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I am working on my first ever AI code - and I'm programming the enemy to pick from available targets and go for whoever is on the lowest HP as a % of their max; certainly don't intend all enemies to pick that way just needed a starting point.
- So when I made a way to flag a status as only applicable in battle I hit an issue with ruby. States already had a property called '@battle_only' that I was unintentionally reusing. I fixed the property by renaming mine to something else. Using it as-is would've caused a UI issue where the game would say a character is immune to a battle-only status due to how everything came together in implementation.


- Playtesting revealed a dumb oversight. In the original game you could flee from encounters and still advance in a dungeon. When I redid dungeons fleeing from battle took the player out of a dungeon, which was kinda dumb to do. I changed it so instead of losing progress (like losing a battle) fleeing will just take out out of combat with the same number of encounters cleared. Bosses were also inconsistent, some you could flee from and others you couldn't. I normalized it (except for the final boss) so you can flee from all bosses with similar consequences: Get taken to the menu before the boss. There's a few exceptions since fleeing becomes a mechanic in one dungeon, so it's still the same but with a message saying why you're getting kicked out.

- More little UI text issues as I find 'em in playtesting.

- The player does get access to silence! Silence mechanics prevent using skills that cost MP, but I use MP as a pseudo-enemy AI and there's no clear interface to what silence affects and if it's even worth bothering with so I changed it to inflict the Buff Immunity debuff. Sadly it ruins the little joke of the skill (Awkward Silence inflicts Silence on all enemies) but w/e. I'd rather have a skill that people use instead of "so is it actually worth shit".

- Various little balance changes and trying to overcome enemy ai block.
There are so many small little things I need to fix in the background systems of Mayhem Maiden that it's exhausting. x_x

Aside from that, I have the four main enemy types for the next dungeon largely balanced (That Viking that acts as a force multiplier for the other enemies still needs a little tweaking, as he's either way too nasty, or not nasty enough). So I just need to balance out the EXP, and go through the slightly tedious process of making sure that all my encounters for this floor (of which I'll try to have more troop variety) have all the event language they need for the transforming gimmick.

Then I can plop them down, assign loot, make some NPCs, make the miniboss and boss...Damn, I thought I was nearly done, too.

And all this for a dungeon that's not super heavy on combat, since a lot of the map real estate is taken up by sliding puzzles. XD

At least I'm making progress again, even if it's slow.
- Made a boss death animation, because bosses should die flashier than normal! Started one for a final boss but I haven't decided on how I want it to look.

- Really just lots of little things for balance purposes. Early enemies give a bit more EXP, moved some equipment numbers, found more UI test bugs, etc. . Biggest is probably giving the tier 2 bosses more staying power since complicated strategies like "hit their weakness" would end the fight way too early. I'll have to find a new vanilla playtester to see if I swung it too far though.

- Oh, also realized there's still a bug in the accuracy algorithm which skews accuracy in the player's favor by quite a bit. jfc why am I so bad at things (it's because I don't devise a proper testing strategy)
You know, I just LOVE when a fun combat idea comes up almost by accident, and then it combos PERFECTLY with other mechanics. :D

I was thinking to myself "Holly (My mage) needs more fun combat options. Many of her equips just give her passive boosts or simple spells...I wish I could make her Enchant-ally-with-element spells feel less like a waste of a turn..."

And suddenly, BAM. I implemented an equip that makes her hit a random enemy with the element she just enchanted someone with. Which combos nicely with her Attack-All-Enemies spell that needs to be enchanted to hit elemental weaknesses. AND combos well with the equip that gives you double magic-attack on the first turn in exchange for defense, by making casting an enchant on the first turn no longer a waste.

