The last time I made one of those “here’s my progress” blogs, I had finished all of the enemy graphics. Now, I’ve finished all of the enemy behaviors and all of the skill animations. Battles still need to be balanced, but that’s going to happen pretty late in the development progress. I also still need to get all of the battle backgrounds together, but that’s hinging on a script that I’m waiting on, which is kind of a bummer, because I want to start making .gifs of all the crazy battle stuff I worked on throughout the summer.

Now that I’ve more or less finished with battles, I’m moving onto the most time-consuming stage of development: mapping. This is probably the thing I’m least comfortable with, and the semester has started so I’m actually working again, which means get ready for a PRETTY SLOW rate of output. The good news is I pretty much expected this anyway so this is hardly surprising, and I’ll try to start posting screenshots for #screenshotsaturday again, which means, from your perspective, it’ll probably look like I’m doing way more even though I’m going at half the speed.

So, for the next year+ I’ll be mapping, composing, and making all of the field stuff interactable. You’re probably not going to see another one of these progress report blogs for a while, but I’ll try to pop back in around the one-year anniversary of the game announcement since I like ritualistic stuff like that. I'll also still post a lot of the kinds of stuff I've been posting; Information Guy, for example, still has a lot to say.

Question for the mapping enthusiasts out there: how long does it take you to get a fully composed level map together (this includes drawing the tiles)? I've spent about a week on the first level and I still have another day or two of tinkering left. The biggest problem I've had so far are trees; they're staggered a bit to give a more natural looking treeline, but this has been a MAJOR pain to get right. I think with the style I've been using, interior maps are going to be way, way easier at least, but, man, these outside areas are killing me.