KRIMSONKATT'S PROFILE

So in 2015 I released my first published RPG Maker game, Zero Gear Fighters. It was... not great. It was pretty clear it was the work of the childish 13 year old with a lot of imagination and child-like wonder but very little skill both in writing and developing. For ages I have wanted to remake the game in some capacity to make a completely new game out of it, as the original game was extremely flawed both in gameplay and especially in story.

In 2019/2020 I came up with a concept for a game called "Chronicles 2: Zero Gear Saga." I would be a direct sequel to Chronicles Meteorfall, that one game that has been in development hell since late 2019 that I'm still working on. Originally what was planned was that the games "Chronicles Meteorfall", "Chronicles 2: Zero Gear Saga", and "Chronicles 3: Ascension" would be part of a trilogy called "The Crimson Meteor Saga" which was part of the larger "Chronicles of Chronicles" world. This series plan has been set in stone for nearly half a decade now and if only one thing was changed, it would completely throw off the rest of the series lore completely.

If you aren't aware of the plot of the original Zero Gear Fighters, here is a basic summary. You are Zero, a boy/girl (you can select the gender because the only RPGs I had played at that point was Pokemon and Mario & Luigi) who has their sister kidnapped by an imp named Vixi who is such an obvious knock-off of Fawful it's not even funny. (que "I have cheese! WITH HOT SAUSE!!!(sic)" line here) Zero then races after the Imp who summons an RTP orc that Zero fights instead of the imp because I was too lazy to program in an actual boss fight. Then you go to this abandoned town for no reason and sneak into a cult evil organization full of cultists evil grunts who watch "baby shows" like Dora the Explorer and Barney the Dinosaur. (I would have definitely been a GoAnimate/Vyond kid if I was born 4 years later) You then beat them up and their leader Cynthia and rescue Cynthia's younger sister "Yusa" or something who then tells you the lore. Yada yada endless sea yada yada giant crystal yada yada wish granting gears yada yada. And this folks is the first major plot hole. The crystal of life, you know, the thing that created the world was apparently turned into 12 golden gears despite, you know, being a crystal. Also, 12 mcguffins? Everyone knows that I didn't have the dedication back then to make 12 separate dungeons/quests.

Anyways you then head to the Tower of Madness past a bizarre map featuring crude pixel art made from lava tiles and an obscure optional boss fight with Mario himself before making your way to the Tower of Madness filled with ghosts that instant-kill you when you touch them. Also here is a secret dev room where you can meet a self insert of me, fight golden slimes that give infinite EXP, and recruit the secret character "Jordan ZERO" who was one of my friends that I put into the game at his request. Once you reach the top of the tower you enter a completely different map that's just a copy and paste RTP map that you don't even get to explore. Heck, you don't even get to fight the arc villain, "Big Bronco." You instead fight a seemingly out-of-nowhere boss called "Daisa IEI" who was based on another of my middle school friends who's attacks are all inside jokes. Yes, this was real.

Fun fact, originally the characters were named "Big Mac" and "Little Mac" based on Mc Donalds but when googling Little Mac I learned what punch out was and had to scrap the idea. Little Mac as a party member would be fire tho, and there's no reason why I couldn't have done it when Mario was a optional boss and the game used stolen Nintendo music frequently. After you beat those guys and recruit not little mac you take a boat to yet another tower which is just a sample map because this is the point where I started to get very lazy. After a few hours of RTP hell you fight Zaful the minotuar, Flush the fishman, and Reep the ghost all at once, some of my brother's OCs from elementary school. Then the game gets softlocked and you can't continue without a walk through walls cheat. Yes, seriously. You then go to the final town, recruit Philip the Vampire (another of my friends who got self-inserted) and get the infinity+1 sword "Thorn." Just Thorn. You then get to lord Anal Lust's castle, beat up Vixi's new form which for some reason is hot now, and Lord Anal Lust himself. Then Zero's sister dies because plot and some random out-of-nowhere guy named Thaddeus Blinn comes in, turns Zero evil, and then the game ends.

So, that was Zero Gear Fighters, a pretty bad game all things considered. You can definitely see why I want a redo of this so much. Later, when developing the Chronicles of Chronicles series, I created as part of the plot a reimagined Zero Gear Fighters that's almost completely different, but shares some of the base ideas.

