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My full focus on becoming a game-dev Jack has begun! This is what I'm working on ATM:

Pixel Art: I'm mainly using the Game Boy palette ATM to restrict myself. I try to give extra attention to my weaknesses (sprites and face/portrait graphics). I think that sprites are hard for me because of how everything needs to be consistent for all of the angles.

Programming: I'm trying to get a decent grasp of Ruby, which more or less is my first programming language. I'm currently watching a lot of videos on Youtube and googling for other specific things. My main goal ATM is to be able to become confident enough so that I can code/customize my own UIs and Scenes in Ace. It's new and it's big, but it feels like I'm putting a small piece of puzzle together everyday.

Music:
I'm currently spending most of my time analyzing various video game music in this area. ATM, I'm focusing a lot of my attention on Chrono Trigger's harmony (modulations, progressions, extensions etc.) and form in general. I've realized that most of the famous video game tunes that we all love share one thing in common: the AA BB form/structure.

I want to learn FL Studio, but I'm going to leave that for later when I've reached some of my pixel art and programming goals. Doing too many different things at once just doesn't work out that well for me.
So, I've been debating on what to do for area 2 and 3 of Hokkai for my game, and I'm deciding on for area 2 having it so that you have to press buttons or activate glyphs in order to summon/desummon areas that'll allow you to cross over to other areas. Although upon typing this and about to set up an example, I realized that I don't have any bridges or anything in this tileset, and thus cannot really do that, nor do appearing/disappearing parts of the land. But I would like to at least make it so that areas 2 and 3 are not identical to area 1. I'm avoiding using teleporters for this area because those have been done enough, so I'd LIKE to do something more...intricate and interesting for these remaining two areas. Anyone got any good suggestions??
So...decided to take a break from working on the game....to update the Bestiary. Meaning doing it all over from scratch. I mean, it's a text file with all the enemy information there, now including what the hell the attacks DO, any gimmicks the enemy/boss may have, levels, Blue Magic that you can learn from them, etc.. The question is, is it worth doing a Bestiary document? It is an awwwwwwwful lot of work to put all of this data into one document, but at the same time, it's a fast and easy way to see where to get things, what to do against certain enemies/bosses, etc.. Though I am worried that my hand is going to act up from all this typing again and not work again like it did for 3-4 months the last time I was doing something this extensive....hmmm...
I am working on royal flower fight this week, still need to implent more features.

That flower fight is looking awesome.

As for me, I´m just getting ready for my game´s year 2 content. Just resting the brain, trying not to burn it out. Making sure what I want to do is what I want to do.

Also, there's some new and amazing facesets being commissioned. But hopefully they don't run into the same problems like the previous ones.
I'm currently working on a Voxel system for creating your own creations in "The Grimoire of Worlds" I'm still trying to work out the best way to do this. I'm thinking of limiting each creation to a single world tile in size(aprox 5x2.5x5 metres) then exporting them to *.x file(for easy loading later) with larger creations taking up multiple world tiles.

Still a work in progress
Finally stepped back into development with some pressure from family/friends, and finished the update that had been sitting on my PC for a full year. Four new missions, all of them testing my horizons on them, along with a complete redo of my hub. All still RTP of course, but I'm trying to avoid letting the lack of cool art keep me from working on the bones/meat of my project.

Gonna try to keep myself to weekly or bi-weekly updates.
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
Your family is pressuring you INTO being a starving shut-in artist? Neat.
Nah, more like my wife pressuring in the 'We have a stable job, and steady income, and low stress, if you're going to do this, best do it now'
Well, after 9 years of absence from game making of any kind I'm back! I decided that I'm not getting any younger so I wrote a list of goals I wanted to accomplish and making an rpg is one of them. With that said, I brushed off the dust on my old notebooks and began revamping my old pet project. Things are coming along PHENOMENAL. I just finished up designing a card game for a mini-game inside the game (I always loved the ff8 and ff9 card games especially because I used to play Yu-Gi-Oh! HEAVELY.) I just need to print it and test-play to see if it works and if there's any balancing issues. I fleshed out all of my characters' bios. Now I'm working on writing the story from beginning to end.
Trying to code some smarter enemy AI for RMMV. It's going pretty well, got it creating evaluation objects for each possible skill and target combination, applying the basic rating as the evaluation score for now and then choosing a skill+target based on those scores.

