New account registration is temporarily disabled.
  • Add Review
  • Subscribe
  • Nominate
  • Submit Media
  • RSS

Miscellaneous

Piece on the side: mini-project

So after releasing Episode X with a bunch of new shit, I figured that was a good time to take a wee break and get some steam back for another couple of missions I've been scheming up.

So in the meantime, I've been playing about with another wee mini-project I've had in mind: VXA Pantomime: FFVI.

It's in a whole other world from Syma, being a visual play/novel and containing virtually no interactivity elements; it's just a short "game" designed to mix together different mediums of storytelling (you read, watch, listen, play a bit) while summarising FFVI down to it's fundamental story.

Has been fun making, since it's let me listen to all the FFVI MIDI music again, but it'll be finished pretty soon~


Announcement

Episode X-pansion!

Cleverly disguised somewhere in this blog title is a clue that this Episode contains more than your average update.

Now, what does this new update contain that should interest you?

Three new missions! Two of these are the peaceful solo missions that got mentioned here; check out Dane's Solo for a very unusual dungeoning experience!

Sixteen New Skills! Each class has acquired one extra skill, and both Common Magic and Common Tools have also received new skills. Not all of these are necessarily stronger and more badass attacks, but all are useful. To give some examples, the MentalMancer can inflict poison on the targets, which eats a chunk of their health every turn: this includes bosses! There's also the Healer who can remove all debuffs, the Medic who can grant invincibility, and the Grenadier who brings out his biggest weapon yet!
(Note: Some skills may appear as 0/0 at first. This issue is fixed simply by changing your class to anything (then changing it back, if you want) and the skill will have properly updated)

The HoloMap Deck is now available! This deck can be accessed anytime from on board the Baseship. It will holographically display all the planets and locations that your missions take place on, giving you their position in the Sector and some extra information about them and the peoples. You will also be able to accept missions directly from there, although they will only appear as missions unlock anyway.

A number of other changes! Including the attack command being changed for Marines and Sorcerors, a link directly to RMN from the game's title screen and added a bitchin' new scrolling parallax battleback to the Shuttle Escape mission!

A full list of changes can be found in the in-game Update Log (which is now working again; I realised that Episode IX didn't provide the Update Log, but that's been fixed)

Oh! And there's also the entirely pointless new Syma Banner that got made purely because I'm doing a lot of art stuff right now!

Miscellaneous

Planet Art - Universe Substance

Do you have any idea how hard it is to find sprite art for planets?

Very! D:

A new feature in Episode X will include the ability to get more information on the planets that the missions take place; this will include art of the planet itself, albeit it'll be teeny and sprite-sized.

Only option left was to just make them fresh. I was going to be lazy at first and just leave it as a generic "this is a planet" sprite, but after having started, it's kinda relaxing to draw up art for them. Since each planet can be so different from each other, with such different layouts and appearances, but nothing ever overly complicated and exhausting.

So to this end, each mission has it's own unique planet/location art! Not really a big deal, but along with the flavour information I'm adding as an optional read for the areas involved, it's all just in an attempt to add some more substance to the universe and add more connectivity between all the missions and areas involved in the game.

Miscellaneous

Peaceful Dungeons

After making a big monster dungeon for Episode IX, topped with harder enemies, lots of travel time and plenty of bosses, I thought I'd try making some more relaxing dungeons for Episode X.

Two solo missions will be included in Episode X, both of which are non-monster based dungeons, and one of them is completely without risk of failure!

Now one of them, Leesa's Mission, I just played around with the idea of a maze with expenses. There's no combat or danger during the mission, but you will run out of mana by clearing the path while you try to find the exit. Pretty quick dungeon to make (and play) but has quite a chill wee vibe to it.

Dane's Mission, however, was a whole other kettle of fish. It's actually pretty quick to play through and has no chance of failure of any kind (other than trying your patience), but was a total friggin' nightmare to develop, I shit you not.

The concept of it was really fun (shamelessly stolen from FF8), and I thought it'd make a really cool dungeon gimmick for a RPGM game, especially since I don't think I have ever seen it in an RPGM game before, but by god it was a handful to design it. Not only did I have to sit and plan out the whole map (more than once, as I kept changing it) but had to have every room layout designed specifically. And despite only actually being about 12 "rooms" within the dungeon, it still took up a good 30/40 maps to make it all, and the transfer eventing was possibly the most confusing I've ever had to do.

