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About to work on what is supposed to be a very pivotal dungeon of the game. However, it's very...lacking. As you'll see from the chipset:



This is for the real dungeon of Pandaemonium. I am not sure what to add to this to make it more interesting. It uses the actual tiles from Touhou 5 - Mystic Square, so that's why there's not much right now (PC-98 game and all). Anything you guys can recommend to add to this to make it feel...epic I guess?
@Xenomic: Why not pixel a few things yourself? A few lamps, stones, things like that?
Because I am not good at pixel art, especially low-res pixel art. The only type of pixel art I tend to do are hi-res Guilty Gear-esque sprites, which obviously won't work here.
Oh. framerate drop is gone. Must have been the fact I had 60+ tabs open, PLUS Eclipse, PLUS Github, and probably MySQL as well...XD

Well, dungeon is populated. I've had to make enemies vanish completely if the player escapes from them, because making them go invisible, then resume patrolling kinda screws up patrol routes. :( Oh well.

EDIT: they respawn if the player changes maps, so it's only a problem for the first dungeon, which is likely to be the only one with a single map.
Woo! Everything is relatively well balanced! Everything is beatable (but tough), even without some of the better equipment/skills from chests.

Just need to implement some Permanent Shortcuts in the first dungeon, do a last sweep over the dialogue to improve it, and...*grumble* going to have to find a way/script to better fix the AI the enemies have. WHY ARE YOU PIXIES BUFFING OTHER PIXIES?! You should be buffing and unbinding the boss! XD

Once all that's taken care of, I think I'll be ready to get some proper feedback on what I have.



Trying to come up with a puzzle room in here. The Es all alternate. One set of them are spikes that are lowered, the other are raised. You cannot walk on the raised spikes, so you have to find switches to lower them and raise others. However, I'm not very good with making puzzles, and not sure how to fill the rest of the room with this. In this room is the main switch that'll lower the set of spikes that's blocking the right passage in the main room, so the goal is to get to that switch.

So yeah, I know the map's not very pleasing at all, but the aesthetics can wait until it's done. But I'm not sure if this idea is good to go with or not...this is the left room from the main hallway too so it's only one room off from where you start. @_@;
My advice? Map it out on paper first. I find making it somewhat gridlike on paper helps, and then you can make it look prettier in the game engine when you implement it.

I say this as someone who made a similar puzzle not too long ago (only there were THREE types of switches. :o) If I hadn't made it on paper first, I would never have gotten it done, let alone as nice as it is now.

So yeah, never underestimate the power of rough drafts.

---
Just tried running what I have of my game on Hard mode. Dear GOD it's hard. I'm not even gonna TOUCH my superhard mode. If people are crazy enough to want to play that mode, it's on their heads.

A demo will likely be up really soon. I need feedback bad.
@Aegix_Drakan: Not a bad idea honestly. I think Locke suggested that to me before too (with Paint I think?). I just never really did pre-plans like that. Probably should though, however I tend to do things on the fly without any plans. I just can't plan things out before hand lol. x_x;;

Hm...I think I know what I want to do with this dungeon now. Both left and right rooms will require you to operate switches to proceed through parts of one room or the other, similar to like a Zelda-styled game, and one of the rooms will have the final switch for the north path (there's still going to be a second floor and basement, and the north area will still have the parts from Rinnosuke's side of the story in that dungeon (but no random encounters) so...). But really, the dungeon will be pretty much 2 rooms total. What do you guys think? Not only does it keep the dungeon from being too long, but it limits it to two rooms max for rooms with enemy encounters (potentially. Don't know if basement or second floor will have enemy encounters or not, or what they'll even have. I know I'd like to have those so as to make the dungeon well...feel like the enemy's homebase as it should be).
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
author=Aegix_Drakan
Just tried running what I have of my game on Hard mode. Dear GOD it's hard. I'm not even gonna TOUCH my superhard mode. If people are crazy enough to want to play that mode, it's on their heads.
I always design the game on the hardest difficulty first, and then create the easier difficulties afterwards. Otherwise it would end up really unbalanced and potentially unbeatable. And it's really easy, as the designer, to tell exactly how hard an enemy can be and still be beatable. Design hard mode for players who play correctly, and then go back and make easier modes that let the player mess up and still win.

I don't even know how you would do it the other way around. You'd have to basically redesign the entire game for each harder difficulty, to make sure it's still balanced.
*sigh* I should give up, I really should! *sob*
I am working on a complete pre-evented text based combat system that has a class system. So, in other words, every fight I have to script to be different and give the player new class specific options.
A example would be that a dual blader would just run into a bar filled with goblin mobsters, kick over a table and stab a goblin through it, while a sorcerer would be forced to dodge around the room, avoiding getting shot while charging up his magic.(Note that everything is in ascii and described)

Possible? Oh yes. Mind mindbogglingly annoying to set up the stored variables and repetitively playtesting due to dice rolls? You know it.