:D I'm really happy it turned out so nice.
Unlimited Mapping Works is still going on for me. About 10-12 more maps for this dungeon and then final dungeon and that's it for main story dungeons (until updating old maps). The problem I'm having is this: In my Village Zone, I have an Items Shop and a Weapon Shop (2 vendors per shop). This is in the Void (2nd of 3 dungeons in a row), which you can access pretty easily (though there are random encounters outside). The Item Shops should be fine here I think, but I'm debating on the equipment shop. The only reason I'm considering it is due to how long it'll be since the last set of upgrades for equipment (about 4 dungeons worth of no upgrades), and you get a character back a couple dungeons back who's going to be severely lacking in upgrades for weapons (not that weapons are super important right now), which includes weapons, armors, and accessories. However, the BIG issue is I'm thinking of having a couple hidden shops here, one for skills so that the player can get the rest of the missing skills they haven't gotten yet and would only be available here, and one for the better equipment. I'd like to still make SOME equipment only obtainable via other methods, of course, but I haven't decided what's the best route to take. Is anyone keen on hidden shops like that in games? Normally, I'd be having these shops somewhere else in the game, akin to FFV's Phantom Village, but I haven't decided if I wanted to do that, have it in this village, or just not have it at all...

I'm also debating on updating a couple statuses in my game too:

*Make Petrify statuses reduce all physical/magic damage by 99%.
*Make Freeze status double damage taken from physicals/Fire, 0 damage from Ice, half from Water.
*Make Zombie change resistances to: Absorb Dark/Poison, Weak vs Holy/Fire, Halve Ice, Immune vs Instant Death/Doom/Regen.

Yay or any on most of these? The main issue with Petrify is that only Lv10 Petrify counts towards game overs, the others can wear off (5 turns for level 1, 45 for level 9). Meaning that it's possible to end up being stuck in fights by being constantly re-petrified. But since FF games tend to make the target invulnerable to everything, I figured why not? At least it's not FFX's Petrify!?

For Freeze, the idea I thought was nice, but the Ice immunity is probably a problem especially since most enemies that inflicts Freeze tend to also only use Ice-elemental attacks...at least it's not FFIX's Freeze (which I have coded in the game for Reimu, but it's unused)?!

For Zombie, it's based off of FFV's Bone Mail moreso than Zombie in general, but I might just go with the status immunities. Maybe the Holy weakness/Dark absorption, but not 100% sure.

This is mostly an attempt to make Petrify/Freeze NOT be a complete clone of Paralyze/Stop (Lv10 Stop, much like Lv10 Petrify and Lv10 Venom, count as Game Over statuses. Lv10 Paralyze just lasts 50 turns. Paralyze/Stop/Petrify/Freeze are essentially the exact same thing right now, though with Freeze there's a chance of being unfrozen if struck by a physical attack).
AtiyaTheSeeker
In all fairness, bird shrapnel isn't as deadly as wood shrapnel
5424
Workin' on a design document for a short game. I'm challenging myself to make and use NES-style assets for it. One of my bigger problems with game-making is having too big of a scope when I don't write stuff down -- it's good to get my thoughts down in a tangible format and have an idea of what I need.
Corfaisus
"It's frustrating because - as much as Corf is otherwise an irredeemable person - his 2k/3 mapping is on point." ~ psy_wombats
7874
Working on the Graveyard of Shadows. Slowly chipping away at the map so that I can get to the fun part of eventing. There will be a couple of frights around here but mostly that's reserved for the psychological horror section of the dungeon, the Mansion of Shadows.

Hidden for size:
*opens old project*







fuuuuuuuuuck what was I working on last? I got two save files and one is in a weird state and I can't remember what it was set up for. Maybe I'll just start another balancing playthrough and see where it all breaks down again
Mistakes and delays. I am working on mistakes abd delays.

Been playing with TF. I pretend I am just playing around with it by remaking Legion Saga maps that I already made... But let's be honest I'll probably hit a point where I am like "We are here now. This game went back to MV and uses TF."

*shifty eyes*
Dear journal, today I learned the following things:

A) I am sometimes a very, very bad designer and wish I had people to smack me for how bad some of my old designs were. The following are sins that need to be cleansed at some point:
*A Lost Woods type maze cut down by half with better directions and hints.
*A worn-down mansion to actually LOOK like a worn-down mansion.
*A couple bosses to be better designed.
*EXP and money values on enemies throughout the game.
*Those weird chests that just spit EXP at the player. And a chest that spits a +10 Speed bonus to a specific character (though she can't use Speed Crystals for permanent speed bonuses so...)
*Cutting down on the massive size of two dungeons.
*Fixing up various cutscenes to make more sense. In addition, fixing up some scenes or adding more scenes to give Hope a bit more screentime and importance!
*I don't remember what else there was, but I'm sure Locke can tell me!
B) I have learned many broken things about my own game that shouldn't be broken from Locke and a streamer. Things that I don't know how they're broken (music screwing up), things that I can see why they're broken (30 turns of Nul- elemental stuff is too much!), and things that I didn't expect to see broken (walking out of bounds in a map).
C) I don't know what to do for my final dungeon in terms of design.
D) I have to go through the remaining 7-8 dungeons of the game and put in the events. Then go back and test play those dungeons and make sure they work, and THEN go back and test play the entire game one last time.
E) I need to update equipment to be more versatile and interesting. For example, equipping a sword may give a specific ability to the character.
F) I hope to finish this game before the end of this year...getting done before the 9th anniversary of it being in production would be nice...
Marrend
Guardian of the Description Thread
21781
Up to 68 stars in-game! That's 40 to go!

