Ghost World

When I started this project some time ago, I spent the vast majority of my time tweaking the graphics, spriting characters, making maps, and crafting dialogue. It wasn't until I was half done the second area of the game that I realized that I didn't have any music, or any combat. Actually, I wasn't even sure I was going to have combat at all, and maybe make it one of those no-combat games.

Two factors that made me reconsider my battle position was that 1) The story itself loses some weight without combat, and 2) instead of looking at combat as a huge pain in the ass, I should view it as another way to show people more about the world. So I had to start putting it in.

This was far more difficult than I had anticipated. One thing I absolutely loathe doing is balancing rewards and difficulty. (This is primarily where I stopped in my roguelike development - but hopefully after this I'll be a bit better at it.) So I spent as much time as I could putting it off by designing enemies and a few bosses pixel by pixel.

Then came the dreaded time to test - it was a mess. I was either doing tons of damage or no damage, There were too many enemies, fights were too long, anemy attacks would spam or never show up at all... I would keep running into the engine at times as well. I was hoping to have skills that would inflict several status effects have a particular attribute, and that if a monster was resistant to that attribute it would effect the rates at which those status were inflicted - doesn't work that way... Then I tried making scripted battles, before I realised there wasn't an in-engine way to do that, so with some help from kentona I got a bit of a makeshift system in place.

So, for the last several weeks I've been balancing out item stats, enemy placement, enemy stats and abilities, and bosses for the first area of the game. I think I've gotten a bit of a hang of it, but I stil hate balancing. I'll try to reward myself by making individual battles as interesting as possible with my programming finaglery.

On another note, about the music. When I was first making the game itself, I didn't have any music. When I was setting the mood, there was no music, and I got used to that silence and thought the mood depended on that silence. Eventually, though, I realized that music could be another tool at my disposal, and not just something in the background, or another annoying roadblock to me getting back to my map making and dialogue writing.

The problem - I cannot write music. It just doesn't work, at all. After the first 10 notes in famitracker I have like nothing. But I wanted the music to be something special, and not just a bunch of midis off the internet (I hated the rtp ones). So I came up with something of a compromise that I hope everyone will enjoy. I won't really elaborate on it, but suffised to say there will be music from all over filtered to have a more 8-bit feel to it that meshes well with the simple 4-colour setting I've produced.

Lastly, I've decided to not release a demo of my game - ever - for two reasons. 1) I hope/plan to be finished by the middle of the year, and 2) I tend to lose all motivation in completing a project when I've already produced something substantial. I'm spurned on by the thoughts that people will have about the game when it's done.



So, to finish things off, I'll just say I'm on to the second area of the game, which is half-mapped and dialogued. The first part is all done, and balanced. With all the skills and stats figured out, and my battle making prowess has been trained, hopefully the rest will go more smoothly.