Dreamblazers Devlog: Week of December 15, 2014

Last week’s achievements

* Finished art feedback for Jig and Berry
* Sent some ideas for tweaks to Celty’s design
* Designed initial layouts for Spring Lake Valley and Winny Spring
* Wrote flavor text for enemies I hadn’t written it for previously

Current focus

Back to the animation grind!

Sample stuff

Jig and Berry

Here are Jig and Berry, the final character designs to be added before I finish a playable prototype! Jig, shown on the left, was going to be the very last one, but Berry emergently popped into existence during my coloring process when that red jacket looked amazing but didn’t seem right on Jig. But who is Berry and why does she look so similar to Jig? Find out on the next exciting episode of Dragonb—uh, I mean, Dreamblazers devlogs!

Weekly goals

* Integrate animations with ORK
* Make the 2D camera follow the player

Comments

Ah, all the art is finished… 2014 is ending and a new beginning is upon me—one without a steady flow of character designs coming in, but hopefully with a steady flow of pixel art. I actually don’t know what I’ll do with these devlogs in 2015; after I’ve got animations and the 2D camera down, my efforts will go to cutscenes and writing, but updating with “wrote 14 scenes and tweaked 3 old scenes” every week sounds dull at best. However, I do assume that making characters automatically move around exactly when I want them to will give me all kinds of trouble, so maybe it’s fine and I’ll be able to complain about roadblocks all the time again. =P

I also hope that writing isn’t a slog. As a creative person, I do love my characters (10 hours playing with the fill tool for Jig, 2000 words of feedback for Cotelle…). As a gamer, I realize that others will mash through cutscenes without caring just like I do. It’s a tough balance. Bestiary flavor text is/was my favorite, though: I draw a lot of inspiration from Pokémon, so I consider it important to ask what monsters do when you’re not fighting them. Answering that question brings a sense of cohesion to the game universe, but it always feels iffy to insert that into mandatory dialogue, so bestiaries are where it’s at.

Finally, my earlier Dragonball line wasn’t only a throwaway joke. =)

Since today concludes the character designs other than small tweaks, at some point in the next few weeks I’ll have an organized picture with characters grouped according to their relationships instead of shown in the order they were completed as they are now. They’ll also have mini-profiles with stuff like character classes and species, plus more characters will be showing their nicknames (“Hikaru Wilder, Cerulean Cleric”), not only the seraphic sisters, Imperial agents, and Kelly.

I might even have fun facts and trivia about some characters’ creation and what they’ve meant to me over the years! For example, today’s Berry was inspired by Dragonball Z way back in the late 90s and she’s been a part of my Dragon Quest IX and Etrian Odyssey III parties. That kind of stuff used to go on my wiki, but somehow my own wiki has locked me out of editing it right now, so until I get that resolved, I can put it here instead.

Why do this all of a sudden, though? Because once the title screen image is finished, I’ll be taking things more public (very slightly more public) and posting in the Showcase section of the ORK forum!

Dreamblazers Devlog: Week of December 8, 2014

Last week’s achievements

* Sent art feedback for final Winter design
* Started art feedback for final Jig design
* Sent title screen image requirements
* Designed initial layouts for Seaside Slime Cove, Den of Kobolds and the Unicorn

Current focus

Final art run (for now) and touching up various features.

Sample stuff

Winter character design

Here in time for Christmas, it’s Winter, the most cheerful and eccentric of the seasonal seraphic sisters! One of the major goals of the story is to meet all four.

Weekly goals

* Integrate animations with ORK
* Make the 2D camera follow the player
* Design layouts for Spring Lake Valley and Winny Spring (and clean up the existing ones as needed)
* Write bestiary flavor text for remaining enemies

Comments

Sudden art burst from nowhere! Jig’s (non-alternate outfit) design is pretty much finished except for her color scheme, which means I’ve spent and will continue spending hours of fill tool fun to figure this out. She’s a very colorful dresser like Jelia, who also took a good long while, so making a balance that doesn’t clash but also expresses her personality is difficult. More importantly, Jig is the final character remaining with Flora, so it’s kind of bittersweet, but… that’s it! Nothing more after this. (At least not for purposes of a playable prototype.)

Other surprises: family visit from nowhere! I knew they were traveling all over the state visiting other relatives, but didn’t know it was in the plans for them to come see me for a few days.

Lastly, on the subject of map-making: I feel way too uneasy when designing dungeon maps and I’m going to continue tweaking them. The overworld is a different case. I simply design surprising locations like an elevated crater lake, a desert on a tropical island (hey, Hawaii has one), and a place where rivers, lakes, and the ocean all border. More importantly, each overworld continent is meant to be a self-contained area that people can travel as they please with no right or wrong directions because all of them are progress (even if nothing else is available to do yet, they add 0-EP teleport locations), so designing it is pretty stress-free.

