CYBERDAGGER'S PROFILE

First off, gotta love the "Are you a bot?" part.

Now then, let's start with my introduction proper:

I am a 22 year old dude hailing from Lisbon, Portugal, currently known as CyberDagger online. I had a previous online identity, but I not too long ago decided to discard it and start anew. (Basically got a new name to be associated with someone with an artistic output that's considerably less crappy fanart and failed projects than before.)

I've been a gamer for most of my life, and I got an interest in game design pretty early. I've only really started working on it a few years ago, though, but although I don'y have any finished project yet, I've read a lot. Hopefully the finished projects will come soon.

I have a deviantART page here. Due to the previously mentioned identity switch, this is a fairly new page with not a lot of content. Expect to see more soon.

I have also started a blog, Intro Stage. It's a blog about game design, for exploration of its elements and to hold my rants about games as well. It hasn't been updated in three months, as I went through exams season and after that was out of town without internet access, which hasn't given me any opportunities to find a trigger for my rants. Hopefully my time here will inspire me. Once I get a project underway, I also plan to use Intro Stage as a dev blog.

Previously, I was using Construct 2 as my game development tool of choice. I was learning it and experimenting with it in order to make a project of mine a reality. This project can sort of be described as the lovechild of Ikaruga and Sonic Colors. In the end, while I learned many of the skills to make my project, it never left the planning stage, as HTML5 currently doesn't support something crucial for my game, palette changing. (For those wondering why I didn't just save copies of the same sprite with different colors: I'd have to do it to every single sprite in the game. I planned for everything in the game, player, enemies, backgrounds and HUD, to be in greyscale when you begin the game, and you'd get the colors as you progressed. I'd need to have 4 to 7 iterations of every single sprite in the game minus bosses and late game exclusive enemies. The download size would skyrocket.)

As for my experience with RPG Maker, I've known it since 2003. Every time a new RPG Maker came out, I downloaded it and experimented with it. The old 200X versions were simply toys. You could import your own sprites and sounds, but there was not much you could do in terms of the core mechanics on the game. Then XP came, and introduced RGSS scripting. And suddenly the RPG Maker engine was much more versatile, and worthy of actually being called an engine. And subsequent iterations just improved on it, and now we have VX Ace, which I recently discovered.

As usual, I downloaded this new version of the engine. After I played with it a while, I started getting ideas. I usually get ideas when I play with new toys, but they're usually nothing of value. This time, though, one of them was really good. With that idea in my mind, I started snooping around, to see what Ace was capable of. What I saw amazed me. Ace was more than capable of what I wanted it to do.

But you won't see this great idea of mine soon. Notes taken and elements planned out, but it's way too big and complex for a first project. I'll make a smaller scale game, probably a parody game, as my first projects. It'll also allow me to experiment with some mechanics. I want to get rid of MP/SP/Mana/whatever and replace it with something similar to how fighting games work. Luckily, Ace's prebuild TP is almost exactly like what I want, and modifying it slightly will probably get me where I want. I will also play around with an unusual way of aquiring skills.

And now we're nearing the end of this. I'll just ask for some stuff. First of all, I came across Yanfly and Victor, and loved the scripts they have to offer. I am aware that theyare not the only thing in the market, though. Any other great scripters you wanna recommend? Also, if I want resources for my game, like sprites, where should I head to? I plan to have only original content in my big project, but I will probably borrow some stuff off the net for my first project. I also have a question specific to my project, but I'll post it in the proper section later.

If you want to ask me any questions, fire away! I will gladly answer them!