The amount of brain cells I cooked as I sat there trying to work out what goes where and trying to think about everything in reverse...god.

The dungeon itself, from a mapping perspective, is incredibly basic to the point where it's actually pretty boring, but don't let you think that it's not there for a reason! Overcomplicating the mapping would not only make the design job a hell of a lot harder, but it would certainly detract from the dungeon gimmick itself. Not that (in my experience anyways) you really pay much attention to the mapping; you spend all your time trying to keep your head on track.

Great fun to design though, even if it was a bloody stinking nightmare. Even though I know the exact layout of the dungeon I still get so lost looking for the switches :)

Announcement

Episode IX - Release of the Split-Party Dungeon!

A small-but-big update here:

Episode IX only includes one small script (a menu within the Game Over screen, as scripted by DoctorTodd) and a single new dungeon. No new bugs have been found and nothing else has been changed.

Howevers; this is not only the largest and hardest dungeon yet, but is also a completely new mission type!

The dungeon is the Bridge Mission, as mentioned in my last blog post and will require you to use all eight of your squad members and then split them up into teams.

The random encounters are vastly reduced within the dungeon, but with small parties to deal with them, resources run low fast. It will be essential for you to carefully plan out what supplies you can afford to sacrifice on the way to the Agents leading the attack, and what supplies will be necessary for the boss fight!

I've run through a few tests now and had a fairly rough time with it myself (I've not been able to do Hard Mode yet; screw that!) but it seems to set up the right atmosphere I was going for.

With the dungeon as large as it is and the fact that it's a whole new mission type, I thought this warranted an Episode of its own, but don't expect all Episodes to contain so few new updates; Episode X is due to have a lot more :)

Game Design

New Mission Type - Bridge Mission

I've been working on the new mission type so that it can be the main focus of Episode IX's release. Have gone through countless test runs of the whole dungeon now and am convinced that the twenty-odd switches and variables are working smoothly and as intended. The biggest problem is that the map is slightly laggy visually (over 400 events, and a number of par.procs) but it's only very slight and not persistant. And my laptop hasn't been turned off in about three weeks. Maybe that's relevant too.

Anyhoo; Bridge Mission, you ask? Well this mission is a special mission given to you on the Bridge of the Baseship by the captain himself; that much should hint that it's bigger and bitchin'er than all those regular mission's that stack up on the briefing nodes!

Either way, as this screeny shows, the mission type is an old gimmick, but one I feel fits fairly well into this style of game. Supplies conservation is one thing, but having a lot of it and a big team really does a lot to take the strain off; forcing the squad to separate and rely on a lot fewer supplies and tighter class combinations really puts an emphasis on the concept of planning your squad's decisions!

The mission separates your entire squad of eight into teams of two and sends you in all at once, at different locations. You will have to make sure that every character can hold their own or they won't survive being in a small team and without any chance of switching them to the back crew for safety.

And that's before we even reach the boss fights!

This entire mission is quite large; probably the largest of all missions yet, but contains plenty of treasure and the vast majority of content hasn't been recycled from earlier missions; it's all fresh, and I even made custom art for the boss just to make the whole experience stand out a bit more.

Was fun to build the dungeon, if absolutely exhausting. Planning it out took more effort than I expected, considering I wasn't really aiming for a "Puzzle" vibe; I wanted to make this mission simpler, ease into it developmentally... I've never been great at conceiving puzzles to be perfectly honest!

Announcement

Episode VIII - missions, UI updates, balancing and bug fixing bonanza

From a development perspective, Episode VIII is probably the biggest yet. Unfortunately this doesn't show through entirely as a particularly large update.

I wanted to get this version out ASAP due to the number of bug fixes and balancing changes that have been made, so it's a bit ahead of schedule. Should work though.

Anyways, here's what we have:

-Two new missions. A boss-only mission and Samus' solo mission (also, boss only!)
-An advanced text script has been implemented to improve the dialogue UI all across the game. With this, a number of dialogue windows have been edited to suit this, although nothing important.
-A Data Log (Bestiary) has been added and will keep track of all the enemies and bosses you've fought, giving you their stats so you can better prepare against them next time. Note for current save files: this update will not retroactively add in monsters you've met before, so you will have to go and meet them again to update the Log. However, the VR enemies from the tutorial map will be automatically added since they are missable.
-A number of balancing changes in the game. This includes increasing the difficulty of a couple of bosses, increasing the effectiveness of a couple of skills, as well as reducing stock and power of some skills and enemies.
-Updated the rep requirements for all missions. This will mostly affect new games and have little to no effect on current save files.

