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Crocotile3D is overrated imo, the workflow feels pretty bad to use if you want to do anything beyond a quake map in terms of complexity. Like the advertising looks great to someone who used to working with tiles, but try actually using it and comparing it to any standard modeling program. It's just really cumbersome to edit and manage a 3D grid when there are smoother methods.
@ellenor: fair enough, the shader you posted looks amazing. Keep us updated once you've slapped some textures on your geometry!

@Darken: That makes sense, now that I think about it. I haven't used it, just read about it. I've mostly seen static images of things built with it, and they've mostly been small one-off objects (like a car or whatever) rather than comprehensive areas. Even the few scenes floating around are quite small. I guess I know why, now!
I am working on a RPG called Princess Fighter. It is based on original characters by Justin "Major-Link" Eddy. At the moment my team consists of myself and another programmer.

Screenshot:


Tileset is by Bonsaiheldhin.

Fflo
Be careful ! I'm French
3650
First time participating in a ranked gamedev jam:
Build your own game jam on itch.io

The mission is to build a short game (no more than 30 minutes) in one month respecting at least 2 themes out of 10.

My absurd gamedev personality returns in this one.

The plot:
A muted rogue (Silent protagonist is one of the themes) learns on the radio that the mage who muted him years ago is now a villain's henchman!
The rogue will be helped by two sisters: a coleric warrior and a prankster sorceress.
You'd be asking me why doesn't the sorceress negate the Mute spell? Well she's not skilled enough to do so!

What did Maria do to the rogue to make Kelly angry? Wait and see.
(And by the way, RMXP's sand renders well with RMVXA's palmtrees!)
I was working on the trailer for my game which is now available.

It's been performing poorly so far, I guess only thing I can do at this point is hope for it to get better.
Finished our cast of main characters.
Which were quite a bit of work since each characters walk cycle is custom made.

Currently working on giving characters in Blackmoon Prophecy a bit more of an identity of their own teatv hellodear.in
Making a start on a Captain Planet inspired game. Planning on having Chrono Trigger type skills where there are dual and triple techs.
Hey, been working on making an RPG from scratch in Game Maker Studio 2. Thought I'd share a vid of what I've got going after about three weeks of work. I have a lot of basics up and running with cutscenes, NPCs, treasure chests, and of course combat. There are no animations yet and all graphics are just placeholders right now.


The combat is what I've spent the most time on and what I wanted to talk about. Here's the current direction of it:
- Sliding in and out of combat as well as the battle background are pretty much shamelessly taken from Deltarune. I liked having the characters slide from the field to battle position. The background was simply easy to do. Making actual battle backgrounds is beyond my skill level. I also ruled out encounters being continuous with the field (like Chrono Trigger) for a number of reasons. I'd like to get this project done in a reasonable amount of time so there needs to be some shortcuts.

- The style of turn based is very simple one turn per round, not CTB or anything fancy. I chose this direction for its simplicity both in putting it together and planning battles in my head. There will be a visible turn queue, I just haven't made it yet.

- When attacking, all units that are neither the attacker or the target have a shader applied to them that makes them transparent red. This is something the DS demake have Xenosaga did (see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hPfu5Awp14). It seemed a good way to help the player focus on what's important. Let me know if it looks bad though.

- Whenever an enemy uses anything but a basic attack, they have a charge up with some energy particles. This is mostly to give the player time to read the name of the enemy's skill. The particle effect was made in Pixel FX Designer and I'm happy with the result. I'll be using the same tool to create spell animations.
- There's a small screen shake effect when attacking. I'm wondering if there should be some more visual impact like making the target's sprite flicker or flash red.

- When exiting combat, the player character flickers and can't get attacked by another on-field encounter while it lasts just like Xenosaga.