But when I narrow the focus, a single cave or forest has an end goal in mind and has to properly but subtly lead the player. Nothing has warped my opinion and triggered my perfectionism here quite like the Sequelitis Mega Man X vs. Mega Man Classic video: there is such a thing as a correct way to do this!

In most RPGs you could simply design many false roads with treasure at the end, but in a game where the only items are equipment and all equipment is viable from start to finish*, that becomes a tougher balancing act.

Simply making circular paths that ultimately lead in the same direction isn’t an option either since those can be annoying to players, who wonder if they’ve missed something and wind up treading the same ground three times (forward, back, and forward on the other fork).

We’ll get there, though! This is 1) a gameplay element and 2) an element I’m making myself (as opposed to music or pixel art, etc.), so I definitely pride myself on getting it right.

( * Equipment for me is comparable to skill systems in Final Fantasy IX or Bravely Default: not all equipment will be useful for all situations, but all equipment is useful in some situation, so you’re building a collection of swappable “skills” via clothing.)

Dreamblazers Devlog: Week of December 1, 2014

Last week’s achievements

* Made functional ally-summoning enemies
* Tested out EarthBound-style HP drain and inadvertently figured out how to do Pokémon-style HP bars
* Tested out one-turn-delay priority attacks

Current focus

Touching up various features.

Weekly goals

* Send art feedback for final Winter design
* Integrate animations with ORK
* Make the 2D camera follow the player
* Design layouts for Seaside Slime Cove, Den of Kobolds and the Unicorn, Spring Lake Valley
* Write bestiary flavor text for remaining enemies

Comments

Since I’ve been on animation for a while, I jumped back into tweaking the battle system for the past week (aside from visiting family for Thanksgiving). Somewhere in the ether exists an incredible RPG, simply waiting to be created, with priority attacks that change turn order on a one-turn delay, but I feel that the entire game would have to be built around that mechanic with methodical and strategic battle pacing. It’s kind of like Flamberge, a recent Kickstarter strategy RPG where both sides take their turns simultaneously: a very interesting idea that demands an RPG’s full attention and commitment.

(I will say this: if delayed priority was going to make sense in any game, then it might have to be one with physics like mine where everyone has super speed; mechanically it feels sort of like the turn-based version of bullet time.)

And then there’s EarthBound HP drain. Though it’s a great mechanic for adding some real-time flavor to turn-based battles, it turns out that most of the reason why it works is because that series, like its inspiration Dragon Quest, has very easy decision-making. My decision-making is more akin to competitive Pokémon, so rolling HP either puts too much pressure on players if it’s fast or looks silly if it’s slow.

It also conflicts with my Last Stand battle mechanic, where a character at 0 HP loses EP until finally going down (basically like a certain showdown in Final Fantasy V, but active in every boss battle); because they’re similar concepts, Last Stand gets lost in the shuffle if HP also drains that way under normal conditions. I still love the idea of HP drain, but like with delayed priority, an RPG needs to be built around it. The good news is that now I know how to do justice to Pokémon HP bars!

That brings me to the bigger success of the week: enemies can summon allies now! They’ll mainly come in two varieties of summoning multiple fragile enemies or single strong ones, but a certain puzzle-esque “boss” also has her own spin on the idea. I didn’t keep many ideas from 1999-2001-era Me without major tweaking—not even my magnum opus boss battle—but that one’s staying mostly unchanged. =)

Anyway, of the first continents’ enemies, Kobold Chiefs are the best at summoning because they can give party-wide stat boosts to whatever they summon. Kobold Rogues used to outshine them since they could (and usually do) blind the player party, but now there’s real choice in deciding whether to go after Chiefs or Rogues first. And worse yet are the Chiefs who have tamed Greatwolves. Greatwolves only call more of their pack when they’re weak, so one might try to leave them alone, but their stats are almost as good as party members, they can be buffed by Chiefs too, and they can pin party members to take away their turns and feast on them for massive HP recovery like those cannibalistic hydras in the final dungeon of Chrono Trigger.

Ahhh… If it isn’t obvious, this is the stuff I love talking about in these updates. ♥ If I had any good business sense then maybe I’d find somebody and pay them to figure out all the animation stuff and create maps while I do what I like, but I do appreciate knowing what is and isn’t difficult in this process. So back to that I go!

One last note:

It’s a crazy thing to find yourself singing along to a piece of music when you’ve never heard it before, but I actually have heard it before. : D Going back to things from an earlier era that I’ve thrown away, the story of my RPG’s 2001 version opened with the heroine wondering whether people dream of adventure for a reason and launching into a solo musical number about loving her steady life but still wanting more.