But need to figure out how it chooses skill targets so I can overwrite that. Then it'll be all about adjusting those scores based on how much damage it does, if it kills, if it applies status etc... and balancing all of them against each other.

Yeah I know I can probably just DL an existing plugin, but I like doing it for myself!

Also, must be careful not to make it TOO smart, nobody likes that.
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
Please remember that the player is supposed to win, and they're supposed to do that by taking advantage of gaps in the enemy's strategy. Good enemy AI isn't about making the enemy smart, it's about letting the player be smart.
Yeah, but it's also about things like not having the AI use healing spells when nobody is injured, or buffs on targets that already have them. That kind of thing annoys me. I don't like them making entirely random choices and would like their choices to be weighted a little more to good ones. Naturally I agree that the AI shouldn't be taking the optimal choice all the time, and in fact if the enemy's intelligence is less than 100 the best choices will be unavailable.

Definitely trying to give the player opportunities to be smart and manipulate/screw the enemies out of making good choices, like with my Moods thread outline.
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
Doing holiday stuff on UOSSMUD.

We used to have a minigame called the Militia, which played almost like a MOBA game with only one team. Monsters would move towards the central town along certain paths, and destroy buildings if they reached it before being killed. Players who were in the militia had to kill them before they reached the town, and go find bosses who were spawning them.

It was, by far, the least popular thing we've ever done. People couldn't always participate in raids, so we had to add a 5 minute warning before they happened. Very shortly after we did that, it got to the point that every time a raid was announced, every single player who was a member of the Militia would immediately log off and switch to a non-militia character. So eventually we gave up and deleted the entire minigame, because what's even the point of that?

So of course for April Fools Day A 1000% REAL PERMANENT CHANGE we're bringing the militia back and drafting every single player to join it! Raids all day! Mandatory participation, and you get teleported to jail if you try to fight anything else during a raid!

---

Just listen to these player comments about how much they love the new mandatory militia system!

"I didn't get recruited when I logged in. I think you actually banned my account from the militia back in the day because I kept buffing and healing the enemies. Freedom!"
-Clash
"Ah, I remember when I rage-deleted my character in the middle of a raid. Good times." -Enker
"So, is that the only joke? Or is the real joke that I'll come back tomorrow and it'll still be there?" -Sayaka
This round in "pretend I ever actually do anything" I:

- Fixed an issue where due to caching what an actor can equip it fucked up other scripts that would change what they could equip as they change their equipment. Also fixed a bug where characters who normally can't unequip their weapon so they're barehanded can equip a two-hander then a shield to drop their weapon and become unarmed. These fixes means scripts that have an accessory that allows characters to equip anything and another where they can't equip multiples of the same accessory now work correctly. (no dupes takes precedence over equip anything, the other way around requires a lot more effort)

Equipping the equip anything accessory, equipping a normally restricted weapon, then unequipping the accessory leaves the character unarmed though, but doing anything about that will be a headache so I'll ignore it.

This also broke shields in the shop but there was a quick fix for this. If somebody can equip shields normally but has a two-hander equipped it'll show that they can equip the shield normally. The shop equip menu is that vanilla+0.5 thing so it sucks anyways but c'est la vie.


- While playtesting I noticed that a lot of skills intended to be weaker didn't scale like it and stronger skills didn't either and noticed a fuckup in the damage algorithm. The defense of the target scaled with the strength of the attack, so say a 25% ATK skill would only take 25% of the target's defense, and similarly a 400% ATK skill would have to deal with 400% of the target's defense. Dumb shit from ages ago, now it's 100% defense/spirit all the time (although since spirit is both magic damage and defense, magic defense is 2/3rd of spirit). In addition mixed attack skills ignore 1/3 of the total defense of the enemy, so a ATK&SPI attack is against (DEF+2/3*SPI)*2/3 to compensate for hitting both defense stats.

