Alrighty, let’s take some exciting things one by one!

So much good news in one day! :O 55,000 Steam sales being a median for RPGs is extremely reassuring. :D https://t.co/Ry2QpL9nos

— Jelly Paladin (@JellyPaladin) June 22, 2015

So, somehow, in all the rambling and fretting and pondering I’ve been writing about here for the past couple of months, wondering what I can and can’t afford, crunching numbers on what the kinds of games that I back on Kickstarter make on average, and so on, somehow it never occurred to me to think through all the way to what happens sales-wise after a game is finished and is being sold to the public. Part of the reason why is because Dreamblazers is probably still quite a ways off, but another part is because I wouldn’t have known where to look for those sorts of figures.

Enter the article in the link above telling me exactly where to look. The article refers to 55,000 sales as the “average” for an RPG on Steam, which wouldn’t necessarily be good news, but they later clarified it was actually the median:

@GridSageGames @sinisterdesign @raiganburns yes, it's median, sorry for confusion

— Steam Spy (@Steam_Spy) June 22, 2015

I never know who’s reading this blog (other than like 650 spambots per day, but more on that in a moment), so for those not in the know about the difference, here’s an easy illustration: let’s say ten games are for sale and they sell 0, 500, 2500, 5000, 10000, 15000, 17500, 35000, 95500, and 275250. The average here is 45,625, but you can see how misleading it would be to look purely at average when in fact only two of the ten sold that many or more. The median is 12,500, which is more in line with what a person could reasonably expect to sell since five of the ten sold that many and another came very close.

Bottom line: suffice it to say I’m feeling a lot less insane now about my entire indie game developer venture. =P It’s still progressing more slowly than I’d like, but on the other hand it’s 2015 and the entire resources of the world still haven’t figured out flying cars for us, so I can only feel so bad about that.

Now for my second topic… You know who’s arguably progressing more quickly than I’d like? gamingislove, the creator of ORK Framework and Makinom. He’s so on the ball with both of his Unity assets that often I’ve just barely figured out what in the world an update with 10-14 new features does by the time he’s released another one.

Yesterday he released something that I think will let me do very interesting things with turn order in the battle system if I only 1) choose to abandon a traditional turn-based system or ATB system and 2) figure out how exactly the “multi-turns” system works. :P That’s part of why this post was a day late—this really excited me, so I rushed to experiment with it, but I haven’t quite gotten a grasp yet on how it works. Apparently it’s similar to Final Fantasy X, but there’s been a learning curve for me since I haven’t played that. One thing I do know is that now I’m capable of giving a character multiple turns in a row!

…this isn’t quite the same thing as multiple attacks per turn, though (which is what I’d really, really like). For example, Celty’s the fastest playable character in the game, so let’s say she could either attack three times per turn (not possible as far as I know) or could get three turns to every other character’s one (possible). In the first scenario, if she gets hit with the Soaked status effect that covers her in water and makes her weaker against lightning for three turns, then she’ll attack nine times before she dries off, but the enemies will also get two turns. In the second scenario, if she gets Soaked, she’ll take three turns in a row and dry off before the enemies have a chance to zap her.

So I’m not yet sure if I’m sticking with this route, but that’s what I’m looking into.

And then, of course, today gamingislove released the plugin to bridge ORK Framework and Makinom, so I’ve got even more on my plate! It actually feels good to be back in that swing instead of mostly waiting on art assets or sending out feedback about them.

One day, when I crack that median 55,000 sales figure, I’ll have to figure out some way to pay that guy back. Sure, he’s getting hundreds or thousands of customers, but it still boggles my mind that I could either pay an entry-level programmer $65,000 for a year—that’s not so far off from how much money as I’ve made in my life!—or I could have done what I did and make this one-time $100 Unity purchase. For all my struggles and all my amateurity shining through, I wouldn’t trade any of it. In fact, I literally couldn’t ahave.

Last thing for the day! The Steam article from earlier did make mention of PR being important, so at some point I have to step up in that department. For some reason there’s been a sudden massive upswing in spam comments here over the past ten days to the tune of about 1000 per day, which is another reason this post is a day late, but that’s obviously not quite the same as drawing in new eyes. :P

Not too concerned about it just yet, but finding a monster artist should bring me really close. I don’t think I necessarily need stuff like music or even special effects in battle before I can put out the most basic of basic demos, but obviously I’ll have to be able to show off monsters for the main characters to fight.

