Granhistoria Remake

Ahoy! A prototype with about 2 hours playtime for this remake has been sighted, and it'll be up on Dec 6th! I couldn't exactly make it for Granhistoria's 22th anniversary release this June, but being a bit late will have to do. (This has been more or less in the works for 1½ years at this point.)


Ripping animations... just one part of the package.

Everything is pretty much all set to go, except one or two more spells I'll still try to include over the weekend. Ripping animations is stale work at heart and any mistakes in sequencing them are doubly horrible to correct. My (definitely not professional) process goes something like this:

1) Have one of your characters use a spell with the desired animation in battle.
2) Screenshot/advance frame combined to rip a 'rough' sequence of the whole thing. Many animations contain elements that run faster than 1 change per each frame... slow-mode emulation is helpful in figuring out the exact sequence.
3) With vSNES, ripping the individual animation sprites is no problem.
4) Chaotic improvisation occurs. Taking those screenshot files, I make a single spritesheet including layers of obscure numbers to remind myself of timing changes, x-y placement, pauses, repeated frames... until nothing stands between putting the results (fully culled of backgrounds/unnecessary elements) in a Ace-specified .png, finally.
5) The editor is for fine tuning. It's also here a kind of desperation will sink in, having figured out you'd need new frames here and there for the whole thing to work, or in-between playtesting the animation in-game, to notice it doesn't really work the way you figured it would. At all.
6) Hey, remember to rip sound effects as well! And curse the fact they might be pain to fit in the animation the way you desired.
7) To be frank, I'm happy with the way my ripped animations have turned out so far. (Just never use Freeze, will you?)


What is this remake for?

Some people, finding themselves in a situation of having to be an outspoken advocate of someone else's game or project, would find it to be a revolting task. To me, when looking at any piece of 'art' - an artifact of the past - as is, its merits become completely seperate to any of its circumstances. Here and now, for me, it's none about showcasing my own abilities as a game-maker than it's about praising what the original game's makers got right. In this creative process I want to distance myself as being any author or originator of ideas, rather, I think myself as one who simply and luckily has the means to substantiate the depth that is already there - certainly having once existed, even if briefly, in minds of the original content creators but not present in the final work for one reason or the other.

Certainly this game - while I wait for cease-and-desist anyway - merits some introspection. What about its relation to the 2010 Radiant Historia (more on that later)? Disavowal of its score by the music composer (more on that later)? Its designs having uncanny relatability to the fantastic Japanese movie Wings of Honneamise (more on that later)? It's certainly been mocked plenty around the net and those discussions are always fun to browse, and don't get me wrong the game does deserve a healthy dose of "what were they really thinking with this and this!"!

But its shortcomings paint an interesting picture. A lack of side-quests or activities? The result: emphasis on linear gameplay makes the looming end of the world a more poignant fact. Pathetic lack of sprite variety for town npcs? The result: important characters always stand out from the crowd. Game events spoiled to you via the Chronicle system? The result: when unexpected things do happen, the effect and shock is much more pronounced.

The way the Chronicle works in Granhistoria is something you don't often see in games. Cause who'd want their epic RPG adventure be 'spoiled' from the get-go, right? With this system intertwined with its core story, the possibilities of reworking this game in particular has proved more interesting, not to mention more useful, than say something like the trendy upcoming FF7 remake. Which from my point of view is a completely useless affair - let's say, given that since they're willing to put such effort on a remake project at all, why not work on something wonderfully charming and less established with potential, like Treasure of Rudras or Romancing Saga 3 instead?


I think I've already gone way over what this devblog entry was gonna be about... so cheers and gday to one and all!