Project Insomnia - Working Title - DEAD

My "traditional oldschool" game is slowly turning into a nonlinear sandbox. But hey, at least it's looking pretty.

Anyway sat down at work yesterday and made a check list of all the things I'd like to have done before releasing a playable demo. But First the have dones.

Have Done
Maps - 42 (includes 5 exteriors, 1 small cave, and 14 completed buildings)
Fog Overlays - 8 out of 42
Map visible enemies
Side view battles
Day and Night cycle
Message box skin
Battle Scenery - Woods & Cave

To Do
Visible Game Clock
Battle Sprites - May need help on this one
Fog Overlays - all 34 of them ugh.
Mapping - Academy interiors (I have 1), Weapon Shop Interior, and Church Interior
Menu System Overhaul
Ambient Animations - Roaming NPCs and Wildlife
Code "Level up" training system
Plug in missions, jobs, and Side Quests

ARGH!

Okay, so I set up a day and night cycle that adjusts the lighting/fog effects accordding to the time of day. No big deal, wasn't difficult and quite frankly - I followed a tutorial. I figure why reinvent the wheel if I can save myself some time?

Strangely enough the timer function didn't play well with my on screen enemies. If the timer happened to roll over during a battle it would cause the battle to exit and restart. Since I set the time to restart every 10 seconds for testing purposes this happened CONSTANTLY.

So again no big deal I figured I would simply pause the timer whenever a battle was initiated. This worked like a charm with one small caveat: the timer could only resume after the player either defeated the monster, or escaped the encounter. I had no way to flip the timer switch back on if the player simply outran the enemy on the map.

So again I figured I would just set a failsafe switch to turn the timer back on whenever the player exited the map. For the life of me I couldn't get this to fucking work! Because switches all execute at the same time I couldn't turn off the enemy encounter switch and have the timer switch "see" it before the player teleported to another map - without a functioning timer. AND if I tried to set a wait command to buffer inbetween the two it cause ANOTHER bug with my variable map teleportion that sent to player hurdling through space to a totally random coordinate!

UGH!

Couple hours of trial and error later I finally sorted things out though. Had to change a parallel triggering common event to one that called from within a map event. So instead of constantly triggering, it only happened exactly when I needed it to.

Only issue now is that the timer restarts after battles and when you leave the map. Not a big deal when it's only 10 seconds long, but when I set it to a more realistic 20 minutes or so it's going to be constantly prolonging my game days. So now I have to figure out if a. If that's a big deal gameplaywise and b. if there's a way to pause the timer or record it's setting and resume from a variable? Oh well at least the game breaking shit's been handled.

...but side battles are a go! (Thanks to Atoa's battle scripts)



Now to draw up sprites, animations, status bars, and build a to scale model Taj Mahal out of match sticks. o.O On second thought let's revisit this project after I establish some actual, you know, gameplay.