MEGAN_HUNTER'S PROFILE

Thanks for the help! Unfortunately, some time ago that I can't even *remember,* I downloaded the XP trial and it expired (and locked out) long ago. I really can't think of why...I must have thought I needed it to play an XP game or something. Anyway, downloading again doesn't work...my compy remembers. Maybe I can find someone else's machine to play with it on.

Hmm that's good to know about the frame rates!!! American hand drawn animation is generally made at 24 fps; they stretch it out to 30 fps for tv, but that standard's changing along with the resolutions. So in "theory," 40 would work fine for me. But I have heard that XP can be choppier, so in practice it might be uglier than I'm picturing.

XP could probably handle all of my maps as tiles, I hadn't thought of that! Right now my only tiles are little animations that I put in as events: eyes that blink and that sort of thing.

As for the animation confusion, I didn't do a terribly good job of explaining it. My job is in animation, so I wanted to make video files and import them into the game, basically just like you'd link to a midi. While both XP and VX state that you can't do this, there's a handful of scripts folks made for XP to do just that. "Image Sequence" probably threw folks off, in my world that just means like a high quality animated GIF instead of an actual movie: it's a series of JPGs or TGAs or what-have-you without audio. Some of the XP codes couldn't figure out movie files, so they show this rapid succession of frames instead...really the same effect if you're happy with whatever music is already playing. One code did claim to play actual movies, but I'm not sure if it was from within the engine or if it opened separately.

Thank you for the sage advice!

Almost good to go, thanks to Chaos. I'm about to shade this image to the side, I just want to make sure the scale is right first.

Edit: And done! So I guess I made this image for 1600 x 900 resolution, and now I'm wondering how common that is. Doing some res tests I can squeeze in 1360 x 768 if I make them fall directly underneath one another. I could make them really small, but on my screen that looks pretty ridiculous and pretty empty.

Must...solve...mystery...

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I would think it goes the other way around! Aka, give people a reason to subscribe, and they will.

This statement sounds like it makes entirely too much sense. Logic is not my "milieu."

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How long do you plan for this project to be, and how are the story segments/missions/quests/etc. divvied up?

Right now I'm thinking that the game will have 5-6 hours of play till you beat the final boss and finish the story; if you go collect everyone's spells and things it might take you 8. There's some side quests you can do at any time, but the plot is very simple: get from one end of the map to the other. So it's very easy to cut it up.

And that will be the "finished" game. But in the future, whenever I end up with cartoons from doodling or whatever, I'll put them into the game too. I just figure that they'll be harder critters in new areas that are basically post-game and story-less. A lot of that comes from the voice actors; I might be able to convince folks to do it once, but I won't be able to bring all of them back every time I want to add a side quest.

I'm nothing if not pragmatic, and my only goal right now is to actually finish the game. At Mattel we'd be told to make this or that huge project in two or three months, often using a software we'd never even touched. So it's definitely do-able. There's also some clear sacrifices I make since I know my limitations: that's why I'm using the basic VX engine without altering it. My target is to finish the game by the end of July, a date that's already gotten pushed back because of my career so I'm hesitant about pushing it out any more.

Have my controller, ready to play some Heeeeeerroooooooooo's Reeeeeeaaaaaaaalllllllm!

Playing it now inbetween photoshop tasks for a client. Wish they'd stop pestering me...I'm loving this game!