Fae Bride

Hey guys, I'm cutting it a little close for the blog but I just finished the first round of IGMC judging (which has kept me quite busy and thus unable to progress much through the tail end of this event).

So what have I accomplished for Fae Bride? Not as much as I would have liked, that's for sure, but let's start from the top!

Fae Bride (aka Dragon Bride) was a game I created quite a while ago, when VX first came onto the scene. I had a general idea of making a game with some scripts and did so with a very faint story in mind. The main component of the game was two-fold - scripts and parallaxing.

So yeah, this was my first attempt at using both and honestly, in some ways it paid off. In others it didn't.

The parallaxing was great for ground tiles until such time as I started trying to do more (and then had to stop because holy shite I could not do buildings and snow).

The scripting was fine - I got things to work as I wanted them to well enough.

Then came the characters who I ended up liking a lot. I still, at this stage, didn't have much in the way of a story so much as a string of events that kinda flowed together.

But then a problem arose - the game encountered some weird bug that made all the chipsets blank. And every time I tried to fix it by carrying over the maps to a new game it kept happened. Something was rotten in the state of Denmark.

Around that time Ace came out and I decided to go legit with my gamedev. Yes, at the time I was using a pirated engine (maybe that was the issue?) and it took me an Age to get around to grabbing a legal version of VX.

Enter this year. Over time I'd poked at the project to see if I could bring it back to life here and there. Most of the mapping had been done and a fair amount of eventing, too.

Thankfully the RPG Maker Humble Bundle came out and had VX in it, then the Revive the Dead 2 event was coming around and I decided to give this project another chance - to see if I could save it from the weird bug that destroyed it in the first place.

And I did.

So now that the history lesson is out the way, what did I do this month or so?

I rescued what maps I could and spliced together a few of the chipsets that were missing, then had to remap a lot of the maps due to errors all over the place from the loss of the initial chipsets (and I still have NO idea how that happened).

I then took to balancing the game a bit better, enemy-wise, and finally got around to writing up a story based on what I already had. On top of that I tried to eradicate a few of the bugs that could be found around the place due to my being a newbie dev when I started making the game, and added a couple of new maps to the whole shebang.

What I didn't get done is actually adding the new parts of the story, getting rid of the magic system I initially started crafting in the game, getting the new dungeon areas sorted, changing some of the events in order to align them with the new story more and adding in a 'demo end' sequence since it's obvious I'm not going to be finishing the game at any time this event.

That said, I'm chuffed with actually having saved the project from itself so that I can work on it and finish it instead of keeping it in development hell.

I would have liked to have worked on it more during the past weeks, but busy is as busy does and there's been a lot on my plate lately, so I don't feel incredibly bad about it.

I'll likely be adding the demo version to the site and not a complete one, but the dream of finishing this game has changed to being a possible reality.