Because of my divided time, progress has understandably slowed down a bit. Not only that, but I’m now learning about Makinom since that’s going to be useful rather than continuing to build on the established stuff in ORK Framework and 2D Toolkit. So I didn’t really have anything to report this week and I had to ask myself whether it was still worth posting a devlog. These posts themselves take important time too, of course, so ultimately I decided the answer was no—thus no post on Monday.

But I’ve reconsidered. These posts are my development history and, for better or worse, I’m going to keep up weekly posts even if they’re smaller in scope than they used to be.

So rather than talking about what I did, which isn’t much in terms of tangible progress, I’ll talk about where my mindset’s at. =)

You know what’s pretty inconceivable? In the Princess Bride sense, I mean, not the literal sense? The amount of money in my bank account going up rather than down for the first time in sixteen months! This radical notion of no longer running on financial fumes has made me ask myself questions about the scope of what I can pay for.

Right now Becca is already making some overworld tiles that I forgot on our first go-around and also expanding the Seaside Slime Cove tiles with some new ideas that she and I had. If not for the job-out-of-nowhere, the Seaside Slime Cove tiles are something that I probably wouldn’t have commissioned pre-Kickstarter—one way or another, new money needed to come in before I would go for it.

But there are other things I could pay for. Other than pixel art, just a few weeks ago I briefly mentioned the possibility of a full-blown visual fashion system like those online doll programs you see people make in Flash.

Or how about this? Games like Phantasy Star IV and Fire Emblem have used illustrated sequences to portray key scenes:

(For more of those Fire Emblem examples, see here: Fire Emblem cut scenes)

I say “key scenes” because they didn’t illustrate every scene. Every scene would be the domain of games like Phoenix Wright, visual novels, or visual novel hybrids like Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love (one of my favorite games).

I can’t remember if I’ve discussed this on the blog, but I’ve definitely mentioned my approach to writing the story on Twitter:

How I write my RPG story lately: ask which characters haven't had standout scenes yet, then create circumstances that would give them one.

— Jelly Paladin (@JellyPaladin) August 15, 2014

Virtually every character gets to have at least one shining scene (or sometimes two characters at once if they’re fighting against or with each other), so maybe I could spice those up.

These are all brainstorms, of course, but the Kickstarter audience tends to want to know about developers’ ambitions—things that they’d like to do and things that they have to leave on the cutting room floor but could revisit later if circumstances allow.

…oh yeah! Speaking of the cutting room floor, I meant to link to this blog post over on my musings section from a couple weeks back.

While it’s still a big part of the game that you can “keep the characters you like and kick out the ones you don’t”, my original conception of Dreamblazers included the option to go even further than that—I wanted players to be able to switch character parties. Don’t agree with the dreams that Leaf and Celty chase? Then ignore those two and go play as Sakura and Evelyn instead. Sakura and Evelyn are about to battle against Kelly and Jun and you think Kelly and Jun make a convincing case that they’re in the right? Then switch to playing them at literally the last moment.

Of course, if Sakura and Evelyn were defeated then the story would have to end, but I liked the idea—it reminded me of the New Game+ option in Chrono Trigger where, at any given point in the story, the heroes can abandon whatever they’re doing and go beat up the final boss, leaving the timeline in total disarry.

A design philosophy like this is part of why I modeled the stat growth formulas and damage formulas after Pokémon: I wanted a player-vs.-player feel where the “antagonists” were designed in the same mold rather than being on totally different scales. In most RPGs, enemies have ten times or even a hundred times or even a thousand times as much HP as the playable characters, but the playable characters do more damage to compensate. This always make for awkward scenarios when a former antagonist joins up with the good guys and suddenly they’re no longer the imposing, indestructible force that you once battled against. Dreamblazers was meant, at least initially, for the player to be able to switch “allegiances.”