In this new version Zero is no named Sero and is a young woman working as a mercenary to pay for his sick younger sister Yua's medical bills. However, one day she gets a job offer from the king of Morda Vael himself offering 10 Billion Bx in exchange for the four elemental crystals of Morda Vael. Sero accepts, and slowly builds up her cred as a merc in order to tackle harder and harder missions and eventually collect all 4 crystals while slowly gathering new allies. Upon collecting all 4 crystals, the world slowly begins to fall into chaos and powerful monsters rise from the earth. Worse of all, Sero's hometown of Alphes is under attack from a giant monster, and when Sero rushes in to help the entire town is burnt town and everyone is dead. Sero slays the monster, the "Arbiter of Imbalance," but it is then revealed that the monster is actually Sero's sister who's lifeforce was tied to the crystals to save her life and whenever Sero took one of the crystals her condition got worse until she turned into a monster.

Sero, absolutely enraged, leaves her friends and goes on a killing spree against the government of Morda Vael, aiming to murder the king who tricked her as revenge for taking away her home and her sister. Eventually Sero's friends rejoin her, and together they slay the King of Morda Vael, who claims the he doesn't know what is going on and that he's innocent. Regardless, Sero strikes him down, and King Gasper Conan is actually her grandfather and her mother was the lost princess who eloped with a commoner, making Sero the legitimate heir. Before Sero can process this Harumi, the chairwoman of Morda Vael Sero previously fought during her massacre against Morda Vael, appears and reveals that the king actually WAS innocent. She had been running the country from the shadows for years and was actually the one who sent the initial job offer that set all of this into motion. Harumi reveals to Sero that the Morda Vael Crystals hold countless souls within them and recycle these souls in order for them to be reborn to keep the cycle of mana from going into chaos.

Harumi plans to use these souls to power an ancient weapon known as the Zero Gear, a superweapon created by the people of the lost civilization of Arcadia that can alter reality on a massive scale at the cost of eating human souls, but was sealed deep underground in fear of it's power. Morda Vael uncovered it in an expedition but kept it hidden in the castle vault so no one could use it. Now that Harumi is in control she plans to use the zero gear to resurrect her dead husband and children who died in a housefire 15 years ago while also making herself queen of the world. Sero stopped her, but then decides to selfishly use the Zero Gear herself to revive her mother, sister, and grandfather so they can all live happily together.

Mia, one of Sero's friends, stops Sero while she is in the machine by destroying the crystals, knowing that they would eventually be reformed and the planet's mana cycle would heal. Sero's body was left behind when Sero's soul entered the machine, and Harumi's lingering spirit took advantage of this by possessing Sero's body, creating Dark Sero while the real Sero helplessly watched. Sero murdered Mia and badly injured her other friends Bronze and Philip, forcing them to flee. Harumi's confused due to the merged consciousnesses of Harumi and Sero, decides to go for plan B and open the Obsidian Gate, the portal to the nether realm, ending the game on a cliff-hanger to be resolved in Chronicles 3, a reimagining of Dragon Ascension.

Pretty good plot, eh? However, in the wider multi-universal lore of the series, both the original Zero Gear Fighters and the reimaging Chronicles 2 both happened. The characters in Chronicles 2 are reincarnations/rebirths/reflections of the cast of Zero Gear Fighters, echoes of their original selves caused by something known as the "emulator effect." Dragon Ascension, the sequel to Zero Gear Fighters, also happened, but was never fully completed. If it was, in the true ending the world would have been destroyed by a being known as Omegeo, setting up the events of future universes and putting an end to that universe. That incarnation of Ryuuta would also be something called "the demiseraph," a divine hero that is the only one that could slay the ultimate evil, Elzakalas, at the End of Days. However, Omegeo with is final attack split the demiseraph into 13 pieces, the 13 main protagonists from across the Chronicles series. Splitting the pieces also made them imperfect and subject to corruption, and one of them became so corrupted that he became the basis for Elzakalas' origin, ensuring an infinite time loop.

So, since Zero Gear Fighters and Dragon Ascension canonicly happen, just in a previous version of the universe, that leaves us with all the random plot holes and unexplained oddness of those games that needed to be corrected. Right now I am currently making a "lorebook" for my series containing the entire history and lore of my entire series in incredible detail. This includes small tidbits about worlds that came before the current "Zutara Continuity." However, due to the incomplete nature of the Zero Gear Fighters/Dragon Ascension duology with all it's oddness, I wanted to remake their original games as well. Originally, I wanted to just do straight-up faithful remakes fixing the glitches and the suckiness to make the games at least somewhat playable while keeping their odd and childish nature intact. However, while writing my lorebook, I realized how much untapped potential the original, unaltered Zero Gear Fighters plot had. Most notably, where the heck is the zero gear? Yeah, the golden gears are a thing, but first of all those things make no sense and secondly they're not the Zero Gear!

