having to handle so many sprites at once along with the damage, but it turned out that as long as there were not more than 10 sprites on the screen it would work fine.

I also had to limit how much damage could appear on screen, by limiting it to 40 sprites per battler in order to keep the frame rate up.

And of course there were many problems I had no foreseen such as what would happen when a very fast sprite bumped into a slower one, this changed the design of the battle system from single attacks to simultaneous attacks where sprites would attack each other if they bumped where as before the fastest one would be the one to land the attack.

This led to a design rule for battles. "Normal battles should not last longer than 30 seconds" without someone dying. Also, "Use small numbers and make 1 feel like a threat to the player"

After working out the "Bumping", I started to work on the battle "HUD", which where character stats would be displayed.

Since this was meant to last less than 30 seconds and most of the focus would be in the sprites themselves, I decided to just make something compact and simple.



I looked at a TON of HP/MP bars to see which ones were the most easy to identify and follow.

The main idea was to create a tiny hud that would move around a bar to display where the sprite was in battle, but with all the focus on the main screen, it seemed pointless.

While working on the HUD I realized that there was a lot of empty space left and I had no idea what to fill it with.



After a while of thinking of what I could possibly fill it with and replaying "Half minute hero", I realized what I could fill it with, but I did not want to do it.

The original game allowed you to sacrifice your HP in order to boost your speed and power. I wanted to do something similar, but if I used HP then HUD would still be half empty.

That is when I added the "Battle rush" input:



It fit within the limits of the competition, since it was not technically a command input and you just pressed enter to speed up the battle. This also allowed me to fill that void in the HUD.

I also toyed with the idea of quick items and adding a menu and a battle end menu, but that would not work for the competition, so I just put that in the ideas drawer.





After the main components were done, I just refined it bit by bit until it was ready for the competition.

Many of the refinements included ways to make the battle system seem faster while not actually being any faster (Creating a map transition that seemed to reveal something that is hidden behind it)

Leaving the debug letters at the bottom as a distraction, this also worked to show how fast the battles were going and could momentarily distract them from any slowness.

And here is the result, the cutscene I submitted for the competition.



Jump to 1:20 if you just want to see the battle and skip my cheesy writing.

Seeing as this was an experiment in basically bending rules, I added resources from ACE in order to make sure it disqualified as I did not want to affect the chances of anyone who might have written a really good cutscene.

I also uploaded a video to make sure that nail hit the coffin (Remember that my goal was to create a battle system that require no input therefore bypassing that rule)

It turned out that it was liked, and the battle system itself was no problem. Of course the graphics would end up disqualifying it.

I was happy that I realized my goal (I'm easy to please), but then I found myself reading PM's from people who wanted to see more of it.

Of course after a week, I thought the battle system looked like crap and I wanted to completely redo it.

I started by changing the resolution to 640 x 416. After that I decided to see how I could improve the HUD and how the player saw information.

Using the ideas from before to build the menu, I decided to try and fit faces somehow instead of sprites.

Also I wanted to somehow fit items into the mix and have them be limited.



As you can see I changed how bars looked from horizontal to vertical, I found that I could follow the bars more easily if they were going down. The second bar in case I have not explained it is for skills.

This design ended up not working very well, if items were added they would have had to heal everyone at once or have their effects be global to fit under a single timer. This killed off that idea off and I had to find another way to fit items into the mix.

Then I noticed there was some space to the right that looked a bit off... But it was just enough to fit another bar!



Now that characters had their own Item time bars it was time to design a menu to go along with them...

And that will be next time!

Thank you very much for reading on my ramblings and have a nice day!

If you have any questions or thoughts or want me to explain something in more detail, do let me know.