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Progress Report

World Tour

Right now the world map is perhaps 65-70% finished, still thinking of ways to make it more distinctive but right now it's a perfectly serviceable map for an FF fangame. I remember being unhappy at one point with the limit on map size, now I find myself struggling to think of things to fill in all the empty space with.

Progress Report

Whu?

Oh hai, it looks like this project has switched back to its original concept and I updated the maker to MZ...does that mean this isn't actually vaporware and actually still getting worked on? Check back in four years and see.

Progress Report

Cast Animations

Updated the casting animations. Still can't figure out a way to make the player move forward and do the spell pose before the animation starts, but that might be a thing I'm just gonna have to deal with.



Minor thing, but little accomplishments like this are always satisfying when you're deep in the grind pit.

Balancing moves sloppily along, skills are getting added, and I'm currently rethinking my town tilesets.

Progress Report

State Animations are Go!

Got mini working, which means I can do petrify and toad as well. Not that I expected this to be hard, just that's it's been something I've put off worrying about till I ran through most of the other stuff on my checklist. Looks good.



Of course, due to the way the plugin and class system works (we needn't get into details), to make the animation work properly I might have to end up creating something like 300-400 different battler images. Mostly clones with different filenames, but still. I don't really care, but by the time it's finished the project size might end up being larger than Skyrim

Miscellaneous

WTF FFS WTF

Just grooving on the glorious feeling of getting everything how I wanted and decluttering all the dead ends & unused plugins and notetags, and now the YEP Selection Control won't work. Worked on previous projects, works in the test project.

But the nice, pristine project I started & spent the whole weekend getting ready.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Now gotta go through the plugins one-by-one. Is is some function in YEP_Core not turned on? The Battle Engine? An incompatibility with a new script I added? Wrong load order?

No f-ing clue. GAH!

In other news, I uploaded my short, terrible game for the Abrupt Ending event, not gonna do a game page. It's bad, but without the unaffected cheesiness that makes true stinkers sometimes charming & fun, plus probably not worth the 250mb size for ten minutes of 'gameplay'. Srlsy, MV.

Request

#ThirstyAsk

Since I've been at a good place with the project right now, interacting with the community more lately, trying to get everything I need together before slipping into the months-long period of silence where the actual work gets done, I thought I'd throw out one more ask. If you're a spriter who's interested in the project, I'm at the point where I could use assets. I put a slightly longer post in the job board, but thought I'd put it here to.

Really, more than specific graphics, what I need is interesting stuff I wouldn't think of. I'm a spriter, but I'm not an artist. If you need a bit of extra money and can sprite something I really want, I am happy to negotiate commission.

Progress Report

Progress Report of Power Report

Welp.

I think I've done it.

I've finally got the job system functioning the way I want it to. It's a completely functional system with no bugs. It's stripped down from the FFV system, there are limitations, and I have a few things to figure out wrt the impact of those limitations. But it's functioning, and I just cleared another hurdle between me and the project seeing fruition.

Now I need to go back and undo the mess I've made. Thinking of starting with a clean project file, but I've done so many tweaks and then forgotten about them that it becomes a forensic trial just trying to reproduce them.

Algorithms! I hate 'em. But I gotten a lot more comfortable with the (fairly elaborate) algorithms being used. Everything works like it's supposed to, so now it's only a matter of spending hours (and weeks and years) gradually balancing and fine-tuning everything.

I guess I don't have much left to do but make the game. My biggest issue right now is, I guess, a relatively petty one. I really, really, realzies, want to use and ATB system. I know, I know. Guess it's a generational thing. Problem is, I need to use a custom gauge, the one drawn by the engine ruins the effect of all my beautiful 8-bit pixels. That's gonna require a plugin, right? I am not gonna be able to do that on my own. Just not feeling the other battle systems.

I guess that's really it. Since I don't have anything to show, here's a map from something completely unrelated to the topic. I kinda went crazy with the mountain tiles.

Progress Report

Question and sorta update for y'all.