So, I came up with a new plot for the original Zero Gear Fighters. Now, the game is a sort of dimension-hopping adventure, fixing the weird world design of the original game. It also allows me to add more variety, remove the RTP genericness, fix the plot and pacing issues, add in new characters, and just make the game massively improved far more than a mere "fixed" version could do. First of all, there are no more golden gears. Instead, they are "creation shards" formed from the crystal of life. "Lord Anal Lust" is now "King Aeolis" who is a tyrannical king made a deal with demons in order to gain magickal might and be able to track the crystal of life, which he desires to recreate the world in his image. However, Aeolis discovers not only that the crystal had been shattered into many pieces, but that only one shard exists in this time and place. The other shards have been sent to other, bizarre dimensions to protect them from anyone who wants to steal them. The one crystal still in their world is trapped inside Ella, a little girl and Zero's younger sister.

Zero in this is explicitly non-binary, referencing both the choice of gender in ZGF and their unclear, mysterious gender in DA. Ella at a young age was terminally ill with heart disease, but was saved by a mysterious doctor who did a heart transfusion. Apparently, this transfusion had the doctor place a shard of the crystal of life inside her, keeping her healthy. Zero does not know this, and makes a deal with Aeolias to return Zero's sister in exchange for Zero gathering the crystals. However, the crystals are scattered across dimensions, so Zero gets help from a quirky scientist called Dr Matsuda who builds a device called the "Central Omniversal 0th-Dimensional Antiverse Warp Gear" or "COOLDAWG" for short. Zero thinks the name is dumb so they rename it to the "Zero Gear," the device that can travel between dimensions. Now Zero must go on a quest through 6 different bizarre worlds in order to collect the shards of the crystal of life and save their sister. In each world Zero obtains a new ally, but in the end Aeolis reveals that he had extracted the shard from Zero's sister and now Yua is dying. Yua dies in Zero's arms and Zero swears revenge, fighting through Aeolias' castle defeating his general Vixi who transforms into her true form, a succubus witch, before facing off with Aeolias himself and defeats him and his second demonic form. However, Thaddeus Blinn ambushes Zero from behind and possesses them, becoming Dark Zero. Dark Zero then plans to open the Oblivion Gate to unleash hordes of demons upon the planet, leading to the events of Zero Gear Fighters 2.

So, that was the plot for both ideas I had for remakes of Zero Gear Fighters. Only problem? There are two of them. I would be really weird to have 3 different versions of the same game. The original 2015 version, the first remake outside of the Chronicles lore that overrides the original plot, and the second remake that IS part of the Chronicles lore that exists separate of the original game. The first remake is a lot more faithful, expanding the original game and fixing it's many continuity errors, while the second remake is a complete reimagining taking the original game's framework and making something new out of it like I did for my real first RPG Maker game The Legend of Light (which is sadly lost to time) and it's reimagining Chronicles Meteorfall. But the problem is this: what game can you possibly think of that had two different remakes/reimaginings that went in entirely different directions but were still based on the same core ideas? Nothing in the history of ever has ever done that before. And I just know that it will be insanely confusing for someone to come in and see Zero Gear Fighters, Zero Gear Fighters ReMake, and Chronicles II: Zero Gear Chronicles and get completely confused at the continuity and how those games connect. It's not very intuitive that the same game gets a remake not once, but twice but not only that the remakes are completely different. This isn't like Fire Emblem Mystery of the Emblem and Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon where Shadow Dragon is like an improved/complete version of book 1 of Mystery of the Emblem while featuring some new original additions, basically a second shot at a remake, these are two games releases relatively close to one another that are both completely different stories set in entirely different universe, but both based on the same plot. How the heck am I supposed to manage this whole mess? The original zero gear fighters was supposed to be forgotten, but now that I have a second idea for a remake I can't get it out of my head! And I can't combine the two plots together because the lore of the first remake contradicts the lore of the chronicles series! And if I just remove Chronicles 2 and 3 from the timeline the whole plotline with Baetylus is never resolved! Baetylus is still sealed away by Tayo and could be released at any time, and without Baetylus being dead Elzakalas can't make any more incarnations meaning no Laos, Astraphantos, Pranola, Eos, or any of the other archons! I just have no idea on how to handle this. I know this post/loredump was insanely long, but any ideas? Please? Thanks.

So I'm making a skill that's like bide from Pokemon. It's enemy only, and when the enemy uses the skill the gain the "omnidrive" status. While in Omnidrive they are unable to attack, but store up damage taken while in this state. After 3 turns this damage is unleashed with a powerful almighty attack that does damage equal to damage taken x4, then the state is removed. However, if no damage is dealt, a switch is activated that causes a skill to be used called "Realground Shattering" which does infinite (not really) almighty damage to the entire party. This skill/state is primarily based off this tips and tricks from Yanfly:

Link to the Webpage
Link to the Video


And here is the code for that particular version of the bide state.