I was 16 and so the lyrics are mostly embarrassing and I’m not posting them now—except for the ending. I haven’t thought of that song in years upon years, but the first time I heard 0:20 of that Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire theme, the two repeated choruses came rushing back to me:

And I think I will find—no, I’ll find out, I know
What awaits me if I just move on

There is loving and living and so much I’ll never know
Until I’m out exploring what’s beyond
And so very soon, I’m sure, I am going to find
What awaits me if I just move on

The bold part has almost the same cadence as the Pokémon piece except that it pauses before “no” instead of before “me”; the notes and scale of the first line in particular are exactly what I had in mind way back when. <3 It also fits even better with the “And so very soon, I’m sure” line other than having one fewer note. Sometimes I write lyrics for pre-existing game songs for fun, but this might be the one and only time where things happened in reverse. =P

Dreamblazers Devlog: Week of November 24, 2014

Last week’s achievements

* Got functional collision detection!!!

Current focus

Touching up various features.

Weekly goals

* Integrate animations with ORK
* Make the camera follow the player
* Experiment with EarthBound-style HP drain
* Experiment with one-turn-delay priority attacks
* Make functional ally-summoning enemies
* Design layouts for Seaside Slime Cove, Den of Kobolds and the Unicorn, Spring Lake Valley
* Write bestiary flavor text for remaining enemies

Comments

I’m pretty sure I won’t accomplish all of those goals in one week, but that’s everything I have at my top priority level. (Lower things on the totem pole include figuring out how to make cutscenes, figuring out how to make branching dialogue, figuring out how to make enemies visible in dungeons and on the overworld, and finding a pixel artist (best saved until after holiday craziness is over).) Functional collision detection was a major breakthrough, as the past several updates testify, and I’m glad to be done with it. :D

In other news, it’s that time of year for a Pokémon release, which normally means I disappear into the ether for 1500 hours. Thankfully for my productivity, though, Hoenn is only my sixth favorite region and after 1500 hours of X/Y I only care about five or so Pokémon that I didn’t already have. =P

Which reminds me (and the above concludes the progress segment of today’s update):

On my Musings blog I’ll write mini-reviews of every game I’ve played this year, but here’s the short of it: this has been a very good year for me in gaming, but also a good year for reminding me why I’m crazy enough to make an RPG in the first place.

Let me first say this: I’m not doing it for money. =P I spend so little that if I partnered up with someone and bought a second house for all cash, I could collect rent for the rest of time and do nothing. And no doubt you’ve heard people say that’s their dream. “If I had [X] money then I’d never work again.”

But that’s not me. I’m making Dreamblazers partly because I can’t not and partly because nobody’s making the kinds of RPGs I want to play. Or in the case of 2014, even when they make something genius like Bravely Default and Pokémon, something else goes very wrong in the process.

Often when an indie game developer says nobody’s making games suited to them, I start running for the hills because they’re talking about a zany high concept game or random genre bending “just because we can” or something along those lines—things satirized by The Optimistic Indie.

“They said my game is imaginative, personal and meaningful, but unpolished. Well yeah. I’m trying to educate an audience, not attract one.” –April 25, 2014

“Making a roguelike where you are a fashion designer riding a motorcycle. It’s called voguebike. Seriously, where do I get my inspiration?!” – June 22, 2013

“Writing a game about a young woman’s decision to leave her husband for a soldier whose child is robbed of his talent. It’s a platformer.” –October 8, 2012

“I hope that one day I will make the ‘Citizen Kane‘ of games: Greyscale, old-fashioned, not really interactive, you collect lots of coins.” – April 14, 2012

Not what I’m talking about, though! There’s no grand overarching game element that I feel is missing from the industry. Not one. However, there are also no games that I feel do everything I want simultaneously. I’m talking about normal encounters with enemies who are threats but not insta-kills, a hybrid of open-world exploration and linear progression, an equipment system with real decision-making instead of rote upgrade, super frequent boss battles of multiple-weak-enemy and single-strong-enemy and one-one-one-duel variants, no consumable items, highly useful status effects, and other gameplay elements brought together in one place.

And now I can get back to tinkering with that instead of handling “basic” 2D movement, so that’s pretty exciting! :D

Dreamblazers Devlog: Week of November 17, 2014 (General Computer Edition)

Sometimes a week’s surprises come from completely outside the realm of game development: my computer suddenly decided to not connect to the Internet anymore until after it had been on anywhere from 60 to 120 minutes. I’m still not sure that I’ve actually resolved it, but at least as of Saturday I’ve gotten it down to only happening sometimes instead of always, so I can stop the endless computer reset cycle.

Pathfinding before this week’s end, though. I really want to get over the hump here and get back to regular updates of much more interesting things like battle mechanics and balance. =P