Iniquity and Vindication

I've been making some actual progress on this game, lately. I have a tendency to go a couple weeks without touching it, working on UOSSMUD or just wasting time on the forums instead. But getting RPG Maker XP and Photoshop installed on my work computer and getting my game loaded onto a flash drive so I can work from both home and work easily has helped a lot. I have a desk job where I typically have a few hours a day just sitting at the front desk as a receptionist when there's nothing else to do, so I might as well be getting paid to do game design, right?

So that, you know, this stops happening:


The current dungeon I'm working on is the... second and a halfth dungeon, I guess? The dungeon is a naval base, which there are a couple screenshots of in the images section. You don't play as James, the main character from the demo; instead you play as his friend who is trying to rescue him after he was caught. (Yes, this is also how Vindication started. Bite me. I have a working formula and I'm not messing with it.)

Veris, the new character, is actually a cripple who can barely use his arms. Predictably, he is a mage who doesn't have a normal attack. He also doesn't have the laser cannon that James gets in the demo; both because James still has it, and because he can't lift it. He does have a different tool for solving puzzles, though: a lighter. There'll be a lot of different tools you acquire during the game - think Zelda, Lufia 2, or Wild ARMS - but the first one for Veris is the lighter, which is fitting since he's a detective by trade.

It's actually kind of a challenge to come up with obstacles that can only be passed with a lighter. It doesn't create enough fire to burn anything that's not extremely flammable. And my game takes place in the 1980s in urban and military environments, so Zelda style tiki torches that cause doors to open aren't really gonna cut it.

What kind of barriers can I create that can be burned with a lighter? My current list:
- Bales of hay that were accidentally delivered to a hallway in a military freighter instead of a barn by a postman who was on his first day of the job
- Walls of pure magnesium
- Fireplaces, if for some reason you have to walk over the roof, and there is a giant bird or something sitting on top of the chimney
- Giant piles of dead prostitutes doused in gasoline
- Ten foot tall cigarettes

All excellent ideas, but for the first dungeon I think I'm going to go with good old-fashioned exploding barrels, which conveniently already have fuses attached to them. Push a barrel in front of a wall, light it, blow the wall up. More complex configurations will show up in later dungeons, in theory.



I've managed to get the lighter itself working, animate both James and Veris using it, make some pushable barrels, animate the barrels exploding, and get the event code working so that it all actually works together. The breakable walls can detect if a barrel explodes adjacent to them. Haven't animated the wall crumbling yet, but everything else for these puzzles is done.

The kind of crazy part is this script I have that lets an event inherit all its pages from another event, so instead of duplicating these barrels a hundred times across the game, I just have one barrel in a map called "Common Map Events." This way when get annoyed with the animation later, or I add another tool that can also blow up barrels, I don't have to edit any of my existing maps. Adds some work up front, but saves me way more work later. Unfortunately, I'm still at the "up front" stage of making the game, which makes it kind of painful at the moment. Which is why it always takes forever for me to get the motivation to get stuff working. But, hey, progress!