And here is my version


Is this code correct? Are there any errors I should be made aware of? Because I'm not that experienced with Javascript yet so I don't know exactly how well this code would work. Thanks for the help.

Got it. I'll stop using this site as a personal blog to vent about my issues.

author=Sgt M

author=KrimsonKatt
I no longer post those insane incoherent off-topic rants

Like this? Half of the site's forum activity lately has been you using it as a blog, and If I was an RMWeb staff member lurking here, I'd probably be taking that into account as whether to unban you. I don't imagine that they want that spilling over there.

You need to calm down. Write in a diary, open a blog, anything is better than oversharing on a forum about RPG development software.

That post was on topic, and I never went off topic in that post. It was a rant, yes, but a relatively short one. Yes, I do agree that I need somewhere else to vent then on here. I would talk to my family, but they know nothing about video games or game development so they can't really help me. They're just never interested in what I have to say.

I do want to write a blog to vent about random stuff, the only problem is that no one would ever see it if I post stuff on Blogger or my own website or whatever. I don't use twitter, that site is literal hell and is currently imploding. Do you have any other suggestions of where I could blog that people would actually SEE? I tried threads but it's really incomplete and unfinished as of now.

I personally don't really consider myself to be oversharing because I'm not as bad as someone like Chris Chan, but I do tend to talk a lot about my personal life on here. I didn't realize that was an issue, so I'll try to focus my posts here solely on game dev rather than using my status updates as a blog of sorts doing constant life updates. I should probably post those life update stuffs somewhere else. Maybe I could start a Tumblr? IDK I've never used Tumblr before and have no idea how it works.

author=Darken
is RMN not enough? what RPG Maker Web can do we can do better

There's way more people on RPG Maker Web then on here. It's also a lot more active. There's also the issue of me being unable to download a lot of plugins and other assets from there since I don't have an account anymore. You have to be logged in to download anything from their site, and since most plugins hosted on there are through the site, I can't download them because I'm banned.

So in my game I'm using the Yanfly "Item Upgrade" plugin. This plugin allows you to use a new type of item to upgrade other types of items through a special menu. Each weapon/armor has a certain number of "upgrade slots" and to upgrade an item you must consume an "upgrade material" which will then be attached to one of the upgrade slots. Each upgrade material gives certain buffs and changes to the item it's equipped to, and you can select certain upgrades to only apply to certain types of weapons and armor, such as upgrade materials that only work on swords or other upgrade materials that only work on heavy armor.

If you're confused on what I'm talking about, information regarding the plugin can be found here: http://www.yanfly.moe/wiki/Item_Upgrade_Slots_(YEP)

Anyways, I have looked from the help documentation countless times and I cannot figure out what certain notetags that the plugin uses are supposed to mean. For example, this bit here:


I don't understand this part at all. Aren't the upgrades only supposed to be applied to weapons and armor? All these types only apply to regular items, not to weapons or armor. And then there is the issue with whatever "string" is. What is that even supposed to mean?


What does all this even mean? Type? What type? Because I just put the Upgrade Effect and select what weapon and armor types in the notetags and the upgrade items and everything works fine. Here is the notetag I use for a basic "power scroll":


Then for the actual weapons and armor I don't have to put in anything into the notetags and everything works fine. So what even is the purpose of this section of the help file? Because you can already change what type the upgrade item is in the database itself. And what the heck is string? None of this makes any sense to me.

All I want is a special upgrade item to only be applicable to one specific weapon. That's it. But there is no clear way to have special requirements for the upgrade items, just selecting what weapon or armor type you want to apply to it. I thought of making a new weapon type and having that weapon be both a sword and that new weapon type, but since I use Fallen Angel Olivia's "Weapon Switch System" all weapon types are available at all times in the menu so the menu will just spoil this special weapon type that's supposed to be hidden to the player and only used for behind the scenes stuff.

I thought that if the weapon upgrade system had a way to have more requirements for what items the upgrade item could apply to I could have the upgrade item to only be applicable to that one weapon by making the requirement the "name," but that seems impossible unless there's something I'm missing, especially with the string stuff. I looked up "what does string mean in JavaScript" and it said "basically just text lol" So I thought the string tag was a name requirement for a short bit, but that can't be it, can it? IDK but this plugin's help documentation is super confusing and completely unclear what notetags go with weapons and armor or items since they're all mixed together.

I did a bit of brainstorming while writing this post, and maybe the "types" mean that only upgrade items of a certain type can be applied to the weapon? And when you do "string" both the item and the weapon simply have to have matching text? I'll try that and see if it works, but I'm not 100% sure right now if that's what the help documentation really means. Because if it is it's worded in a super weird way that leaves me completely confused.