THENECROMANCER'S PROFILE

Everything should be done and working. Nothing left to code, no more graphics to make. Running one last play test and it's good to go. Few more days.

All the coding is done. Just running through the final play tests and fixing up little things. A lot of little things.

Almost there.

author=Avee
I suppose that if you mapped P1's and P2's inputs to different keys it would be possible to have two players control characters at the same time... It that what you did?

Yup. I'm using half the keyboard so far. I think there have been a few multiplayer games but it's certainly not common.

Thanks anyways.

author=Zachary_Braun
Which bugs were the killers? It would be helpful to know, because it would showcase the engine's current shortcomings.

Well, it's a lot of little basic things that don't indicate engine shortcomings. Just early bugs that need time to be worked out. In fact, this engine is leaps and bounds above RPG Maker when it comes to "eventing". I could do things in 3 lines of code that would take me 30+ lines in RPG Maker. Great built in features and commands. Everything is customizable and can be re-arranged.

I was reporting bugs directly to the dev on discord and they would get fixed pretty quickly, sometimes within minutes. So kudos to Wano. It's progressing fast.

What killed my momentum on this game was the regular updates, actually. Sometimes several times a month the engine would update and some of my coded functions changed, or had their bugs fixed, meaning my code would need to be updated to match. I was stuck in an endless cycle of updating my code constantly, which created new bugs and I'd have to redesign how I coded stuff. 1 step forward, 2 steps back. After one particular update everything lagged horribly for no apparent reason. There is a built in feature that when you load a project made in an older version of the engine it auto updates the project for the new version, except this doesn't always work properly, then I'm off on another bug hunt.

There are certain core features not available yet(which are coming). Right now you can't make any changes at all the the default battle system, like what the gauges look like or hero positions. No way to alter a map like tile swaps(because it's 3D using events to change how a map looks doesn't always work). Anytime a map needed to change in the slightest way I'd have to make a duplicate map. Things like that which prevent me from doing anything interesting on the maps. Then there were the camera bugs - if you move the camera anywhere then do the reverse action the camera wouldn't end up in the same exact spot which throws off anything that comes after. Among other camera issues, which are set to be updated soon.

Plus I'm still learning how to use some of the unique features of the engine. I made a smaller game jam project after this and figured out some great stuff I can apply to this game. I only work with default features, like someone would use 2k3. There is actually a full plugin/programming language side of the engine that works like scripts in newer RPG Makers. So someone with skill in code might be able to do more, but for the average user using only built in features - these are the problems.

The engine has a patreon and when goals are reached more features are added. There's a big 2.0 update that just got funded recently so it's getting some big new features soon, but some bugs seem to be taking a while to sort out. I'll probably wait at least 4 months before even looking at this again.

Added Past and Future maps, some towns and dungeons too.

Fixed most bugs, added polish all around.

Added more monsters.

Added a prototype minigame for kicks, a board game similar to Mario Party.

Added more game options, like set music/sound volume.

In the process of continuing the story beyond the first boss.

Things are moving along.