I am tempted to just make it if combat somehow goes past 150 turns to just kill the player off. So tempting...
However, the most it has gotten is to 47 turns in my currant test bed, with only one table and three tommy gun wielding goblins. Thank gods.
slash
APATHY IS FOR COWARDS
4158
Laying out a state machine for my battles; I need the code for enemies and players to be able to queue up reactions at any time that will be executed at the end of the current turn. This covers simple stuff like an enemy counter attacking when it gets hit to the player summoning crows whenever her HP drops below X.

It kinda sounds boring but it's fun!
author=LockeZ
author=Aegix_Drakan
Just tried running what I have of my game on Hard mode. Dear GOD it's hard. I'm not even gonna TOUCH my superhard mode. If people are crazy enough to want to play that mode, it's on their heads.
I always design the game on the hardest difficulty first, and then create the easier difficulties afterwards. Otherwise it would end up really unbalanced and potentially unbeatable. And it's really easy, as the designer, to tell exactly how hard an enemy can be and still be beatable. Design hard mode for players who play correctly, and then go back and make easier modes that let the player mess up and still win.

I don't even know how you would do it the other way around. You'd have to basically redesign the entire game for each harder difficulty, to make sure it's still balanced.

That's what I did for my last game and it worked really well, so I know it's good practice.

For this one, I'm not trying to design it to be really hard on normal mode, so I'm finding it flexible enough that I can test it on normal first, and then go and slightly tweak a few things on Hard if need be.

As for my superhard mode...It only exists because a friend of mine found my last game way too easy on the hard mode because, quote: "I only died about 4 times at each boss, too easy". Also, this is the lunatic who thinks that stacking attack power on the tank and attacking while using a "lower party's attack, buff party's defense" move is a good idea....but somehow manages to make it work.

Honestly, I'm only doing minimal testing of Superhard to make sure it's not broken. I don't have the patience to go through it.
Still working on my FE game.



Slowly but surely replacing the mini-portraits with the sprites I made. Spent the last two days testing the game on Hard Mode ( I'm a sadist ). I can gauge the characters potential easier that way ( even if it is frustrating at times. I mean Fire Emblem meets SMT ( Press Turn system. XD ). And mouse support is real nice.


I dub those two the 'Wonder-Twins of Sex Appeal'. But being siblings, they work amazingly together. Innate support. ^^
Ratty524
The 524 is for 524 Stone Crabs
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Worked on some sprites for a little side project of mine:

Hariyama is the derpiest Gen 1 styled sprite I've made so far, and more is going to come! >:D

To reassure everyone else, I AM working on a few Pokemon RMN sprites on the side of this.



So I finally got these switches I've been meaning to get (was trying to get them from MariAri, but Nitroid uses the same resources so...), so now I CAN do the puzzle for my dungeon. However...I still don't know how to set up a good puzzle (sometimes you have to flip between the two rooms, other times you do not. May have a passage where it loops around to the other room from an area that would otherwise block you off, but is hidden well and would require the player to actually explore the area some). If anyone can help me with this, that'd make this part of the dungeon go by much faster...x_x;;

EDIT - So, I have the END part of the puzzle made. Problem is, making the rest of the puzzle to GET to the end.




Main switch to proceed deeper into the dungeon is in the center of all of these blocks. In order to get to the switch, all 3 sets of switches need to be lowered. But how to do the puzzle as such? Any puzzle geniuses here that can help out??
Fixed most of the status screen. Luck is no longer displayed, but Hitrate and Evasion is. Doing this on VX ace took way longer than doing something similar on VX.
BizarreMonkey
I'll never change. "Me" is better than your opinion, dummy!
1625
author=Crystalgate
Fixed most of the status screen. Luck is no longer displayed, but Hitrate and Evasion is. Doing this on VX ace took way longer than doing something similar on VX.
Oh man, I remember when I was trying to hide all stats but HP, MP, ATK and MAT in a game in Ace, I couldn't do it for the life of me.

Currently, I'm revising the currently disappointing ending in Menagerie to ready it for Menagerie: Remastered.



This stage is every bit as hellish as it looks. >< I'm getting out of my comfort zone by making a game that is only centered on battles.
Copied and pasted an on screen encounter system from another game. It had a load of events, switches, variables and common events, but it sure beats trying to recreate the system from scratch. The job isn't completely done, I haven't modified pieces of code that need to change between this game and the one I copied from. That is, except for a script call which would crash the game since it refers to a method that doesn't even exist in the new game.
slash
APATHY IS FOR COWARDS
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My battle system code for Unity3D is almost done!! It just needs a few tweaks, and maybe some experimenting to see if it'll work well on mobile...

So hyped! Once this is done, that should cover about half the code I need for my next game!