Hi!

Ok I just don't like to keep the radio silence go too long. But uh yeah, there's things in the works, minor things I've worked for the last couple weeks. It's been a big sluggish for varying reasons but I'll keep June as a target for the next update.

Update will not be too juicy, mostly tweaks and some smaller sidequests. Very little in terms of content. Along with a revamped end of chapter one, as I felt I needed to close it with something more substantial that also kicked off the second chapter.

Here's some minor updates and tweaks to gameplay.

The "Defeat screen" got an update. Before, upon defeat, player was sent to the last visited checkpoint and half the gold was lost. There's never been any proper game over. This behavior is now under the "give up" option, and the player is given options to load a savefile or retry the battle.



I don't really remember what was the last update I gave on this, but there was another another revamp to the config screen. Added categories, and an option for showing different sets of button icons.



And lastly, a new area related to a sidequest. The player will have a chance at helping others and leaving their mark in the world, along making important relationships and getting access to new things.



That's all I got to show for now.

Hello! Captain speaking!

First off, let's congratulate the blog for turning 69. First milestone I guess, after all these 84 years, it finally arrived. The nice number.

So, unfortunately I haven't been working as much as I'd want to in the game, however there is a couple new quirks and stuff I've been preparing, aside from trying to grind the story events little by little.



The first thing is honestly something I've been thinking about since I started to make the game in XP. I don't really like tile-based movement, and usually just set on it as part of RM's limitation, but I've been experimenting with alternatives and/or redos for the character movement stuff. In Armored for example, I did implement half-tile movement, so I basically piggybacked from that knowledge for this. I also once (actually twice) did pixel movement for a couple undisclosed, maybe entirely lost projects that will probably never see the day of light, but for this I thought I might just go for the second closest thing.

This might have been actually a mistake. But I want to learn from my mistakes, gosh darn it. It also broke some stuff but honestly it broke less than what I expected so... eh. Seems like it's gonna stay.



The second small thing I've been working on is... honestly this is just a couple bullet points I wanted to check from stuff I noticed that bugged me. If you see the image, all enemy alternate forms stack into a single entry. This is not just a visual thing for the bestiary, since what I actually wanted was to remove the need od "scanning" (analyze, get enemy info) once for every single enemy form, since each has their own ID in the database. Instead, now they all kinda count as one. I say kinda, because I still need to polish that counter to the top-right. That counter is how many you've defeated. I might leave it as counting which one you actually defeated, or always display the total sum of all forms.

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I've done other things, but mostly what I've been trying to work is either polish or move little by little the story forward. I have less time to work on the game as I'm more busy with work, or just feeling fatigued. But yeah, I'm still trying to move forward with the thing.

And that's it for now! Thanks for reading!

So I guess that everyone here has felt that thing. You do stuff, you go to sleep knowing that your gam is slightly better than before. Then wake up, go to work, take a shower and cry, eat your rabioles, the usual. Then look again at gam when you have the time (sometimes 3 days after because life ia a bih). And there it is. Nothing changed since last time, you say. Start feeling depressed, sometimes close the editor, go cry some more, come back and watch some Abridged Yu Gi Oh.

You know if there is something that we are not grateful enough is for Little Kuriboh's constant drive. He's almost finished with Yu Gi Oh Abridged (while beating cancer btw), and yet there I was thinking "WOW LK Y U SO SLOW HAHAHA". Get a pair! This game is cancelled! Ok no, let's keep the composure.

Anyway, what have I been doing? Stuff. Let's start with a video. ROLL IT!



--OH yeah before I forget, hi, The Captain speaking!

I shared that video around in the Discord thingie, but I should document a bit here every once in a while, to remember myself what things I've been doing. And because I like to write dumb. So this is basically a couple new functionalities for the diary thing, basically. You can now pick a mission entry, whichever it is, and filter based on other entries related to it. I'm trying to do something more like Morrowind's diary, where you still documented stuff chronologically so you can see your whole travesy, while also adding nice filters to help you guide yourself through the huge dumps of information. I hope it's good.

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There is also a lot of work put into maps and stuff, from improving them to making new ones. One of them is the new town of Ardmore, a small rural town full of farms.





I like to add those animated pieces here and there, so the map doesn't feel 100% dead.

There is also a prototype of a mine in Fierro but that's super unfinished. Will mention it again when I do progress on it.

Another town that has received a lot of facelifts is Syrinx, the town with the coliseum.





There is a lot of other places where I did small improvements here and there, but those I think are the most notable, I already shared them as images a long time ago, but yeah, just wanted to recycle stuff.

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Now, battles have received quite a lot of updates recently. Besides bugs, they're systematically the same. I've just spent some time polishing their looks.



The new scan not only should look a bit less horrible, but also accomodate information in a much cleaner way. Before I had some super small floating window, which usually had lots of issues with positioning, and was very cumbersome to use (Left and Right to change between the microscopic pages). After a while of having to deal with it I realize I didn't like it at all as it felt horrible and looked even worse. So I did a new approach more in line with some Final Fantasy games (especially 8), of course adapted for 2D.



Then the battle camera. I'm still working on some stuff related to it, but hear me out. Again, ergonomics. I felt that the battleground was not only very static but it was also feeling kind of claustrophobic. I've been thinking about this for a while, was gonna use it for cool techniques, but decided to start implementing it on regular day-to-day battles first and see how it felt.
What's the thing that has caused the more issues? Well you see, you know that battlebacks aren't instantly bigger. And I kind of overshot it just in case. So now battlebacks are twice as wide.