- A while back I made a topic on here talking about Paper Mario combat. I liked the multi-hit vs. heavy single hit in a system with subtractive defense, and wanted to utilize that in a game with more traditional stat growth that PM lacks. Nowadays, I'm less crazy about that threshold-focused design but I still wanted multi-hit attacks to be meaningfully different.
In what I've got now, there is no defense at all but enemies have a block rate (think Dragon Quest 9 or Xenoblade). There's a chance an enemy will block only taking half damage. If a multi-hit attack is blocked, subsequent hits are canceled. So arts that deal heavy damage in one hit are still more useful against defensive enemies than multi-hit arts even without subtractive defense (especially since the damage ratio per hit is uneven - later hits deal more damage for most multi-hit arts). For demonstration, the rock crab's block rate is set to 100% in the video but no enemy will actually have 100% block rate. I should probably include a status effect that makes enemies unable to block as well. Player characters can block by defending.

- Every time you stun an enemy, they gain more resistance to stun. The rate is dependent on the enemy. The frog boss gains a whopping 50% stun resistance after he recovers from the first stun. The break status will reduce stun resist to zero but that's not in the video.

- Enemy placement in battle is janky. There's an invisible 9x9 grid. The horizontal space of the grid had to be stretched out to fit the slimes with the much larger frog sprite but now the crab is way too far from the action. I may need to make personalized coordinates for each enemy formation.
- Enemies charge up TP (blue gauge) while attacking. When it's full they use a special attack. I might need to find a way to make this more apparent to the player. Later you'll get moves that deplete enemy TP. I like the idea of having a tug-of-war over enemies' skill resource.

I think that's all I have to say about it right now. Any feedback is greatly appreciated especially early on while it's still easy to change stuff. I'll probably move on to actually working on sprites and tiles. I'm thinking enemies won't be animated all. I thought I might get away with giving player characters only one attack animation. I'm a complete beginner to pixel art and I've been procrastinating on it.
@EtherPenguin:

Looking really slick. Yeah I def think it's a good idea to not worry about on-map battles as those *typically* don't really affect the battle mechanics and are really there for seamless sake (though I do wonder about the potential of say... doing a puzzle in the environment to affect the battle scene in your favor...) but that's a whole extraneous thing.

So what would be the angle in choosing a single hit or a multi hit? Just single hit for high block enemies until you lower their block? I recall Slay the Spire having a whole thing with blocking but it wasn't chance based (more like an extra health bar that goes away each turn typically). If there was a winged enemy they would take half damage but if they took more than 3 hits they would get stunned, so it encouraged you to multi hit to get rid of the half damage. This even applied to de-buffs, an enemy could resist 3 times in a row but past that they'd get de-buffed. Not really a suggestion or anything but just what I'm reminded of.

Anyway looking good so far, excited to see how it goes.
Maybe not puzzles exactly, but CRPGs like Larian's games ask the player to utilize the environment to gain the upper hand. Stuff like spilling oil and setting it on fire. I imagine there's a lot of potential to build something more puzzle like out of those ideas. The Last Story used the environment in some pretty interesting ways from what I remember and had a neat way of incorporating a cover system into a JRPG.

My interest in on-field battles is just making the exploration and combat feel continuous. For my purposes, I mostly wanted field encounters to chase you. In the Chrono Trigger style you need to carve out specific areas to be that encounter's arena. Enemies have to stay put and sneaking involves just hugging the wall. Deltarune had such an elegant solution to having battles exist in their own space while still feeling more connected thanks to the player characters being on screen during the transition - I'm surprised it's never been done before (at least that I'm aware).

Anyways, yea, at it's most basic single hit arts are simply more attractive to use against enemies that block and multi-hit are more attractive to use against evasive enemies or non-block-able enemies if it deals more damage. But most arts have some effect attached to them. Like Heavy Tackle inflicts stun on the second hit. The frog boss's tongue lash move it uses at full TP is three hits with stun on the third hit. In the video, I defend when I saw the frog had full TP so only the first hit went through.

So, the game would never really ask you to choose between Power Smash (1 hit - 4 dmg) and Double Slash (2 hits - 1 dmg on first hit, 3 dmg on second hit). I figured there would be times when it's worth the risk to attempt the two-hit stun move against an enemy that blocks. That's also why I like it being chance based since it leaves the possibility of success instead of just saying your multi-hit arts are effectively unusable until you put the enemy into a certain state.