-BUG FIXES!
Loads of them! I've gone through the game twice now from start to finish in an effort to find all bugs that come from anywhere. Some of these may have been more obvious, while others were less drastic. Either way, I'd like to ask that anyone playing the game uses the Bug Reports page to let me know if you find any; it takes a lot of time to repeatedly test each and every mission both in testing and from a new file and I can't catch 'em all!

Specific details are in the in-game update log, although the Bug Fixes section is the most important, as some gamebreaking bugs were discovered and are now corrected. Episode VIII should be the most smoothly running version of Syma yet!

Episode IX may take a bit longer, since this version was released early, although I do have plans for a new mission type that should make an appearance soon!

Progress Report

Episode VII - Episode VIII

Episode VII is out, but honestly there's not much in it. I'm doing things in such a way that I'm an episode or two ahead of what I'm releasing, to keep myself on track and without a big backlog. Because of the timing of this, Episode VII has kind of wound up with little to show for itself other than a few changes and a couple of missions, while everything else has poured into Episode VIII.

Now, Episode VIII has a lot to show for itself.
As well as having a whole new advanced text script implemented to improve the dialogue, it also has a Bestiary addition for planning ahead on bosses you've already done, and I've gone over the whole game in an effort to catch as many bugs and problems as I can possibly find: Episode VIII will be the smoothest playing version to date!

Progress Report

Episode VI

Two new mission types released: Shuttle and Solo!
The Shuttle Mission lets you take your shuttle, the Esper I, and fly through combat-heavy airspace in an attempt to dodge the interceptors on the way back to the Baseship!
Solo missions are a special character specific mission that takes away the rest of your crew and has you complete the mission with that single character!

Also released two new classes: MentalMancer and Gray Mage.
MentalMancers are powerful psychics who use unusual damage calculations to deal potentially massive damage, but at high costs; great for killing bosses!
Gray Mages, on the other end of the scale, are purely support based characters, with heals, buffs, and powerful debuffs!

ALSO also released special "Subclass Only" classes which can be unlocked once a combination of two other classes reach lv5 (an instructional NPC gives details)
These "SCO" classes will give very high bonuses to a single stat, while leaving the rest of them nearly unchanged. They're great for specialisation, but risky!

Added instructional NPCs who give details on unlocking SCO classes and will explain the specifics of the damage calc formulae, for anyone unfamiliar with RPGM's formula.

Increased the healing rates of the Medic to better balance them against Healers, as well as slightly increased agility rate of the Sorceror.

Request

Concept Suggestions & Feedback?

Feedback? Yeah, I guess so; would be good to get some feedback on which missions are successful and which ones to try and avoid repeating, but this is mainly a request for concept suggestions for missions.

Syma is all about doing missions that have no recovery points and making sure your squad has enough health, mp and ammo remaining by the end of the mission to successfully clear the boss and any other challenges. This makes it all about careful usage rather than just spamming your best skill then spamming mp pots.

Missions so far have various different challenges: one of them has your squad members randomly killed off, another faces you against several large groups at a time, another deals constant damage to you just by being on the map and a new map full of magic-weak enemies will perpetually drain your mana.

Now, the concept is fun enough to play with but remains fairly unexplored in the grand scheme of things. I've never been that good at coming up with puzzles in RPGM, and figure that puzzles could be a good way to stress the players resources in a way that combat just doesn't. These could include eating stats, racing against a clock, avoiding enemies, anything really.
The main stipulation is that they have to be evented in such a way that they can be completely reset upon completing/abandoning the mission, so that they're ready to be taken again when you try the mission again.
The counterside to this is that the theme of the game is sci-fi meets magic, so imagination is literally the only limit. Hub-Based Missions means I don't have to concoct a driving explanation to link any given mission to the others, so it's easy to come up with any concept and apply it.

Basically, I'm just wondering if anyone has any fun ideas for missions, whether it be style, puzzles, challenges. It doesn't even need to be a 100% fully detailed idea; even just a concept could help out. I'm just looking to try and keep some fresh ideas of missions to try and prevent later missions basically becoming harder versions of previous missions (which is a burn considering every mission already has Hard Mode!), so I'm all ears for the creative juice!
Pages: first 12 next last