Oceans Dream

Still working on the battle system. It’s gonna take some work, but I’m making progress. Part of the work is just making it not look bad, the rest is making it work like it should. Which it doesn’t really like to do.

MP Regeneration doesn’t seem to like me, and of course isn’t in RMVX by default. So instead of automatically regenerating MP, Tisa will defend to recover MP. This is a greater amount but she does have to waste a turn doing so. She has 100 MP (and always will), starts the battle with 55 MP each time (so there’s no need to conserve MP for a later battle), and recovers 25 MP when she defends. There’s also Energy drinks that recover 50 MP if needed, but those are limited in supply.

Karen alllmost has her limit burst meter working. The problems I’m having with her are:  A) She does not start with 35 LB each battle, only the first one. I need to find out why this is the case. and B) Her battle HUD shows the MP bar still (along with the LB one). That one I haven’t really gotten around to fixing though.

Vivian uses ammo for her shots, except for one gun which is her backup. It’s verrry weak so you only want to use that if you have nothing else. The problems I’m having with her are about the same, I need to get rid of her MP bar and place the 3 types of ammo there instead.

I also want to change how the names are displayed, so they’re displayed vertically instead of horizontally. That is fairly hard to modify though, I’ll try to figure it out sometime.

I worked on the menu too, you have 7 equipment slots for skills. These are not always single skills, sometimes they can have multiple skills. I was going to make a point system to restrict what kinds of skills you can equip (the stronger skillsets costing more), but it was a pain to balance and I didn’t want people getting rid of all the lower level skillsets just to have one higher level skill to spam.

Once that’s done, I’ll just add in all the skillsets, work on the database and then finally start with the game itself. I hope it’ll be much faster when I get to that point!

I also plan to have enemy group size be Dependant on how close enemies are to each other. So each sprite would be a single enemy, and if another sprite is close by, then it’ll be in the enemy group as well. So I can have traps and stuff effect this as well, like stunning an enemy so you can pick off another one before it gets too close, or make one temporarily run away, things like that. Then to see if RMVX can actually manage that with just events.

I’ve been mainly working on the scripts so far. I’m not doing anything intense really, mostly just edits. I’m not a scripting genius or anything.

So with this system, Karen will gain LB (Her own magic points) whenever she attacks. Tisa has the regular MP and recovers it per turn (That part isn’t implemented yet, for some reason there wasn’t that option  in status effects or items), and Vivian uses ammo (items) for her skills. Most of that is set up, I just need to set initial in battle values. Here, you don’t start with 100 (maximum) MP or LB, you start with a portion of that. But it gets reset every battle, so you can’t conserve it for the boss battle or whatever.

I made some menu edits as well. I will change the menu background design later, but that’s not very important right now. My main priority with this really is to get the equips working right. Basically, I want you to be able to equip skills. I may have locked equipment (if I can figure it out) so you can only equip like 3 skills in the beginning until you start unlocking more.

I did some other minor edits as well. You don’t need to press a dash button, and the default walk speed is a little faster.

I’m also figuring out what skills each character will have. I have the basic ideas in mind, but not any specifics. Tisa will use Water/Dark elemental spells (multi-target), some Buffs and Protection spells. Karen will rely more on Single target attacks, can be Fire or Storm elements. She’ll have the weird skill here and there but mostly relies on attacks and charging up the powerful attacks. Vivian will use various guns, has Energy/Bio elementals, and can inflict status effects too.

I still have a big list of enemy sprites to make though, but at least I can work on priority stuff instead of trying to make them all in one go. Also on the to do list is editting the battle HUD, so that the names are listed vertically instead of horizontally. I’ll figure that out some day!

I made some more enemy sprites, still a lot of them to go before I’m done with it. I also worked on some script work. I’m a newbie at RMVX so I’m not quite that familiar with RGSS, but I have programmed before so I at least get some of what’s going on there. It’s a little tougher trying to figure out other peoples scripts but I’m learning.

I am trying to go for the least amount of scripts possible that weren’t mine. I sorta feel like it becomes less my work when I use it, for some reason. And I only use scripts that are specifically stated by the scripter that they’re free to use as long as credit is given. I will do the same with sound effects as well, because everything else I’ll be making on my own. I don’t want any content taken without permission for this.

So, what I have so far is the Melody battle system by Yanfly. I’m trying to modify it so that the characters have their own forms of “MP”, Going to edit the HUD to remove the battle faces and reposition the text (and have a background image too). It sort of works okay right now, but I do need to add all the skills and everything. I have my own idea for how that is going to work.

This is how it looks so far. I have since replaced the font, so when I can I will work on the HUD itself.

I also have limited items now. So you can’t hold more than 9 of each item, except for ammo (That has a current limit of 300, I may adjust this later). That part works already.