I imagine the player's primary reason for picking an art is it's effect and then how many hits it has and if the effect is applied to all hits or only one is just something extra to consider. I wanted to avoid making the combat feel like it's overcentralized around any one mechanic, but rather it would feel Dragon Quest-like up front but with an extra series of interesting little considerations if that makes sense. On the other hand, I'm starting to see how it could look like a mess of needless convolutions if the system isn't more centralized around the differing hit counts.

I'm not even entirely sure how magic fits into this system yet. Corum is a rogue with some support arts, Astra's the tanky warrior, and the third and last party member is supposed to be a mage. I've got it setup so that magic can be blocked but it won't deflect the rest of the attack if it's multi-hit. Part of me feels like magic attacks don't really need to be a thing in this system though.

I was not familiar with Slay the Spire, and only now looked it up when I read your post. Cosmic Star Heroine was a game that came to mind with a similar way of handling debuffs: each time you attempt a status it reduces the chance of the status until it finally hits. I was planning on make the break status work this way. Stun resistance can be removed by inflicting break, but enemies would also have break resistance. Every time you attempting to inflict break, break resist is lowered and resets after recovering from break. I had in mind that your first break art is three hits with break only on the last hit then later on you get a two hit break move with break on each hit. It would have a much higher TP cost (and/or cooldown?) but would reduce break resistance quicker.

Thank you for taking the time to watch the video and for the compliments.


Story Time

This is what it looks like when you begin a project with the idea, "Graphics are going to be super simple, but mechanics are going to be complex." Well, you can't have a non-picture weather system if you have to call to another map for your menu.

So, I had to go the picture route. Problem was I could only have 50 pictures on the screen and didn't want to rely on extensions which had the potential to cause unforeseen issues with the game to have more. I made it work but with how many items I needed for my inventories, I had to get creative. The menu system went 3 or 4 layers deep in more than a few places. I also never liked the fact I used a borrowed frame with some edits. One day not long ago I showed someone my menu and realized just how bad it was to navigate. Wasn't functional at all. So, back to the drawing board.

With the newest RM2k3 allowing 1000 pictures I went to work on a much smoother, more functional CMS. No 3-4 layer deep crap. In fact, this whole menu as well as my field screen and my battle screen can all be comfortably navigated with similar controls, using the keypad.

So anyway, in version 3 you see my merit matrix which has 100 unlockable upgrades the player can choose from. Also showcasing a work-in-progress alternate menu frame.
My 2K3 world map, southern hemisphere hasn't been made yet, there will be two more continents. Feel free to use it as the world in any of your RPGs cuz I like it.



I'll add screens for my 2k3 projects later.
I'm working on my soundtrack.

By that I mean I'm staring at guitar pedals.

Then I started thinking that electric guitars are interesting pieces of pop art but why the hell would anyone want to play one of these shrill poorly designed overpriced overrated piles of monkey shit
Made a projectile spawner generator menu for later use for creating a bullethell minigame.
I'm working on a game for my daughter. I only have 3 months to make it until her birthday.

https://rpgmaker.net/forums/topics/25865/
author=Gretgor
So, since my egg hunt project that I will be doing outside of the Seasons jam (I will need that time to work on my thesis) will involve more action than my other games so far, there are tons and tons of different states and animations the player character can be in at any given time. And that, in turn, can lead to copious amounts of bugs of the "get stuck in a particular animation state" or "become unable to do certain action" type.

So, in order to organize my ideas better and try to avoid this kind of bug taking place, I created a spreadsheet detailing all animation and state changes that I intend to add to the game.



My question now is: is this actually me organizing my thoughts, or is it me procrastinating while telling myself I'm doing work?


Gretgor, your spreadsheet is an excellent idea ! In a project that only has 4 states (walk, sprint, smell and eat), my animation code quickly became a mess. The large number of states in your game makes it vital to keep things organized. What is the meaning of the red cells in your spreadsheet ?

Lihinel, you've made very handy tool. Do you plan to release it's source code? I've recently made a very basic shmup and would like to see how your advanced bullet movement system works.