Category Archives: Devlogs

Dreamblazers Devlog: Week of May 12, 2014 (Pony Detour Edition)

No devlog today!

I’ve been totally occupied for the past week, and by “occupied” I mean “I somehow forgot last Monday that the season 4 finale of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic was only five days away, so in celebration of the only TV show I’ve enjoyed in the last five years, I spent a ton of time in the last week revisiting episodes from earlier in the season and getting hyped up for the finale. I was so excited I almost literally couldn’t sleep for most of the week, as I kept waking up just three or four hours after going to bed and then trying to go back to sleep.”

There was also the new 3DS release on Thursday of an old-school-styled 2D RPG, Grinsia, which is the kind of thing I’m obligated to check out. Most of my time went to MLP, though. I’m going to take some time out to post reviews of all the season 4 episodes for the next little while, but once we’re past that I’ll be all set, refocused, and back on top of Dreamblazers. (Incidentally, I’m still going to finish the Tales of Symphonia breakdown as well. That’s just far more time-consuming than the pony reviews, so I scaled back on the update frequency.)

I feel like most people would just pretend they were doing stuff and make up things to claim that they did—that or just skip the weekly post and come back next time with a real progress update. I intend to continue being upfront here and not giving any false impressions, though. Didn’t really do a thing for my own game. Flat out: that’s what happened. (Considering all the Honesty here, you’d think Applejack would rank higher than my thirtieth or so favorite pony, but nah. =P)

Dreamblazers Devlog: Week of May 5, 2014

Last week’s achievements

* Various fixes to menus
* Various fixes to equipment
* Corrected Style stat formula
* I now know how to put in any of the following types of abilities: single-hit multi-target, multi-hit single-target, multi status effect, multi-hit plus single status effect, and multi-hit plus multi status effect

Current focus

Balancing enemies.

Weekly goals

* Send in art feedback for everything
* Begin implementing a variety of (normal) enemy stats and test a range of different attacks against them for balance

Comments

It didn’t occur to me until this week, but so far I’ve been conducting all my damage formula testing with playable characters and bosses. While boss fights will be Dreamblazers‘ centerpieces, I’m also aiming for interesting normal enemies. With only a few exceptions like Pokémon and Final Fantasy VI, I can almost always accurately judge how much I’ll enjoy an RPG by how much I enjoy its normal encounters.

So normal encounters are the focus this week! This is what I’ve been aiming for since the beginning, in fact. I underestimated how many things I’d need or want to do as foundations leading up to it, but now we’re here and a fun week lies ahead.

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