What's up, RMers?

[Ahzoh]

I came up with an idea for a level in my game called the Pillar of Sky, I kinda got the idea from Pokemon, I admit.
The Pillar of Sky (or Sky Pillar) is a vastly large and tall tower-like structure consisting of various layers or "floors" that, unlike traditional buildings, magically float at various heights from one another. They are all connected to each other, by a room that acts as a portal to the upper floor, and another room to the lower floor.
The general orientation of each floor is that everything starts with the lower floor room and the other rooms are constructed so that as you move you are made to "spiral" towards the upper floor room. There is a central hole to every floor, for aesthetic reasons, I guess.
The design of each floor consists of metallic grated flooring and the walls are slightly domed-shaped inwards. One may find a lot of art adorning the walls however, and curious symbols, too.

The tower itself serves as the base for the Triad of Magi, and houses many of the higher-ups of the order.
By the time the player explores the tower, the Pillar of Sky has been invaded by the Formless Beings and the Mitsim.
Why this is, is because the Mitsim (plural) have possessed some members of the Triad and sought to create a portal to the Living World while the Veil was weakened. The main heroes are trying to stop this.
While the heroes were in the Veil at the time, they confronted a very intelligent and sentient Mitsim (singular) as he was possessing the body of a known Triad member, named Rqodi-Pahmadi. This is where the plan for the invasion is revealed. Cue boss battle. Then it seems they were about to kill him, but he rips open the chest of his human host and subsequently possess the injured Osha (one of the protagonists and the sister of the other two protagonists), and uses her to spread his plans. He escapes into a portal to the Sky Pillar, and they follow after him.
It seems they were too slow, as by the time they get to Pillar of Sky, the invasion of Vrkhazh has already begun.
They find the Mitsim who is possessing their sister standing there, on the first floor.
The Mitsim (singular), knowing his plan is complete, feels he "does not need a meat suit any longer" and, like before, rips open Osha's chest to get out and proceeds to the upper floor.

This is where the first 1 minute 20 seconds of the music below would start playing. As the sister lays dying, she is comforted by her siblings and their friend. Then one of the hero stands up, and then the music after 1:20 starts playing and this is the background music for the whole Pillar of Sky.

I found a great song that I'm going to employ as background music while the heroes are proceeding upwards, permission pending.

[Kain Nobel]

I just bought VX Ace and have been messing with it, slowly porting over some Kain graphics so I can feel at home again. Converting my XP tailored resources to VX Ace is a chore, but I'd imagine it might look good once it comes together, hopefully indistinguishable from when they were in XP. I'm still keeping my project on XP, not switching, but I've been wanting to play with this engine a little more.

The face and character generator leaves a lot to be desired, I don't really like them. The original RTP heroes have great character/face matches, I applaud the artist for such a great job, but the system generated ones... not so much. I was thinking to myself to find the folder with the raw materials and replace them with some of mine (I got a few character components, but none for faces). Still, just looking at the UI makes me realize it can never be, it's too short and my characters are too tall. (Where the heck DO they store those graphics anyway?! I'll have to look for them.)

So now I'm messing with DerVVulfman's CharGen Extended :)

And I realize, I have my own private set of character templates, but I've barely used them yet. I've made plenty of other half-baked resources using Kyomushi, HK, XP original, Peri's paradigm shift template, but my own has barely been worked with. Right now I'm starting my own Kain RTP folder for CharGen and starting to make a few small things (as well as taking notes.) I do wish it wasn't encrypted, but it'll do for now, there might be a few small things to improve it.

Supposed to get back into ReGaL this coming month, but I've honestly been kicking rocks and spending lots of time in graphics land. Switching back into code mode (and re-learning C++ again) is something I have to get my mind set on, but I've just been so busy and unable to think clearly as of late. It's easier to work on a visual medium when you're "blah", but hopefully I'll get my act together this month and get my head back into the game.

[Kain Nobel]

Working on some resources for character sprites, some of the materials are still WIP. I'll post a few...



...So far I've got Male (Beefy), Male (Extra Beefy) and Female. When I get around to it, I'm going to make more body types (and obviously more hairstyles, clothes, accessories, etc.) I had a Male (Average) but I think I might've saved over it when doing edits :/

Also gave one of my characters a twin sister! When I started drawing her, I wasn't really planning on making her somebody's sister but you can't deny the resemblance.



Unfortunately, when her brother goes to war he ends up defecting to the other side (the country his parents were born in). Everybody believes him to have been taken prisoner and executed, but she feels that he is still alive so she enlists in the military with hopes of finding him. There is no telling whether they'll have a positive reunion or a bitter dispute when they finally do meet, but it certainly isn't going to be an easy mission.

With a growing cast and a nearly finished story, I keep having to go back and revise things, put new characters into old situations. Some of what I've added might not get used as I'm unsure of when exactly she'll be recruited yet, I need to find the right moment. Regardless, I'm starting to fill out her dialog section and get a feel for her personality, she's a lot more outgoing than originally intended (but that's not a bad thing :) ).

