Monthly Archives: April 2014

Dreamblazers Devlog: Week of April 28, 2014

Last week’s achievements

* Wrote ~9,700 words of story
* Sent art feedback for Telia and the Team Jig outfit; finished art feedback for Princess Leaf

Current focus

Battles!

Weekly goals

* Send in art feedback for everything
* Get five distinct attacks functional and balanced (e.g. until now I’ve just been testing single-hit single-target, but start with multi-hit single-target, single-hit multi-target, multi-hit multi-target, etc.)

Comments

This past week took an unexpected turn: I was in the mood to write dialogue, so that’s exactly what I did to the exclusion of all other possibilities. “What’s so unexpected about that?” one might ask. “After all, Dreamblazers is an RPG.” And I took creative writing courses in college and you might even say I studied under a Harvard professor—I could elaborate, but who cares? This is a video game, yo. More in a moment.

I very rarely watch movies or TV. However, I’ve constantly heard from movie and TV buffs, through cultural osmosis, that Hollywood is “cynical” in how producers follow market statistics. They include love interests to serve sales, not the story, and the same goes for the placement of action scenes.

I guess I’m “cynical” too, though. If I believed I could sell an RPG without a story, that’s what I’d make. I don’t sink 4000 hours into Pokémon and 1500 hours into Monster Hunter and 400 hours into Advance Wars and 200 hours into Kirby because of their stories, but because each one is fundamentally the same kaleidoscope: throw me a wide array of abilities and enemies and I’ll go wild trying endless combinations of the two.

Truth be told, I’ve been writing dialogue all along in these devlogs in a more minor way—200 words here, 300 words there—but haven’t mentioned it because it’s unimportant to me. I play games for gameplay. Shocking! Writing is not my focus; in fact, the main joy I get out of stories in games is usually sifting through all the ways in which they don’t make sense.

…yet… I’m writing a story. And if I am, then it gets my full attention and my best efforts. May others dig it more than I. =)

Dreamblazers Devlog: Week of April 21, 2014

Last week’s achievements

* Primarily damage formula testing
* Simplified energy attacks concept

Current focus

Battles!

Sample stuff

Pretty glorious.

Weekly goals

* Send in art feedback for everything
* Continue ironing out damage formula balance

Comments

Thought of the week:

I’d extend it to not only projects, but components of projects. As I implemented moves in battles, one of the first steps was setting up damage formulas. No problem, thought I; I already know what my damage formulas are, so I only need to add them in.

Little fine-tuning here and there, but things were going great! I picked eleven reasonably diverse characters and matched them against their own stats to test. All the calculations seemed fine, so hey, cool! Just as a final check and to have a reference lying around in a spreadsheet, I’d match them against each other—

Uh-oh. This quickly revealed that energy attacks were too powerful. They’re meant to be powerful because they bypass defenses, not because they’re inherently four times better than physical or magical attacks. I had modeled my damage formulas after the Pokémon series because there’s no RPG I’m more familiar with, but I had gone overboard with my changes for energy attacks.

Days of testing later, you see the spreadsheet above! Even now I’m not confident that I’ve settled on a final formula, but it’s infinitely better off than before. Continuing to plug away!

Dreamblazers Devlog: Week of April 14, 2014

Last week’s achievements

* Sent character profile and color scheme for Lash
* Sent round 2 art feedback for Leaf’s princess dress, final feedback for Autumn, final feedback for Astrid, and round 1 for Tango
* Slightly redid certain fashion effects to fix loop issues; fixed minor camera issue

Current focus

Battles!

Sample stuff

Character design for the goddess Autumn and Astrid Crys Alucia (click for larger)


Not drawn exactly to scale since I totally neglected to communicate Astrid’s height. =P I’m still wavering on whether to call Autumn and her sisters “goddesses” because it might not properly convey their power—they’re not tame Thor-tier characters, but they’re also not quite God-tier characters. They’re time-transcendent, multiversal, omniscient, and can warp reality and the laws of physics and magic (ergo de facto omnipresent), but they’re not capable of creating reality. Maybe “Entities” would be a better word.

Weekly goals

* Get at least ten attacks operational
* Get at least ten passive abilities operational
* Send in 50%+ of applicable art feedback for new rounds of stuff

Comments

This week: just because I say things like “I don’t know what I can expect to go right or wrong” doesn’t mean I’m any less surprised when things go right or wrong. =P

Until now, I’ve done all my testing with a one-character party to start small, but since I was delving into battles, I added two characters for more interesting dynamics. Before doing anything, the equipment menu revealed that fashion effects were kind of broken for the two new characters, which was especially strange since one of them was a clone of the one I’ve been testing with. I checked and rechecked the two characters and couldn’t figure out what was going on, so I decided I’d put that on the backburner for a while and jump into battles for the time being.

New problem: somehow I’d screwed up the battle camera to a point that getting new mechanics up and running would be impossible from my distorted, odd-angle view. This was also especially strange because I’d never touched the camera—I even checked to make sure. At first I thought it might have been related to spawn point settings I’d made in order to start the party right next to a battle, but nope!

Long story short, this week became half a retread of the week leading into March 24. Hunting through my ~300 fashion effects turned up that a few still had infinite loop issues, which broke the effects for the two new characters. The battle camera was also a consequence of the fashion effects for different reasons—simply giving battles ten times as much time to load (translation: 1 second instead of 0.1) so that fashion calculations could finish fixed it.

That final breakthrough happened on Sunday, so now I can get back into the meat of things. : D

Dreamblazers Devlog: Week of April 7, 2014

Last week’s achievements

* Finished layout of status menu
* Sent character profiles and color schemes for Tango and Telia; sent art profile for Kelly; sent art profile for Leaf’s princess dress
* Sent round 1 art feedback for Leaf’s princess dress, round 3 for Astrid, round 4 for Autumn, and round 1 for Telia
* Drafted character portrait requirements spreadsheet
* Slightly redid personality profile stats

Current focus

Battles!

Weekly goals

* Get at least ten attacks operational (in terms of damage dealt, timing of sound effects, etc., but not animations—those will be way, way, way, way, way later)
* Get at least five passive abilities operational
* Send in 80%+ of applicable art feedback for new rounds of stuff

Comments

Super satisfying week! I pulled off my primary goal of nailing the status menu layout, got a good chunk of my character portrait requirements finished, and sent in a flood of art feedback and requirements unlike any I’ve sent before. For next week’s post I’ll likely be able to share the designs of Astrid and Autumn here and on the Characters page.

Now to step back: why was I focusing on menus anyway? Because menus might influence the way I handle stats. Why did I care about stats? Because I can’t test battles without having them finalized. Over the course of all the menu stuff I feel that I got both menus and stats pegged, so now I can get back to what I’ve wanted do since forever: combat!

Battles are an enormous project with many moving parts, so I’m being tentative with my weekly goals for now since I don’t know what I can expect to go right or wrong. Like I’ve said before, though, a huge plus in all of this is being able to use an amazing Unity framework to help me out. No matter how much time I do spend, it would have taken either months and months longer or would have taken thousands and thousands of dollars more without it. Endless gratitude.