This is what, the fourth post in a row that starts with a C? It's unintentional, I swear! aaaaahh

Hey everyone! The game's progress is coming along pretty well even though the blog posts are getting farther and farther apart. Progress gets kind of slow at times due to some wonky script incompatibilities and event strangeness during testing and balancing. The part that slowed me down the most was completing the rest of Dejanor's cutscenes to make sure that the actors and NPCs were moving as they should. Admittedly, I had been putting that off for some time--a month or two, maybe--because of the high number of "move route" events they needed. (In an old 3-hour 2010 demo that will not be uploaded here, those scenes were still the most challenging!) But the scenes pretty much done now, thankfully. They are pretty fast-paced as well, so hopefully those of you who like quick and to-the-point cutscenes will enjoy those. :)

Gameplay updates: The first dungeon of the game is almost finished. It introduces a couple of new skills and enemies. Each enemy has their own bio and they're quite fun to write. (worldbuilding! backstory! woohoo!) Unfortunately, I still haven't figured out why charset enemies don't appear like they should, but at least they don't crash the game. Finally, YEM Victory Aftermath has been added for the next release so that the following function works at all: the chain bar can now raise your EXP at the end of battle depending on how high its level is. Dunno why it won't work without Victory Aftermath, but the "Bonus Bar" script (which is renamed "Chain" for this game) has never been updated since its release so I gotta make do with my trial and error bugfixes. '_'
But hey, I learned how to add new modules in it! When the bar levels up, you'll hear a sound instead of nothing like in the prototype.

When I started mapping the green cave below, which is the second half of the first dungeon, my mindset was "gotta go fast!" and so I mapped the walls and floor with Benben's XP tiles. It seemed as if merely blurring it and adjusting the contrast/brightness would be enough to make them look decent with the VX-style objects. It was fine for me at the time, but now I'm not so sure. Despite the really cool rounded water, the difference between pixel art and non-pixel art looks kinda strange, really. Here's part of the dungeon.

(The hole takes you back down so you don't have to backtrack as much)

The other day, I found some curved cave wall tiles by Soruve that looked really cool and not squareish. I recolored them to green and tried fixing the seams on the edges. Here's a quick sample map of those:

That cliff on the left could totally benefit from tile directions, huh? :p It's intentionally empty because I didn't recolor any objects for it yet.

I can't decide what kinds of walls to use for this cave as well as the rest of the game. May as well ask now before I go too far to go back!

So which style of walls looks better to you guys? If the walls in screenshot 1 are used, most of the editing work is already finished for nearly all of the later environments in the game. On the other hand, if most people prefer screenshot 2, I'd need to go back and make lots of recolors to fit those environments. Which I'm okay with too, I guess...the water and snow tiles are gonna be nice little challenges.

Feedback will be very helpful, thanks in advance!