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Miscellaneous

Theme of the Orchestra

Padrick's theme ("Mission"), as heard in the Castle Defender midboss video.

Music is very important for RPGs... as is everything else. Even if you aren't trying to get a certain few emotions out of your players (making something like Final Fantasy I, for instance), you need to entertain them audiovisually as well as with a fun game. Numbers aren't enough, story isn't enough, good graphics aren't enough. You need everything to make a good RPG.

As such, you need good music (hi Newgrounds) and you need to know how to use it. This is basically lifted from one of my older Demon Tower/Diablocide blogs, but I feel that it's important:

-Listen to your game's music randomly, whenever. If you can't stand it over time, change it.
-Listen to your game's music when it plays. It's not enough to declare In2ZeDarkNESSiah.mid your cave theme without actually listening to that music as you map the cave. Don't write a scene without listening to the music you're going to have playing. If this can't happen for whatever reason, when you eventually select your music, touch up your map or scene while listening to the music. If it doesn't fit, don't use it.
-Listen to your game's music when it would fit. If you're working on skill animations for the Lich Queen, you should probably listen to her battle theme. Maybe you'll realize than an enemy casting Ebon Tendrils to the peppy theme you chose just doesn't work. Don't use that track; change it.

What's I'm try to say here is "listen to your music; don't throw it in willy-nilly." Make your game have a consistent feel and sound. Understand what emotions your music evokes. Don't use The Man with the Machine Gun.

Miscellaneous

Gregminister Palace and the Storming Of



In case you missed it, I'll just leave that video there for you. I've cleared up pretty much everything except that weird status effect blob.

Within the next twenty minutes, I'll be playtesting the complete first chapter of In Praise of Peace. It's not very long - half an hour, max - but hey, I'm glad that I haven't switched to a new project already!

I figure that now is as good a time as any to alert you folks to the fact that there will be no official demo for In Praise of Peace. It's only going to be about as long as Visions & Voices (click my name for V&V), which takes people anywhere between 5-25 hours (no kidding), mode being around 8-10. I suspect that the variability for In Praise of Peace will be much lower, since while there are some open-ended and optional back-tracking parts, the storyline itself is focused and direct. Assuming each chapter is about thirty minutes to an hour long, and knowing that there are ten chapters... yeah. 8-10 hours seems reasonable.

This is not to say that I won't be dropping anything off in #rpgmaker.net, however!

Fun fact: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5yj7FmeegM
I have no idea where the title of this game came from.

Miscellaneous

Expectations of a Leader

In Praise of Peace is coming along, even though it sometimes gets ignored when a bug pops up in the WIP Melody battle system. Yanfly and I have spent quite a bit of time debugging and fixing stuff - but now the game runs as smoothly as one would hope! Note that Yanfly does the actual work. I just break things.

Right now I'm currently fighting with the game's first midboss, the creatively-titled Castle Defender. ...yeah, anyway, it's a funky midboss battle for several reasons:

-It is the first "hard" fight in the game
-It is right after the various battle tutorials, and is basically asking "please use what you know now"
-If you don't do it right, you will probably die horribly
-If one of your two-character team dies too soon, you are what many would consider "dead"
-You are expected to use attack items

The lattermost is the key here. You start the game with a handful of powerful attack items, as well as a few simple bombs that are fairly effective. The game suggests that you use attack items on the midboss (through character dialogue), which you really should, because your best items (which, again, you are expected to use) do over 20% of the Defender's health in damage.

That's not all, though. Since you are kind of infiltrating the castle ("kind of" meaning "very much so"), more and more guards are popping up to aid the midboss. This includes a healer and a battlemage. Ow. That said, you've already practiced owning a Court Medic in one of the tutorials, and the Court Mage has so little HP that Lun can easily pick him off.

Alternatively, you could just guard until all of the enemies are present, use the Traveler's Lyre you picked up in a chest to put all of the enemies to sleep, and then hit then with Padrick's Cleanse spell (Pure damage to all; the midboss and Sentinels are weak to Pure, so!). Sleep doubles damage taken, and gives you a second to breathe/heal up.

Bottom line: hard midboss is hard, unless you actually use your sklnfdlsaknglsak attack items.

Miscellaneous

A Melody for Salvation

In Praise of Peace has now been officially announced! It is an RPG designed to showcase Yanfly's incredible Melody script, and also to show RMN "oh hey, yeah, uh, Craze doesn't care about anything besides game mechanics." Screw you.

So, really, this game is two things: a way to show people cool ways to use Melody, and a middle finger to the incestuous RPGMaker community (okay, really just RMN for that; everything I do is an attempt to save somebody's soul).

Oh, wait, no - this game is three things. The third aspect? It's a fun game.

I hope you enjoy the current In Praise of Peace gameprofile. I will be blogging regularly in order to make up for the lack of blogs on my (still active) main project, Diablocide X. I'll cover game design topics, gameplay mechanics, the pretties, Melody, and whatever else I feel like.

-Craze
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