Uggggggh.
I am working on my old project on MV but failed.
In the End this game went back to VX Ace.

■■vil ■■y Q■■st (Anyone can read this must be amazing person)



Trying to update this coding so that it works properly. As it is right now, whenever the boss uses Artful Sacrifice, instead of killing one of these enemies that's alive, sometimes she'll kill something that's not there for a free 500 damage to the party. Obviously, that's not what I want to happen at all. The problem here is, I have no idea how to set this coding up.

A) I need to check for each of the enemies HP. Already set up, easy.
2) I need to check which enemy is alive, so that when the coding runs, it'll know "This enemy is dead, don't use it for this ability". The problem here is I don't know how to make this work at all, especially since I need to keep this randomized. There's 5 dolls, each one can be used for this ability and each one is killed when this ability is used. If there's no dolls, the ability is never used.

Anyone know what I'm talking about and how to solve this problem?
Alright, time to polish off that last run for Mayhem Maiden's next build, looks pretty good, I can probably send this to-

*critical error suddenly happens on every first battle*

What.

*digs*

Ok, so for some reason I cannot understand, suddenly the neat-looking combat aftermath script is now throwing me an error any time I start a battle with the nifty combat aftermath turned off.

It causes the simple sideview sprites script and the enemy HP bars scriptt o have a seizure, as if for some reason enemy sprites do not exist when the combat aftermath is turned off. And I see nothing in the aftermath script that would cause this kind of thing to happen. 0_o

This has literally never happened to me before, and I have no idea why SUDDENLY the game is giving me grief like this. This was working just fine about a month ago and I don't understand what the hell caused it to suddenly start throwing this error. ;_;
Mapping, mapping and more mapping. Every time I tell myself that I'm not going to make a gigantic map this time, it ends up being 120 x 100 or something ridiculous. Oh well!
@dethmetal: I know that feeling allll too well. Though I've been limiting it to about 60x60 lately, which is more than enough for some maps, but man is it hard to not want to go bigger, especially for my own game where encounter rate is set to 80, which is kinda a low encounter rate.
I'm working on a small (10 min playtime) game to teach myself the basics of RPGMaker MV. There's a town, there's a swamp, there's a dungeon, all using the packaged assets.

I'm having some fun with the dialog and storyline but otherwise keeping it simple, straightforward, and short, because the goal here is to finish the project and move on to the next.

It's basically the game equivalent of a short story. I don't know if anyone is into that, so I might just delete it when I'm done rather than share it.
While waiting for initial feedback on my Mayhem Maiden build from my number one fan and hotshot tester, I'm experimenting with the 3DS RPGmaker.

Good GOD that thing is limited as hell.

That being said, I've got the basic workings of a trading game going. I can buy low and sell high by tying the goods prices to a variable, I have a semi-working "Encounter" system that's really ugly, but actually kinda works, and I have a way to cap the money the player can hold (since I can't actually put a cap on their items).

Now I just need to iron out all the bugs for the encounter system, see if I can make a custom combat system using events, and I should be able to actually make something worthwhile with this crippled engine! :D
I'm working on a fan game based off of the Eroge Lightning Warrior Raidy and Viper RSR. I have my world about 25-50% finished and have finished a custom sprite of Raidy and am working on one of Cala. Once I have my game world and events done, I will work on npcs and the story. I need some custom lingerie underwear icons/sprites for items in game and a cg artist for GO and special cutscenes.



Here is the sprite I have made for Lightning Warrior Raidy.