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She's got a big meeting in the morning and the art's not quite done, but surely she can just close her eyes for a minute? More of an extended blink, really, and that couldn't cause any trouble. It's not like she's going to actually fall asleep or anything. It wouldn't suck her into a nightmarish cartoon world, dragging her friends along for the ride. And they're not going to have to fight through horde after horde of animated enemies on a bizarre journey beyond her literal wildest dreams just to wake up in time. Of course not. Because if you snooze, you lose. Who'd want to see that?

Features
No cel shading or Flash sliding here: explore a colorful world filled with hand drawn animation where even the buildings have personality. Those times where you do manage to wake up for a few moments feature a real world home made from photographs of the setting and cast.

Master eight dreamers and their unique special abilities. Draw new cartoons into the scene as Megan, have Keegan summon the friendly toon villagers you've met during your journey, or watch as tank Joe critiques friend and foe alike with his harsh opinions on the drawing style.

Change your appearance, abilities and even the landscape of the dream by holding powerful Memories, Goals and Lucid thoughts in your mind. Wield wacky weapons ranging from the accented Impeccable Bowler to the exclamatory Gadzooka.

Fall victim to countless status changing Moods. Turn RPG convention on its head with toon world versions of classics like Petrified (woof woof) and Cursed ($@%!) while using Doc Quack's Sanity Guide to inkblot the more cerebral maladies like Spiffy Keen and Genesequaed. Die by squishing into a pancake, burning into ash or silhouetting through a brick wall: even enemy attacks cause their own unique menu graphic changes.

Play to a soundtrack collected and inspired from the best of American animation, and fight to some real looney tunes. The malicious melody of the first boss in particular will make you sing in the car and sleep with the light on (but don't tell him we said that.)

This nightmare just never seems to end. Whenever Megan makes new cartoon characters for other things, she throws them into Worst Nightmare as well. So there's always more to explore (while hopefully keeping your save file) just by downloading the latest version from the site.

Latest Blog

A Poll

Now I have a dangerous question to ask. Not in the sense that I think it's a big deal, but in the sense that other folks might. You can already feel the question, can't you? Trembling in your very bone marrow and you struggle against it's sheer inevitability. But I need to know, so here I go.

Enterbrain's finally selling VX again, but surprisingly they're also selling XP. Since almost everything I have for Nightmare is artwork and music, I'm early enough in the programming that I could easily switch engines and only lose a day or two. So that's the infernal question. Which program should I use?

I was thinking of XP and I'll tell you why, as I understand it. It's probably pretty obvious by this point that I don't know (or really care to know) much coding, and am content making a game that follows the RM engine rules pretty much verbatim. I do get really specific about the art, though, and from my reading there's several things that I need to do: things VX isn't supposed to but XP does automatically:

1.) Battlebacks. I got the script to work *sometimes* but this is crucial for me.

2.) Character menu graphics to appear during battle, at least when it's that person's turn. XP's approach would also work fine; not sure how complex this would be in VX. Ideally, the char's stats wouldn't cover up the portrait, or at least cover up all of it; I have seen different ones to different scales.

3.) Animations. I've found a couple of video or image sequence embeds for XP, haven't tried that code on VX.

So far, it sounds like in XP I'd just need the animation script, where in VX I'd need scripts for all three, which would all have to lively happily together, when I could barely manage to change my default font. That's my level of programming.

I also need to...

4.) Display images (portraits of characters) while dialogue text is up. Standard stuff, no need for battle. I'm hoping XP already does this like VX does? For Nightmare I don't need the little square box inside the text field, but if it was available I'd make use of it (showing what item was in a chest.) This is not something that's a dealbreaker.

5.) Maps using all the pictures I've drawn, basically functioning as paralaxes with invisible floor tiles on the spaces you're allowed to walk on. So in this sense I'm really bypassing any form of traditional spriting. VX can do this, but can XP?

In my mind RM makers are different enough to have their strengths and weaknesses; it's not like Photoshop where each new version is always better than the last. I don't hate VX and we're definitely using it for the other game (who's page is already up actually, but we're not making it public until there's a lot more to show and probably download, but that's where I've disappeared to lately.) But it turns out what VX does really well, the simplified coding for common functions? I've been doing it the long way anyway! I just noticed the button down there. I'm still too used to the 95 way of doing things, so I don't think XP would be too complicated from the dialogue and things like that.

What say you developers, for this particular project would switching to XP be the best thing for me? Or sticking with VX?
  • Production
  • Megan_Hunter
  • RPG Maker VX
  • 05/14/2010 01:50 AM
  • 02/14/2012 08:18 PM
  • N/A
  • 60225
  • 29
  • 0

Posts

Pages: 1
Looks interesting. Followin'.
Artwork is really good, *subscribed*
The synopsis is pretty interesting and the artwork looks greats.
Definitely worth watching. I'll be keeping an eye on this. ^.^
I'm really liking the art here, extremely different. Something lacking from the VX category of games.
Wait, the title is...and the developer is...oh, I gotta say it:

Megan Hunter Presents: Megan Hunter's Worst Nightmare, by Megan Hunter.

-Tabris
Yes! YES! I was going for a Garth Marengi. She gets really egotistical like Darkwing Duck, and starts pushing "Megan Hunter's Worcestershire Sauce" and trying to milk the name in worse and worse ways.
You should go with a lighter gameprofile color scheme to match your game. :D
I've always thought of the game as having a lot of purples, but you're right that's not really showing in the screenshots yet. It's traditionally how we show "Evil" (tm) to kids, but thinking about how colorful the world is going to be it's actually strayed pretty far from that. I saved my meager CSS attempt but I'll wait to paste it up until I figure out what colors are going to end up in the images to either side of the body. It's the party, so that will be a pretty important color scheme to cater to. I guess I'd better get drawing! (Thank you for your link by the way.)
I'm loving this game idea. Reminds me of Roger Rabbit.
TFT
WHOA wow wow. two tails? that is a sexy idea...
445
This is very interesting and creative. It's nice to see other artists apply their talent into this program. Goodluck!
Thank you much! Sometime this week my paycheck should finally be coming in the mail, and as soon as it does I can buy VX. I've been making art for this game and another joint project, but haven't been able to make any screenies myself since my demo ran out. But the cartoon world has been much more fleshed out, and I added one real world dungeon that hopefully is like Roger Rabbit.
LEECH
who am i and how did i get in here
2599
Looks cool... BUT I LIKE CELL SHADING... aww.

Well, the image portraits (or facesets) are not included with XP by default. They have to be scripted. And even then, you will have to find somebody that has already created them specifically for XP (which I believe is easy enough to find by searching Google). But that's not too big of a problem for me, as I'm on the fence with facesets. On the one side, they look cool, if you can create various forms of expressions (which VX does not do by default), but not including them allows the player to picture the scene and facial in his mind.
LEECH
who am i and how did i get in here
2599
So... how are you going with this?
Oh man I can't believe I've never seen this before. Are you still working on it?
edchuy
You the practice of self-promotion
1624
Whatever happened to this project?
Pages: 1