New account registration is temporarily disabled.
  • Add Review
  • Subscribe
  • Nominate
  • Submit Media
  • RSS

Progress Report

Summer Update

Greetings Everyone,

IRL intervened a little bit, but production on Aurora Magica was simply interrupted, not full on halted. I’ve had to take a moment of a breather anyway, so I could reassess how I’m handling the story-telling. The reason for this is that several characters will have a story arc that is separate from the others, and a secondary plot line that is independent from the main story. This created a little bit of a quagmire to work through.

Due to this bit of mud I’ve written myself into, I needed to take a step back from the project to look at how to handle things going forward. I was going to have to do this anyway, and then real-life intervened. What does this mean? It means I’m having to start storyboarding the various plot points. Not that I didn’t have a plot to begin with, far from it. The extra stuff though, was a collection of scribbled notes at best. I have to correct this.

With all that said, I’m going to go over things with my alpha testers (yes, I have testers) to see how much of what is already there would be worth cleaning up for a second demo. The first demo gave very little in the way of world building, character development, or any other detail that would make a compelling story. I hope to post another update in the coming weeks to announce work on that second demo. Until then, happy gaming and making!

Failsauce

Progress Report

More Failed Progress

It’s been a while since I've posted, and work still continues. In brief, the changes over the last month have been actually significant. One of the character side-quests is nearly finished, another is about ¾’s done, and a major side quest outside of the characters is nearly finished too. The reason I’m focusing more on these side-quests is that I’m past the halfway mark in the main story, and that means that I need to start tying some of the story arcs together.

I don’t want to write a book within the game since there is enough reading in an RPG to start with, so I have to show any history with cut-scenes or, optimally, with playable areas. From the cat-girl and the tsundere to the not-seen-yet “Osaka trope,” there has been work all over the place to get this project up and running. I’ll be checking with my beta-testers soon to see how much polish I’ll need to get a second demo available.

Now for the bad news, this thing just keeps becoming more epic. I simply wanted to tell a story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. I had no intention of making some 20 - 30 hour masterpiece. However, it has grown as I tried to tell a story with the different nations, areas, towns, and people. This puts the project in a place where I have to run another, smaller, project to experiment with. I’m no veteran of RM, so I still have to work on a project to use as a testing area. This project is just not good for that anymore; thus, I’ll be working on some other projects in the meantime. This could push the delivery date off a bit.

To Do List:
- Build more custom combat animations and skills to go with them.
- Collect some custom character artwork (in process).
- Populate 2 more towns (the number of towns is now 12!).
- Cut scenes for Character Quest 1 & 2.
- Populate 3 existing dungeons.

Miscellaneous

Choices... Choices

I took a break for just a little bit to enter the 1-map challenge over at RMW. I needed the practice. Point blank. Simple.

Aurora Magica is not forgotten, as I'm now working at some of the meat of the story. In fact, I'm working on the harder eventing part at this point: Character Side-quests.

I know the demo doesn't really show it, and I specifically pulled out the game-save variable that shows it (as actually pointed out in one of the reviews)--but each of the female leads has an affection variable. This variable dictates who's side-quest will be available towards the middle of the game. Each of those will have a dungeon associated with it, and one of the characters will re-discover their home town. These events are intended to affect the ending.

All of this is on top of another side quest I'm calling "Blood-lust of the Jotuun" based on a mythological monster of the same name. The idea of using a Jotuun actually comes from the RTP's goblin that doesn't look like a goblin, but more of an athletic smaller ogre. In other words, it looked like a Jotuun. So, this is a side-quest in development as well. ( So far, 4 "mini dungeons" and 1 dungeon completed, with a town turned into a dungeon on the way. )

Progress Report

Thanks for the Reviews

I wasn't going to post anything this weekend, but since a couple of users here kindly took their time to post a review - I want to say thanks. So, Thanks! Feedback is appreciated.

Some of the issues pointed out I knew of; others, I did not. In case you hadn't guessed it, this will be my first release to the public -- so, I still have tons of skills to develop, things to learn, and nuances to figure out. With that said, I am happy to have feedback.

Progress Report:


I've been playing with the Gene add on for MV, and I've been really pleased with some of the things that the tool makes easier. I've only added four or so scenes with it; although, it looks like more will be coming. A friend of mine has committed to providing a little custom art work, so that will help develop an identity for the game itself. Take it with a grain of salt though, everyone has time restrictions. It could take a while.

- Populated two more towns
- Mapped out another town
- As mentioned above, a few scenes have been added and a few updated.

Anyway, thanks again to the reviewers, testers, and followers.

Progress Report

Work Continues

April 03, 2018

Added more maps, a standard for RPG's everywhere - the pyramid. And just for grins, why not make it a Witch's School of some sort? It could even be an abandoned.. Yeah, that could work...


Might as well have a Pyramid!


A deserted Witch's school? Why not?

So far it looks like Aurora Magica is on track for a December release, and I'll try to keep this blog updated on progress.

Cheers!

Progress Report

General Update, Notes, and Looking for a Tester

03/26/18
It’s been a while, so I’ve went ahead and added the mapping demo to the Aurora Magica page as a download here as well.

Progress
Back-ported the changes from the demo back into the game development tree.
Updated maps, scripts, and a general round of “cleaning” or “polish” to the existing parts.

Beta/Alpha
I’m not sure of the policy here on RMN for making pre-release versions available; although, I do see that there is a “testers only” choice on the download settings page. Unfortunately, real life does intervene, so it may be a little while before I can check the rules/conditions/etc to make a public beta happen. If someone would like to have access to some kind of early access version, just send a PM. Also, keep in mind, I am a scrub on RMN. I've got a lot to learn about the tools available, and what is considered good form.

Notes
I picked up a copy of GENE for MV. I noticed a very interesting feature, in that one can save a "scene" generated as a template in a .json format. The reason this is interesting is that it looks like it would allow for some community driven content to be developed with relative ease. By the same token, it could be a copyright nightmare if it's misused. I'm likely not going to use it very much in this project as the "scenes" in AM are more sprite-driven, but the tool itself seems to be pretty solid.

Announcement

Demo Available

I stayed up way too late to get the final polish, spellchecking, and error hunting done. With that, the demo is finally uploaded. While not the longest of demos, it does have the opening scenes, the first town, the first dungeon, and a few good chuckles. The game itself does have a lot more content already, but I didn't think I could get enough polish to make the demo much larger in time for the RPGMaker Birthday Event. (Happy Birthday, RPGMaker!)

Progress Report

Map Demo

03/04/2018

Due to the RPGMaker Birthday, I submitted a map-demo to RPGMakerWeb.com.

To avoid any confusion, I will wait until the event is finished to re-post the map demo here. If you saw the download available for the few minutes that I thought it would be a good idea to share here too -- it will be back. I'm sorry if this confused anyone, but after the event is complete the AM-Maps demo will be available on RMN!

03/22/2018
As the event should be good and solidly concluded, the Mapping Demo has been added to the project page here on RMN! Not that it was hard to sail the waves of the internet to RMW in the first place, but I didn't want to create more confusion for myself - let alone anyone else!

Pages: 1