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Craze
why would i heal when i could equip a morningstar
15150
Getting ever closer to a battle demo (soon: working on the actual graphical aspects of it) and writing blogs that nobody cares about.

Karsu and I are probably going to go the EO/Devil Survivor route for battles, with the portrait on the side and info on the bottom:



I was thinking about Persona 3/4 style (faces and vital info on the right side in rows), but that's hard to do front-view with for the sake of displaying animations/damage.
Versalia
must be all that rtp in your diet
1405
My favorite: Building a new cast of characters from scratch.

The kind with pages of backstory, realistic personalities and understandable issues.

THIS IS CRAZY WHAT IS GOING ON UP IN HERE

but that's hard to do front-view with for the sake of displaying animations/damage.


Any particular reason for going front-view?
Craze
why would i heal when i could equip a morningstar
15150
Versalia: We know which enemy graphics we want to use (they're front-view) and it's way less graphical work. We want to finish this.
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
My favorite: Building a new cast of characters from scratch.

The kind with pages of backstory, realistic personalities and understandable issues.

I hate creating believable new characters so whenever possible I reuse my old characters. In my current game I'm reusing almost half of the main cast of my previous game. But it's not a sequel, nor a remake. It's more like... Ocarina of Time versus Link to the Past. The setting and plot structure and main characters are all pretty similar and even have some names in common, but there is no intention that they actually are supposed to share continuity (at least not until ten years from now when I retcon them to be in the same world after all).
benos
My mind is full of fuck.
624
Just a bit of converstation event in State Park in Dreamwalker, finally getting back in it. Not sure where it'll lead, but i have some ideas.
Simplifying.

Terrains don't really need possibly different costs to enter them from different directions (excepting that diagonal cost is always different), and removing them lets pathing and the AI handle terrain manipulation better. Magic users' damage spells are already different enough that they don't really need elemental types, and removing those gets rid of the amount of junk on the screen, which is always good.

Craze: Is it even possible for someone to go wrong by saying he'll make something more like Etrian Odyssey? =)
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=DFalcon
Terrains don't really need possibly different costs to enter them from different directions (excepting that diagonal cost is always different), and removing them lets pathing and the AI handle terrain manipulation better.

Do terrains even do anything then? That's the only thing they do in most TRPGs. Your maps might as well just have every tile the same.

author=DFalcon
Magic users' damage spells are already different enough that they don't really need elemental types, and removing those gets rid of the amount of junk on the screen, which is always good.

I think you mean "always bad". More complexity is better! If I ever figure out how to play the game, I stop being interested in it! For all practical purposes I've beaten it at that point. (Okay, that's a slight moderate gross exaggeration, but you get the idea - I have never seen a game with too much complexity for me.)
Document stuff.
Now I'm working on sprites again XD
Craze
why would i heal when i could equip a morningstar
15150
LockeZ: When every spell is "huge fire/ice/thunder/water/light damage outclassed by weapon attacks in ten levels," yes. Black Mages in FF games might as well only have non-elemental spells - they'd play the exact same way. (FF13 dodges this a little by having each character only have access to a handful of elements, but it doesn't matter because your party is locked.)

DF: Being more like Etrian Odyssey is horrible if you're basing it on 1/2. EO3 is actually playable.
author=LockeZ
Do terrains even do anything then? That's the only thing they do in most TRPGs. Your maps might as well just have every tile the same.


Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear. OH has varying terrain movement costs. What I took out was the ability to vary it for a tile depending on the direction a unit moves into the tile. (The comparable feature in RM would be the way you can set separate passability for each of the four cardinal directions of a tile.)

author=LockeZ
I think you mean "always bad". More complexity is better! If I ever figure out how to play the game, I stop being interested in it! For all practical purposes I've beaten it at that point. (Okay, that's a slight moderate gross exaggeration, but you get the idea - I have never seen a game with too much complexity for me.)


Before (this example is the deploy menu, looking at my fire mage):

After:

So even though I'm concerned enough about the size of the current help popup that I've wondered if I can present some of that differently, I'll admit I'm not seeing huge gains in screen real estate here. It's at least as much of an issue that putting, say, a "weak to earth" tag on a creature is kind of like waving a "You should deploy Chantal (the earth mage) on this map!" flag, and I don't think I want to constrain what the optimum parties are that tightly.


Craze: But without automatic wipe to a FOE the first time you hit B2F, it's just not the same! =P
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
@DFalcon: Make the left info box transparent or semitransparent and I think it will feel a lot nicer, even with the same amount of info.

You also might not need to list out all the spell effects there in the same window. FF Tactics and a lot of other games employ a system where you can press select and then move the cursor over an item name to see a detailed description of that item. If your game uses the mouse, then right-clicking on the spell or effect name to show its description would work equally well. A system like that could allow you to convey information in smaller, more digestible pieces instead of in huge walls of text.
Well...

I'm experimenting with maps. I suck at them, so I really have to practice at them. I just got RMVX because I heard of the triple layers. I thought it would help me come up with some interesting maps. I severely doubt it, but I figured I'd try anyway.

I wanna make a convincing maze for once. Really. I wanna have a chance at getting the player lost. My mazes are horrible, as are my puzzles. They always seem so obvious to the player.

I'm disappointed with myself right now. I go back to play my old games and I hang my head in shame.
LockeZ: Changing the box to around 85% alpha helps a lot, so thanks for making sure that wasn't relegated to the nebulous low-priority "making the boxes pretty" phase.

Probably I'll end up changing things so you can hit a button to get a cursor on the right-hand status area, where you can move up or down to see explanations for the individual elements. I'd been doing a similar thing in the character command menu (displaying help for only the ability where the cursor is) and two or three lines at a time is certainly a lot more manageable.
Working on randomized mob lairs.
Well Im on hiatus but that doesnt mean I can make a thing here or there. Just done a woodcutting minigame, works suprisingly good, just need to time animations properly and its awwwriiight.
author=catmitts
*image*


That looks awesome, but he looks rather thin from the sides, doesn't he? He needs a bit of a tummy or something...
My game has kinda been caught in a stand still. I don't think I'll be able to start working on it till or after Winter Vacation (EDIT: If I'm lucky...) I is one sad panda.
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
Mucking with the basic combat scripts for my game. I know next to nothing about how RGSS works, and the fact that I'm using a downloaded custom battle system isn't helping the learning process go any faster. Especially since the creator's first language is Portuguese.

Still, I have successfully managed to customize the damage formula for attacks and skills, and I just got common events working in battles so I can mimic some of the functionality of battle events. And the SaGa Frontier lightbulb learning system I coded from scratch works! Woo!

The real problem is making weird skills. I feel like I have to recode the whole system for each one, even when it's just something simple like an HP+MP healing skill. I expect it's going to take hours per skill, and the first few are taking days each because I don't know what any of the functions do. Not fun.
benos
My mind is full of fuck.
624
Hoping to get though SOLDIER and get a upcoming demo soon.