20 animation sheets.
Over 120 animations.
84 weapon sprites.
229 character sheets.
125 monster sprite.
47 battlers (with so many more left to do).
Window skins, fonts, cursors, and icons.
And an unwieldy mess of tiles that keeps growing and mutating.

After 5 1/2 years of ripping and spriting, I've finally reached the point where I've got (almost) everything I need in place and functioning properly, and can actually start the game making part of the process.

Question: how many people would be interesting in a (closed) technical demo? Nothing elaborate and gonna take me some time to string together, but I'd be interested in getting some input before I dive deeper into the process. Most of the game mechanics are playing well together (and I'm not prepared to talk about many of them yet). But there are a number of bugs and issues I can't devise workarounds for, design choices I could use a second opinion on, and various other, well, stuff that's worth taking to the community. A fair bit of it is scripting related, so anyone with a bit of experience there would be appreciated (full-on scripting skill would be nice, but not req'd). But I'm happy to say that most of what's bugging me is decidedly minor, many things that I feel would affect the quality of the game but nothing that would stop development in it's track.

Curious to see who's interested, not gonna cry if nobody is. In the meantime, progress is being made. Probably time to update the game page a bit in meantime.

Miscellaneous

Time to resize all the animation.

I've said it before, but FML. Don't be like me, kids, if you're transferring resources between Ace and MV, check the resolution size BEFORE you start putting the spell animations in the database.

Progress Report

Hell is other pixels

For as long as I've been slavishly meddling with this project (still only 1/3 as long as the dev time on FFXV), I've been obsessed with getting the pixel fonts just right. This has been...challenging. But recently, after noting that some very helpful and knowledgeable people took issue with tiny, dumb prior resolution, I amended the font and came very close to perfection.

Very close, but not close enough.



That's right. Everything looks pretty sweet except for that tiny bit of overlap between the HP/MP symbol and the numerals. And only at higher levels to boot.

But I hate it.

There are several ways to fix this, though as far as I can tell extending the spacing of the HP/MP boxes is not among them. I can be super lazy and just cut the 'P's' off, like they did in the FF Legend games. This is...not a bad solution, and I probably would have done this if I thought of it initially. I can find or create tiny HP MP icons, which is also a good idea, though I've yet to find anything that works.

Or I can do what I'm currently considering, and redo the whole battle system using portions of Olivia's Octopath Traveler pack. Why would I do something so drastic, you ask? Because I already paid for them.



So, overall it looks pretty cool. I'm not sure if it creates too much empty space or not, I sort of like the austerity of it but maybe so. (Sorry to make you scroll, btw, but I don't want to cut down the image) You'll also notice the extremely sexy and outrageous Turn Order Display is not quite right for the 8-bit aesthetic, though I think it looks good moved into the empty bottom quarter. I feel a little bad for poor Ruin wedged in next to it, but oh well. I suspect there's a way to dummy out the display, and though I've done some murking around in the script, I've yet to be able to. But probably doable.

More challenging would be to revamp it into something a little more retro, which *might* be possible, but I have no idea how to do it. If it is, I would replace the bar with something simpler, and replace the battlers in the display with their overworld sprites (as every SV enemy had a matching sprite). This seems feasible, but I do not have the know-how to even begin to think about knowing how to consider doing this.

So those are my options. As much as it busies up the project, I would like to make us of Olivia's side-view UI, as it is recommended-but-not-required for fuller use of her OTB system. And, as I mentioned, I paid money for it. (An amazing purchase, BTW, heartily recommend it to anyone who uses MV with an extra 20$ lying around).

But I'm open to recommendations/suggestions. The end result could be any combination of what I've mentioned, starting to have second thought about the vertical UI but working to include other of Olivia's elements.

Things have come together quite nicely in the last month, after a year or so of stagnation and roadblocks. After this, I have to continue implementing weapon and spell animations, which is real fml work and gonna go sloooooooooow. Then comes the actual game design part, which between the hell of getting the assets implimented and the GDD I have lying around sounds like a piece of cake. I know I'm wrong about that, but a problem for another day/year/decade.
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