WHAT ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT? (GAME DEVELOPMENT EDITION)

My original outline for the first half / disc of the story for my Lunar inspired game was going to be: investigate a suspicious character going around main/starting city, go into sewers fight mysterious figure once, chase after him into wilderness, meet first one or two party members, fight him again, follow him to another location, meet other two party members, pursue him to evil castle and find out he is an evil god (scripted defeat), he kidnaps romantic interest- starting companion, then the heroes regroup and the second and third act start on the second half.

Those are the broad strokes and main points of the first half of the story.

I'm currently working on an open world style rpg. I've just been wondering at what point you would release a demo of it? It seems much harder to decide, as opposed to when making a traditional one.

I could do it when the main quest is completed, and just leave all non-essential locations until later. I'd like to have opinions, so I can make a decision.

Cool. I'll just do the main quest and then leave it until I get feedback. All the quests will be handled by some method or other, afterwards. I'm planning on using Yanfly's Quest Journal plugin for this.

I built a fairly complex menu system which has several layers to reach some inventory items. I was thinking that qlongside programming items to the main menu I need to build a hot key system.

My idea is to have 6-7 main slots for hot keyed items. Another 6-7 sub-slots would be below these when the hot key menu is displayed. The top slots are set from the main menu. To assign a hot key simply highlight an appropriate inventory item and press the number you want to assign it to (1-7). To assign the second layer, hold that button down instead of pressing it.

When outside of the main menu and walking, the hot key bar would be faded or disappear. When stopped it would fade in. The first row would be activated by pressing keys 1-7. So if 1 was med kit, pressing 1 would use a med kit. Ifnit's an outfit, it would change the player to that outfit. By holding 1 down for 2 seconds the sub slot item for 1 would swap positions with the primary slot. This would essentially give the player double the number of hot keys. I could go up to 20 hot keys but for my game I think 14 might be spot on.

I was thinking of the best way to do this and it is a fairly complex secondary menu system so... adding a lot of work.

Me 3 hours ago: "Wouldn't it be neat to swap out that shitty RGSS2 for RGSS3"



3 hours later
A bit of it was just syntax changes, RGSS3 hates whitespace a lot more than RGSS2! Also a funny case of duplicate classes, there's so much shoddy coding in this game!



Then the game crashed

The Mode 7 script was one big culprit, but even when removed and the map appears it still randomly crashed after 20 seconds so oh well!

If I put main between the core scripts and all the other extra scripts the game just wouldn't start either.

It'll be fine. Most content stuff is algorithms trying to recognize stuff like music or videos. It won't pick up on pixel art of a NES on part of a screen.

I'm trying to develop a metroidvania styled RPG called Key Masters

The title is a working one and it's an RPG themed around the use of various keys you acquire through combat and select other means.

Big things to note:

- The main character, Keyth, casts spells by using the keys collected from enemies.
- Unlike traditional XP based levelling progress I wanted to focus on secret finding, using various keys to 'unlock' effects in the environment and find upgrades within the world
- No levelling means there isn't an increase in numbers, but you can find new ways to use the abilities you have
- Keyth can't deal damage by himself (his only basic attack is the Slap command that deals 1 damage total and yes I intend to be sadistic enough to tie achievements toward using that to kill things). Instead using different keys applies status effects.

I'm trying to figure out how I intend to do other members for the party. Debating between summons by using keys to recreate monsters you find in a Pokemon style system or having dedicated party members you can use your key effects on to alter what they do

Big thing is the ability to 'lock' enemies. This is vital as you'll only control Keyth, and by doing this you remove the ability for that enemy to take damage but they cannot do anything until 'unlocked'.

Also an elemental system that rewards the player for paying attention to which elements negate which. So if you 'seal' command with a water key on a fire enemy it will instantly destroy that enemy.

Yes there is an element that cannot be affected by this system. Arcane/Demon. Still figuring things out for that.

author=Gretgor
@yugijak I like that idea. Character progression based on exploration instead of grinding is 100% my jam.

One thing to keep in mind, however, is that if your battles are gonna be turn based, there's gotta be some incentive to engage in battle instead of just fleeing, since there's no EXP.

Battle is how you get keys

Defeating enemies grants keys of elements related to that enemy.

Thanks for calling me out on that though I did forget to point that out clearly.

If I can't find a royalty-free sad acoustic guitar solo song for my game, I'll have to throw away basically 10% of the work I've done this week. Does anyone know where I can find one? I tried Kevin MacLeod, but he doesn't have any songs that are only one guitar and nothing else. I tried other websites, but their prices are unaffordable with the current value of Brazilian currency.

Heck, I even tried converting some YouTube Chorinho videos to MP3, but then I realized that would probably be copyrighted.

Can anyone help me out here? This is making me really frustrated :(

I mean, I guess I could just place a screen-spanning message in a picture that says "please pretend there is a beautifully melancholic acoustic guitar melody here" but that wouldn't quite cut it.

I found a really old MIDI of a Chorinho song by a 20th century composer, tweaked its BPM and its pitch, and threw it in.