Her brother's roles have already been written almost entirely except for their reunion. He spends a good quarter of the game as an ally, I'm not sure if he's supposed to get killed off, rejoin the team, or what. Certainly, from a legal standpoint, he'd probably need to face the military high court, but he does have an interesting position with the enemy. Besides that, the force does have a history of acting above the law, so it's anybody's guess what happens down the road.

[Charlie Fleed]

I recently resumed development of Hartacon Tactics on my XBOX 360. That hellish beast is much more picky than a PC. I hade to give a huge makeover to the project to reach the same level of performance, facing Out Of Memory problems and what not.
I am still not done though, as the game freezes after a few stages. I don't even get an error on Game Studio, it stops and I cannot even make the XBOX Home come up...

[Kain Nobel]

It's March, we're supposed to be returning to ReGaL development but this month is going to be really busy for me so I personally might not get much work done until April. Also, I'm honestly having a hard time focusing on it at the moment, my creativity has been pulling me more towards writing and graphics which isn't really something I want to fight against, I just need to embrace it while I'm in that mind state.

It's funny though, even the writing itself has pulled me in directions that I, the author, originally intended to be completely different, as if it's telling itself and I'm just here to nod along and write it. One unexpected shift is that my planned main character, well, he's still a vital part of everything going on, but his thunder was taken by a female co-star who (in my opinion) is much more interesting and has a heck of a lot more going on with her background and motivations. Did I intend a female lead? No, it just happens. Did it weaken the character I wanted as the star? No, he's still an interesting person whom offers a lot of flavor to my gumbo, with his own doubts and convictions and a drive to rectify his decisions and "make things right" so to speak.

Another plan I had was for everything to focus around one group, the Myran Armed Forces (MAF), being the player's main unit. In the end, it became less and less about the MAF and more about key individuals, as the player follows them through promotion into other forces such as the Myran Green Ops 5th Detachment (MAF-GO5), United Alliance Peacekeepers (UAP) and a couple of other niche groups that handle non-combat operations. Heck, even the care package delivery unit, while mostly a behind-the-scenes group, has 15 minutes of time planned to shine in a challenge to get goods behind enemy lines in an active battle field to your main group.

I'm hoping my future players will enjoy swapping between these various units to complete different jobs and objectives, it should give them a better world view and understanding of why certain groups are motivated toward certain goals. There are even some parts written and planned where the player temporarily steps into the shoes of the antagonist to drive the story further, a sort of hearts and minds scenario designed to make the player slightly sympathetic to the enemy's cause.

[Samven]

I have officially been converted to Ace. It's just so much more convenient than vanilla VX.

[Taylor]

Today on Taylor's VXA/RGSS3 adventures: regardless of if certain skills/items worked, they will be marked as a 'success'.

As long as one has an effect - say, ATK buff - it is considered successful even though you might hit the buff limit, instead of being a failure and so returning the logical "x was unaffected" message. I really love going through default code and having to non-alias overwrite it to mend some stupid things.

In fact through my observation, an item/skill is only non-affective if it has a target and does nothing, which should never happen unless you've forgotten to add something. A skill like Wait is by default set to have no target, so it avoids this.

[Samven]

Not sure I've mentioned this before but I have written a 380 page game script. It will be a thing this year.

And, no, it's not Deceit x Justice (although I might come back to that at some point).

[Taylor]

Hmm yes, all these custom menu elements sure do look nice, completed.

Why don't I just go and recode them all to be concise and use centralised definitions and images and spend hours making sure they're pixel-perfect lined up? (why is draw_text_ex one pixel off vertically, i don't get it)
EDIT 2: Bonus point, draw_text_ex is 1px lower in one project, but not another. I'm blaming the font, or maybe something else is rewriting draw_text but not _ex and I've forgotten where.

Yep, what a good use of my time. = -=;

EDIT: And now to do it again for another project! I was dumb in this one for some reason, and made some graphics 22x22px grids instead of... something more common. Like 16/32px.
Also there's code here to implement weather gameplay effects I've long forgotten about and dunno if I'll still keep/apply in gameplay. Hummm...

[Ahzoh]

Something I've been considering for a long time... it adds nothing to the game but aesthetics:
That my game would be displayed bilingually.
That is, when you look at signs, you see Vrkhazhian text in the Vrkhazhian writing system and then, perhaps smaller and in italics, you see the English translation. And when you go to a new area, the little location display thing up top would also display the Vrkhazhian name and the English translation. Lastly, you'd also see this in the menu and for every state and equipment.
"Čikaĺ" (in Vrkhazhian script) and then somewhere beside it or below it, it's English meaning: "spear".
I don't have an idea how feasible that is or if it will be a nuisance.