This proved to be way, way, way too ambitious, though, so it’s no longer an option. Rather than multiple concurrent stories, right now my goal is alternating stories in the vein of games like Dragon Quest IV and Mother 3: play as one group of characters for a bit, then a different group, then check back in on the previous group, and so on.

Can I even pull this off? I honestly don’t know:

I finally understand why Golden Sun 1 and 2 were separate games. Concurrently-running stories might be overambitious for any RPG…

— Jelly Paladin (@JellyPaladin) June 17, 2015

If I don't want an endless, impossible-to-complete story, then I'd better live with a lot of events that my protagonists don't observe.

— Jelly Paladin (@JellyPaladin) June 17, 2015

But that’s my current thought process and I’ve found that being able to use this technique is really helpful whenever I hit a wall in the writing process and don’t know where a specific group of characters should go next. Instead of throwing them into filler situations, why not write in a time skip without actually skipping time by leaving some characters behind to check out what other characters are doing elsewhere?

…

Huh! For a post that I was reluctant to write because I thought I wouldn’t have enough to say, this turned out pretty enriching. =) At any rate, talk to you all again at the more usual time of Monday in just a few days!

First up, sprites of Recca!

Second up, the creator of ORK Framework (which I’m relying on for Dreamblazers) is putting out a new product called Makinom soon that will eventually be able to integrate with ORK and could have interesting implications on making scripting easier for me as the person who’s occupying the programmer position without actually being a programmer. Definitely looking forward to how that one turns out since it could have a positive impact on everything I’m doing that doesn’t involve ORK nor 2D Toolkit.

Third and last up: as I’ve still been balancing bonuses from the fashion system, it’s just become too inefficient to repeatedly change multiple bonuses during testing because I have hundreds of them. This leaves me with a few options in descending order of preference:

• Pump up enemy stats, therefore ditching the idea that players should be reasonably able to beat the game with each character wearing her canon outfit. With the possible exception of Pokémon, every RPG ever requires the player to frequently tweak their equipment—and I’m even aiming to make that process a lot more fun than normal, so would it really be a bad thing if people have to play with it? Rather than balancing so that a casual player can beat the game without changing clothes, maybe I should balance so that a hardcore player can beat the game without changing clothes: it could be a self-imposed challenge, which is what those players (and I’m including myself) are all about anyway. There are more fashions than there will be monsters even in the final game, so this would be a faster solution.
• Make fashion bonuses harder to obtain. Right now a player has to rack up four points in the same style, which isn’t too difficult given ten outfit slots and with most pieces of clothing giving points to at least three styles. Even making it five points would actually be significant—it would mean half the slots need to be used for a bonus.
• Universally reduce the strength of fashion bonuses even further. This would technically work, but the thing I don’t like about it is that if they don’t give at least a 10% bonus for mixing two styles then it wouldn’t feel like coordinating outfits is even worth the time.

So that’s where I’m at!

Well, let it never be said that I make tons of progress every week: stuff related to my new job ate up time on Tuesday and Wednesday, Friday was dedicated to a wild three-city search for Amiibos, and a close family member announced out of nowhere on Saturday that she’ll be getting married later this year.

Today's Amiibo haul so far, but I'm still aiming for Lucina on Amazon shortly: pic.twitter.com/fq388QYZUM

— Jelly Paladin (@JellyPaladin) May 29, 2015

Actually, don’t tell Twitter, but I got even more Amiibos than this! Everything in the picture is what I’m keeping or trying to trade, but I’ll be using others for giveaways when it comes time to promote Dreamblazers more fully! :D

But truth be told, mostly I just wanted to unwind and take a week off after all the recent stress of the near-disaster and weighty financial decisions, so that’s exactly what I did. No more waking up twice and going back to sleep before waking up for real, but actually sleeping well again.

Not to leave you all empty-handed, though!

Go go Celty sprites! That third one is her jumping down, e.g. jumping down a cliff or off a tree.

Celty has sprite variations for wearing her sneakers or not because of an early optional tutorial about the outfit system and flashback purposes, but I don’t know yet if I’ll work that into the game as an on-the-fly visible outfit change. None of the other characters have such a minor variation, so if I do put in then it’ll just be for her—which would still be fine since she has the most screen time.