So, the overall game of The Ender's Amethyst is changing. It is after some deep thinking and studying that I've decided to move the development of the game to Unity. I am a long way away from getting started, but I am first working on a project connected to this. I won't provide much in the way of details on Story, but here is a preview of some of the work I am putting in on the game engine.



As you can see, it will be in the Metroidvania category and I it is heavily influenced by many games in this category. All of the graphics are custom placeholder graphics and may not be present in any form in the final game, but I do plan on having some RPG inspired elements present and a story.

Keep an eye out here for further details. I may create a separate project page once I've got more details.

It has been a long time since I had made a statement about this but the Project was temporarily halted due to my job-related journey basically. 2 months after my last update, I had gotten a full-time job and I wasn't quite comfortable with working on the project while I was at work and it also gave me only short intervals to work on it while at home.

I do plan on returning to the project VERY soon but I am going to re-do a good chunk of what I have done so be ready to see something much cooler when I get around to announcing it ;)

Stay cool, friends.

So I finished another major dungeon tonight. I threw the book at it when it came to puzzles but only two stayed in the final version, simply because I didn't feel the need to overload the player with puzzle, after puzzle, after puzzle, after...you get the point. If I kept adding every puzzle I thought of, eventually I would have none left to use later in the game too! As such, both of the puzzles I added are enough for an early dungeon.

The only gripe I have about it is that I feel like I made it too short but then I thought to myself "you know, with the length of time the player spends away from town and the amount of healing items a player will go through when going through this dungeon and the area before it, it should be just right." Indeed, the dungeon I completed was the Crystal Tower which, if you played the demo, you know plays an important part of the story (at least at the beginning).

The road to the Crystal Tower starts in a forest in which you have to find pieces of a puzzle (fairly simple, to be honest. I didn't design this to be too challenging) that will give you a clue for the next section of the forest which is a puzzle on it's own (and one of my favorite ones in all RPGs) followed by a boss fight which I will admit to the fact that I may need to come up with a script for that boss on it's own and I very well may do some tweaks on it before releasing the next demo that I promised.

At any rate, after that boss fight is the Crystal Tower itself, with 8 floors, 3 of which is just a climb up stairs (rather boring in my opinion but it IS a tower so it is to be expected). You do get a new character to join your party in the dungeon so I think that is worth some merit as well.

The two puzzles in the dungeon are fairly simple despite no clues being given. You have a switch puzzle in which you must push switches in a certain order so that you can open some doors and then you have the mirror puzzle that you need to solve to move on. I had an idea for a block puzzle but I just didn't feel this was the right place for it. I'll more than likely put that in a future dungeon. That particular puzzle will take the player a while to figure out (especially since it took me a while to figure out and I was the one who did the eventing for it).

In all, I think this has been a pretty productive evening after taking a break from it to begin work on a game for another contest which I may or may not work on, depending on if I can find my own personal interest to work on it or not.

At any rate, I've talked enough here I think. It's time to get some sleep so that I can wake up and begin working on the next portion of the game and t hen begin spriting the other characters battle animations. Goodnight folks.

Today was both productive and unproductive. I scripted a splash screen script from scratch (yup...that means I spent about two hours leaning stuff. Weee!) and began work on a few things for it. On top of that, I worked on a few actions for the Mikael battler.

My main goal for the day was to take a break for a day. I can't emphasize enough how important it is to take a break from things for a day or two before jumping back in. I may take a break tomorrow as well but I'm not positive.

At any rate, that's not really what I wanted to post this about. I just really wanted to poke my head out and say thanks for the support from everyone who has made comments and given feedback. I've got at least half a page of notes written down from the feedback that I was given that I can work on. As a thanks, the splash screen script that I created today has been submitted to RMN and is awaiting approval.

This splash screen script will allow for unlimited splash screens (or at least as much as VX Ace can handle, which even then would probably make for a boring introduction if you used that many) and you can play videos for each splash screen. This will allow for some awesome logo scenes like what you see in professional games and I'm pretty excited to see what people do with it if they use my script.

If you are interested in the script, here is the link.

http://rpgmaker.net/scripts/199/

Again, thanks to all of you that are supporting this game. If anyone is interested in beta-testing the game when I have a complete beta of the demo (that sounds kind of silly, don't it?), just let me know. I may get selective with who does it (I obviously can't let everyone test it) but I'll know more when that time comes.

So at any rate, I'm going to get some sleep. Goodnight folks.

You know, some characters can have a very simple character development that happens during the story and you see everything as the story goes on. Others...not so much. Today I just finished a 15 minute long cut-scene (which is admittedly split into two portions to allow for a break in between to save and leave and come back to it when they are ready) that dives into Shadow's backstory.

If you haven't played The Ender's Amethyst yet, Shadow is the thief who joins your adventure at the very beginning. Trying to stay away from Metal Gear Solid 4 type story segment lengths, I cut most of the story down to 15 minutes by just using dialog in some spots rather than having characters act it out on screen the whole time. To me, this allows the player to get right back in and into the action faster...and I have been at it for 6 hours for that 15 minutes of story.

...and this back-story is the catalyst to the softening of Mikael's "loner" attitude as well, which you will see slowly deteriorate over the course of the game. He isn't Cloud, guys...he's just a father trying to rescue his daughter and he's very upset lol.

At any rate, I've got some new screen shots captured that I will post here shortly after I crop them and then after the screenies have been posted, it's time to get back to work on the next segment of this game: the forest and the Crystal Tower.