This means I have to double check some balancing stuff, mainly anything that uses skills that aren't close to 100% stat influence. It feels better now though, weaker moves are actually weak again and stuff like that.


- Added a 'Remove All' option to character gear. It's a game with twelve characters and players might be moving gear around a bit so being able to drop everything (except weapons) with a single button is nice. I'm kinda surprised that there wasn't an option to begin with but adding it was simple enough which is nice.


- Due to an oversight you could evade healing and other support skills. I'm dumb and forgot a clause that actions that target same-side battlers aren't subject to accuracy and evasion. Of course, confusion exists so confused allies will smack their buddies and ignore hit and evasion entirely!


- Some bug where KO'd people weren't getting EXP when they should be. Fixing this lead to a new funny bug where somebody can be KO'd, get a level, and because their max HP increased their normal HP also increased which removed the KO'd status from them. I'm gonna leave that in. (also because I don't want to find where their current hp is increasing by their hp gained)


- The flaw of testing with the music off is that you don't realize how many little music bugs there are. Some towns change the world map music and some things require BGM changes, like embarking/disembarking vehicles. I got around with with scripts that look at the BGM name and based on it do something else, usually just ignore the BGM play command. I forgot to do this with the vehicle BGMs so changing the music and using the boat screws up the music. Another fun fact is that the vehicle's BGM is set in a place that's saved but there's no editor command to change the vehicle BGM. Also on Windows 10 VX trying to play an empty music file will crash it and opening VX again after crashed the computer via page fault in non-paged area. Fantastic!


- When I rewrote the text last time I never got around to testing it because there's a ton of text runoff and poor placement. I have the $TEST flag always on and run outside the editor so when I find text issues I can correct them immediately.


- Half the hidden treasure on the map are old events that use an old script call that now crash the game. Replaced them all, christ I hate how I leave things half done.


- At one point I was making hit and evasion derived stats from agility but ended up dropping it. Turns out I missed some remnant code and enemies were getting an evasion boost from agility. It wasn't significant for the early game but I started to wonder, use the scan skill, and saw a boss with 50% more agility than it should have. Whoops!


- The boat quest is just defeating the boss of the first tier of dungeons. I changed it to doing the second tier of dungeons too so the player is stuck on the starting continent a bit longer.


- Actually found time to do a bit of progress! If I'm half sick on a weekend I might get somewhere next time instead of seeing a bunch of random fires that need to be put out!
My cards came in and after some testing I found that there's a few design flaws that need to be fixed. I'm going to be doing another couple of weeks of testing before I purchase round 2. I decided that I'm going to write at least 3 pages a week of the main story so that I'd have my story finished by at least a months time. Finalizing those two things are my only goals as of right now.
Currently trying to make the worst character in my game actually viable, while going with a "high risk, high reward" playstyle and "Cursed" theme. It's not easy though, since making that balanced and not either utter crap due to having to babysit her or setting the party up specifically for her or making the abilities TOO powerful is hard. For example, this is what I did in a recent update:

*Ancient Jade: 70% accuracy on all levels, now Earth-elemental instead of Water-elemental. No longer can inflict Instant Death.
*Level 1: ~400 base damage. 6 MP > 22 MP.
*Level 2: ~650 base damage. 10 MP > 38 MP.
*Level 3: ~900 base damage. 14 MP > 54 MP.
*Level 4: ~1150 base damage. 18 MP > 70 MP.
*Level 5: ~1400 base damage. 22 MP > 88 MP.
*Level 6: ~1650 base damage. 26 MP > 102 MP.
*Level 7: ~1900 base damage. 30 MP > 116 MP.
*Level 8: ~2150 base damage. 34 MP > 130 MP.
*Level 9: ~2400 base damage. 38 MP > 145 MP.
*Level 10: ~2650 base damage. 42 MP > 158 MP.
*Monstrous Toad God: No longer increases Speed.
*Level 1: Doom: 20, Haste: 20, Zombie: oo. 5 MP > 22 MP.
*Level 2: Doom: 20, Haste: 20, NulPhysical: 15, Zombie: oo. 15 MP > 40 MP.
*Level 3: Doom: 20, Haste: 20, NulPhysical: 15, NulMagic: 15, Zombie: oo. 25 MP > 64 MP.
*Level 4: Doom: 20, Haste: 20, NulPhysical: 15, NulMagic: 15, 100% Doublecast: 20, Zombie: oo. 45 MP > 80 MP.