My plan is also to make skills be gained by equipping certain items. You will be limited partially by how many equipment slots there are for that (I am thinking 5-8 so far, I would have to decide based on how many skills there are), and maybe also by points. Some skillsets may cost more points than others to equip, but I haven’t decided if I’m keeping that or not. Maybe the upgraded versions of the skillsets will cost more. So for example you may have 6 points:

- Medicine skill may cost 2 points

-Water Strike skill may cost 1 point

-Evasion skill may cost 3 points

So you may have 3 more equipment slots but not be able to equip any other skill. I am still deciding the details of this but I thought it was an interesting way to get skills, and that you can go out and find or buy the various skillsets instead of just learning them as you level.

I will be spriting for some other projects so I may not work on this as much as I want to, but I’ll still try to get some work in, and I’ll keep you updated on that.

Also added PocketWiki to the links because I’m surprised I didn’t have it there before. If you haven’t already, take a look at it!

Finally finished icons (for now), that took longer than I wanted it to. I received all the concept art for the enemies so I should be working on those sprites now.

I still need to work on the menu but that will be later.

Drill Mech by TFT as an example of a concept art which I’ll later make a sprite version of.

That’s all for today, I was busy with other things too but hopefully I can get the enemies worked on soon.

So I am making Azulea in RMVX now. It was an unexpected switch but I will likely be happier in the long run for it.

So far I’ve been setting up the database and resources for it. I’ve double scaled what I had for 2k3 so I don’t have to remake it all. So I am working on how it’ll work in game, since I don’t want the default front view system and all.

Tisa, Karen, and Vivian will be in battle, and I’m likely gonna not have any ATB since I don’t like those.

Working on it slowly, I’ll give you an update on how the systems and stuff work like another day. Very sleeepy right now, so this post lacks much info. Also got a monster concept artist so you may see the sprites or concepts of those later.

Have a Tisa pic for the meantime, screens and stuff to come later.

We still haven’t come up with a proper title for it.

I have made some posts about the game before. Basically, I and a few of my IRC buddies are working on this game. We (at least used to) take 3 days to work on it, then pass it off and they’ll add to it, whether it’s story or gameplay wise. We’re starting to get close to the end so we’re taking longer turns now, but hopefully it’ll be done before summer. No guarantees, I don’t like to be rushed.

One issue I was seeing is that we kept being at a high level (at least in that game) before the game was over. So we would have all of the most powerful skills at least a few dungeons before it was time to end it. Also, we had 2 types of skills as a shared skillset, so there was not much diversity among the characters other than the commands which I believe aren’t all that effective (and were a bit buggy).

So I made a unique skillset for each character. You have to equip an orb to change the elemental spells that the character can use (Fire/Water/Earth/Air/Light/Dark), and one orb to set the level of the skillset for the character. These are gonna be fairly rare so you won’t always have all the characters on equal level skillsets, so you have to choose who would benefit most from the new skills you get.

The story involves letters being sent out to various people who would be capable enough to do a dangerous task. A shadowy council tries to find out who is responsible behind the mysterious deaths, and a girl asks 2 mercenaries to take her to the capital city as she has business there. They end up being involved in the up coming events.

There are various characters (I believe 8 if I’m not mistaken) which will join your group, you can switch them out later when you get more than 4. Also, you can collect frooogsssss.

This is a collaboration with Dajhail, Ocean, GreatOldOne, Skie, and Jihaus.

I hope that we can finish it soon. We will release it once it’s complete.

So I finished my part of the contest game, it was a bit hard but I got the graphics made for the game. It won’t be released on time, but my part is done at least.

So now I’m back to Azulea. I’ve been doing some story planning, getting some ideas for the gameplay and design, and I even made a new battle background. I’ll be doing more of those, I’m planning one a day.

The story is still holding me back, but I wrote down all the ideas I had so it’s more a matter of connecting the whole thing and getting the gameplay to play nicely with it. I hope to update this a little more frequently now.

I have been working on stuff, just not Azulea for the most part. I do have more of the story figured out for it but I haven’t really sat down and plotted it all out yet. I may need help on that anyway, was thinking of asking someone.

Anyway, I posted some screens before on the chaingame that we’re working on. It’s a private one and we’re already near the end but we’ve been taking turns on it. I get home from work at about 6 PM these days so I pretty much take a nap, then start working on that project for a few days before I hand it off.

The game is about 1-2 hours long so far, has a few dungeons and cutscenes already. The basic story revolves around a girl called Rise who hired 2 mercenaries from town (Siegmund and Reinhardt) to escort her to the capital city. Of course, it doesn’t go as planned…

I’ve been doing more of the mapping part, editing tiles, and creating dungeons and working on the gameplay. I don’t like doing the story stuff (as is apparent) so I have my friends doing that part.

We will likely make a public release of it once it’s done, maybe in a few weeks? We just need some time to polish it once we finish the story part.

Screeeenshot!

Not as much progress yet on the game itself, doing some story things. The inclusion of Naia changes things, so I have to adapt to that.

I do have the intro though, I added to it so hopefully it will add some interest to what is going on. I worked on some other things like adding some NPCs and fixing map issues but other than that I was mainly playing through it to see what needs to go and what I should do.

I plan to get more done on Azulea these days so hopefully I’ll actually get to add more areas then.

Here’s an art by KYayb: