Chained Worlds VX Ace Remake (On Hiatus for now).

Small updates and little things are still progress!

I seem to be making small updates and changes to the game most days now, and I'm actually happy about that.

Sometimes something little or small doesn't seem like much progress, but it actually can be! If that small thing, in your mind, seems to make the game look better, then that is good. Sometimes we can be wrong in what we think, but it's still progress of some kind and an attempt to try and make something good is always still the right path, as no matter what happens you can always learn from a game and then make a second, third, fourth, etc game from experience. (Or a remake of an existing game).

Then there is the issue of my mental health, some days are better then others, so I have to make sure I don't push myself too much or get too caught up in something, on a bad day I might take a break since that may be the best thing, but it's slowly been improving so I'm happy about this too.

Why I Like Using RPG Maker

It's the same for making different decisions and edits/changes to what you already got, the nice thing about RPG Maker is that you can easily change something during development progress. RPG Maker makes that easy enough, as long as you take it one step at a time instead of the whole thing at once (then it can get complex!), so I'm glad about that.

What I've been doing

I've been writing out my ideas on what can be added and change in the story, and I've started to write out a story outline for each cutscene in the game. I've also been thinking a lot about the skillsets for the main characters, I've mostly focused on the first two Rohan and Delicia skillsets.

However I've been thinking and realizing what I choose here is probably going to be in almost every battle in the game, as in each skill will be there in each battle. So it makes me really have to think on how to create a bit of diversity to prevent that getting too repetitive.

I think I'll get there and be able to do it, but I want to try and make it so the player has options to use a couple of different skills to prevent skill spamming too often first of all, and then see what else I can do from there.

The different skill choices will probably slowly come through levelling up so the player doesn't have too little or too much in one go. But I know I need to do this or something like this.

It's good I at least know this is what need to be done from experience, but it's one thing to say it another thing to actually achieve it, but I know it can be done so I'll try my best.

Started to use RPG Maker MV, Hooray!

As I was writing down a list of intentional skillsets in a open office document, I realize it's actually best I sort out that out in the database of RPG Maker MV (got to make sure I leave enough space between skill ID's so I don't have a problem organizing them later, though!). So I've started to use the engine now with the project file I plan to create this entire game in. That's going well. I'm using a ton of Yanfly Plugins and then there are some Yanfly Plugins that I think "I may or may not use", so I realize for now it's definitely worth adding those ones in too. I'll have a proper good progress report update once that's sorted and I can start to playtest these skills out!

Finally, Equipment Changes

This is the last thing I've worked on again and change so far, I decided that having these equipment "sets", I was handling it in a more limited and robotic type of manner, which I don't think will produce the most fun result for players.

So instead I decided that different pieces of equipment can vary, and certain ones are more rare then others outside of "sets". This look waaaay better to me, so I think I'm doing the right thing here.

As for will this mean there are equipment bonus "sets" or not, I'm not sure yet. I can see other ways to implement it.

I.e. Throughout the course the game all equipment have certain labels and certain ones grouped together to make a "set", but then more powerful equipment later can have the same labels to make a similar but same "set".

I like this idea a lot more and it's probably going to be this, but I'll wait and see what seems to be more natural for this game before concluding it for certain.

All that matters is that more progress has been made and a few changes that I'm hoping are for the better were decided.

As for crafting, well I still plan to implement it, but the same way with these changes in mind too. Crafting was always meant to just give bonuses to already existing equipment, so I will do that again here. Crafting material will be simple enough that you can choose what equipment to add a bonus too, but you'll need to already own that equipment first to upgrade it.

I like that a lot more, so far, too. Just I can see a huge issue of balancing but that's a problem that can be handled, so it's for now a problem for another day.

Plan Completion

There are a couple more things I could talk about here, such as am I using side-view now or still front view, how I'm handling states so far and custom damage formulas that I requested help for on another website, which was a great help (some people definitely getting added to the credits), but I don't need to talk about everything so I'll save some of this for the next progress report and leave out the rest.

Plan is now 15% complete. 21% drafted out. (More focus on getting further with the story as having the rest of my ideas that I can think of written out. Adding the rest of the planned to use Plugins and the start playtesting some things too probably will be the next thing to work on).

See you next time! : )