Ancient Jade originally had a 50% accuracy, and would only inflict statuses of that level including Instant Death. It could ALSO inflict buffs (which it won't do anymore), so it was super terrible. Here? It actually does damage and has a 70% accuracy, so it's actually more viable, and it won't be inflicting buffs anymore. However, I think the MP cost may be too high.

As for Monstrous Toad God, originally it gave +Speed to one party member (+20 at max level each casting). While that's not BAD, + buffs only go up to +100, which is eh. The current version I have now actually fits in with her "high risk, high reward" and "Cursed" themes. Zombie is there to make it so that you can't heal easily outside of special healing or % healing, and Doom is something that's meant to be consistent with her buffs.


*Native God's Curse:
*Level 1: Disable: 5
*Level 2: Disable: 10
*Level 3: Disable: 15
*Level 4: Disable: 20
*Blighted Earth: Inflicts unblockable non-elemental damage to all enemies equal to the party's missing HP.
*Level 1:
*Level 2:
*Level 3:
*Level 4:
*Brave the Elements:
*Level 1: NulElemental: 10, Deprotect/Defaith: 10, Cursed: oo
*Level 2: NulElemental: 15, Deprotect/Defaith: 15, Doom: 20, Cursed: oo
*Level 3: NulElemental: 20, Deprotect/Defaith: 20, Doom: 20, Cursed: oo
*Level 4: NulElemental: 25, Deprotect/Defaith: 25, Doom: 20, Cursed: oo
*Level 5: NulElemental: 30, Deprotect/Defaith: 30, Doom: 20, Cursed: oo

And this is what I'm currently trying to deal with. Brave the Elements originally was dummied out, and I WANT to do something with elements, but balancing it is super difficult. 10 turns is not a lot, and even 30 turns doesn't last a whole lot of time. Plus, being able to just nullify all elements all at once seems WAY too strong even at 10 turns. I WAS going to have it attempt to halve the elemental resistances of all enemies, but coding that is cumbersome as hell. So I don't know what else to do with this ability...

Native God's Curse is simple enough. Disable is just Silence (prevents magic abilities) and Lock (prevents physical abilities) for enemies (it's different for the player character), and this ability is the only way for the player to inflict the status. It's meant to be pretty useful for random encounters, and not so much in boss fights. Simple enough I think.

Blighted Earth's damage never changes, but its meant to start at a high MP cost, while leveling it up reduces the MP cost. I'm not sure what the MP cost should be, thinking it should be a % of Suwako's Max MP since the skill has the potential to be really, really powerful.

Other than those, I'm still trying to fix up Seven Stones and Frog God, and potentially update Frog's Rest, but need more ideas. Anyone happen to have any good ones that would work with the described themes??
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
Creating a randomizer for one of my own games.

This is such a terrible, stupid waste of time.



With the power of messing around, I managed to figure out how to set things up so that equipping multiple pieces of equipment with this plugin will allow for stacked bonuses! For example, equipping just the Raven Armor will give a 33% damage reduction to Fire-elemental attacks, but equipping Raven Armor with say the Red Hat (25% Fire-elemental damage reduction) will give the player a 58% damage reduction! On top of that, if the player were to have anything that outright nullifies or absorbs Fire-elemental attacks (such as the Fire Armor Bless & NulElemental statuses, or the Fire Ring for nullification, or the Flare Ring for absorption), then it doesn't matter what the other pieces of equipment are as those will always override those!

Man, I feel good figuring this out! It makes it so that I can give multiple equipment pieces actual use now instead of just...one time only use things early in the game! Does anyone think this is a good idea to go with? I was originally using the default 2k3 attribute system, which was just A/B/C/D/E (200%/100%/50%/0%/-100%), which...is kinda meh honestly, and doesn't allow the player to really...customize themselves as much I feel.