Some of these battle background required a complete redo, like the example above. All of them required to be expanded, but some that were too old and were done in digital painting, I decided to finally bite the bullet and redo them while I was on it.

I hope however that my overshoot means I don't have to come back to this. I don't want to do more city background with like 4 or 5 different textures and lots of houses with their own stuff going on.

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Finally! The part I've been neglecting the most, story progress and things related to that. I've done very little of that, honestly. Got some scenes written but I still gotta revise them a bit and throw them into the game. I've also added and improved a bit some other scenes, to add a bit more context. I'm trying to shoehorn some character development so the start doesn't feel as empty, carefully of course, so it doesn't become a pile of ass.

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In other news, I also got a couple new songs thanks to a friend José Gutierrez, you can check them here!
https://josegutierrez.bandcamp.com/album/drekirokr-dusk-of-the-dragon

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And that's it for now!

Hello my friends. Captain speaking. Yes I'm still kicking!


Today I come particularly with kind of a question for anyone left here who still reads blogs. Yes you! Post something below! I don't do it for the buzz I swear! But let me introduce you first to the group customization thingie. The vein of my problems.



So, let's get into business, shall we? I'm getting to the part where this comes into play. What is this you say? If you've ever played Final Fantasy 6, you might remember that classic Nintendo Moment when you are splitting your characters in half between multiple parties. Well, this is that.

So, right now the problem, or more like a game design issue, is how do I set up restrictions to the system, or if there is any need for restrictions. You see, the basic idea behind this is I wanted a system where the characters could logically go and be doing something in one place, while other were doing something else, somewhere else. For the player there should be a gain in the fact that you're covering multiple plot points at the same time, and for me and my OCD, you don't have like 10 guys standing behind and doing nothing while their "friends" are risking their lives against a giant cockroach monster that defies the world's order.

So I invented this. Copyright 2069 me.



Initially I would leave the player decide when to use the multiple group system, and I will. But the first time it gets introduced, it is required. I might rethink this, in case it just becomes 100% inconvenience, but it will be used there, and at other point in the story. Basically, I haz a split party device! :kittythumb:

Now the thing that currently bugs me is the restrictions I need to put in place.

- When required, you can't have less than a specific number of groups. This means leaving one of those groups empty. This restriction is currently in the game.



- When a group is too far away from another, you can't exchange party members. At the moment that means at a different map, maybe around 3-4 tiles away.

- Lastly, the characters at the FREE slots (inactive members) should only be accessible from specific areas. By that I mean, those are the reserve, so they're probably far away. For now the idea is having them only at the Academy of Aleko.



...And yeah that's all from that.

Other than that, I've been doing some reworks here and there, some scenes have been improved, some battles have received a little bit of extra oomph, because they deserved it. And... yeah.



I'll be back.

Heyo humans! Today, we the great great great great yes are gonna present you... more of this thing. Oh yeeeh.

This is your usual captain talking gibberish. But heyo yeh, we're doing the usual work. Which is some, once in a while, while beating monsters and gaining experience and gold. Because life is an RPG. Full of grind, little progress.

Here is some visual things we, me and myself, have done in these last days.



Anyway, that's last week. Forget about that. Here is what I did these last days. First off, polish to the training cave end event. I rewrote the dialog, I think it gets more straight to the point, removed some cringy stuff (still cringeworthy because I wrote it :D), and included some explanations that were missing. ALL THAT IN LESS LINES OF TEXT!



Let's see, what else. Ah! Here is this, posted it on Discord but whatever, it's good to leave some dam sexy screens in this website. Come and look at my nipples!







More changes in text list form.

DONE Bug: Cave effect FUCKING THERE FOREVER AAAAA (if you die inside Haleko and etc)
DONE Bug: Achievements are fricked. --okay it was just the twin flames, I think. And it was me being dumb :')
DONE Bug: Hikari in Limbo. Dying against the Red Wyvern causes the GameOver event to get stuck.
DONE Bug: Enemies around Red Wyvern, not get in the way mid-event.
DONE Balance: Lower Mole speed 1 point (maybe 2).
DONE Bug: "Back" from System menu shows a submenu??
DONE Lore: Explain the gold "system", how your money goes directly to your account and all that.
DONE Polish: Phamas forest entry should be more obvious!
DONE Lore: Extra small scene before Training Cave (explain where is Hikari and what is she doing).
DONE Lore: Explain bank better. C:
DONE Bug: Intro flames wave effects are not working.
DONE Polish: At least add some ocean wave background sound @ ship (intro)
DONE Bug: Fix self-healing flip issue when character is at left side (I put some <= or something like that, EEEEEDYOT!).
DONE Bug: Remove damage when over press tile @ training cave.
DONE Deprecated: REMOVE THE SPECIAL ABILITY CONTROLS PROMPT @ training cave statue
DONE Lore: When trying to exit through left-side from Eddie's docks, there is no notice from mom or something (bugged?)
DONE Lore: Dialogo tras pelear con Vance. "Qué tipo más raro."
DONE Balance: Nerf Red Wyvern's life. It's absurd right now.
DONE Balance: Scan should not fail. Ever.

Some of these are already on the Steam version, because I fracked up a lot on release. But thankfully that's not the end of the world. But COV--thing is. So yeah! Hue hue hue hue hue hue hue.

And there you have it. Cheers!