What's up, RMers?

[Remi-chan]

So I got productive on making a game jam submission for a Pride Month themed game jam. That's been the vast majority of what I've done this week.

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Remi-Chan
YEN |Yearning Eternal Night| is the name of the game jam entry I'm working on. It's a very fun and adorable little game starring two catgirls and how their relationship forms over five days of hijinks.

What is this Game?

Some pages ago you may recall a sneak preview of PRAEDA. It was slated to be a dungeon crawler with Diablo vibes. This was put on the backburner and more or less scrapped as its potential while awesome, was going to be a lot of work and would cut too much into the development time of other games.

However... The basic project file was made for it and I'm now using that project file for something much less ambitious but should tell that story well without so much of the over-scoped mechanics!

Yet again, the game is pretty beyond reason.
It largely takes place in the town of Infernotte and the surrounding countryside before the events of Inferno. As usual I've given my all to making it as atmospheric and beautiful as possible!

You awake in a murky cell.

Deep beneath the town is where we first get introduced to Grace and Nankaina.

The Heavens have ordered an investigation!

We even get to see a bit more of Galvana. This is very much a work in progress and will be much prettier and epic in the future.

Behold this Lovely Countryside!

Theme of the Wilderness from Diablo II plays here, because of course it fucking does.

At night, the town takes on a more spooky tone!

Lot of this stuff is placeholders! I intend to have lit windows, lighting for the various street lanterns and all. Just have to find a picture-lock plugin.

Duality of Snoot and Sorcery!

In order to accomodate for the expansive amount of characterization they receive, I've created 12 new portrait expressions for both Nankaina and Grace. All having animations.

Handholding!? S-so lewd!


Had a lot of fun making these little sprite edits for Nankaina and Grace.

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Xiie / Rune
Still working on the fowlhunters, she got half of the walking on ground sprites done so far!

Rose, Rosalie and Robin

You can find screenshots showcasing these in the apropos thread!

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Pjcr
Radio silence. He was supposed to be back on the fifteenth. So just waiting around to hear what has happened.

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[kyonides]

I was just trying to implement a playtime bar in HiddenPlayList XP for the HiddenChest engine, when I noticed something. Every MIDI's playback time was quite inaccurate and inconsistent, there was no way to determine whether I needed to increase the seconds by some factor or decrease them.

When this sort of weird stuff happens, there's nothing to do but to go back to the drawing desk, and check the calculations.

The last iteration of my custom engine did a general assumption that ALL of RM's MIDI files broke consistently!

So I was forced to check for ALL of the MIDI's Set Tempo Event messages and get their deltas. This allow the engine to correctly calculate the longest track's duration in seconds based on the preset value of the MSPQN or MPQN aka microseconds per quarter note.

Now I'm tired of dealing with quarter notes, ticks, beats per minute, PPQ aka time division or deltas per beat, and yes, hexadecimal values as well.

[kyonides]

Currently working on KBuild XP, a script that allows the game developer to set a building's area, including all 3 layers, and copy it somewhere else.
This includes a preset SE as well!  

Right now, it saves all the modified data in separate files, but this isn't the ideal solution.
 I'll have to alter the default saved games structure to include the new stuff there.

[Remi-chan]

I just yesterday finished the game jam submission I was working on a week or two ago. So there's a lot to share and report, and even then I'm only gonna be scratching the surface.

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Remi-Chan
YEN |Yearning the Eternal Night| as you know, is the game jam entry I was working on. The original plan was to make five short days and nightso f hijinks before realizing that, yeah-- this bitch is actually not supposed to be over 30 minutes long. So I discovered this just as I was finishing night one and said 'bet' now I had a whole week or so to polish. And polish I did...

Do you remember the preview of PRAEDA?

Neither do most people, it was a very underwhelming spur of the moment idea which basically amounted to 'I want to make Diablo II with cat girls'. Not all concepts are created equal, and so I more or less scrapped the genre premise of Praeda, because the amount of work it would have been did not justify the shallow product selling it.

HOWEVER! And this is important, the problem wasn't in the idea- so much as it was the difficulty of justifying such an ambitious idea with so many custom systems for such a relatively small amount of feedback. Like for real, I need a LOT to justify a project, meaning it has to either have a REALLY strong premise for its story and mechanics like Fantasia and PFC have, or be about characters that I really want to tell the story of.

The problem with Praeda was its systems that would be required. It was a headache just thinking about it, not helped by an overscoped skill tree and systems spread that just had me like, 'no okay, this is dumb. There's no way in hell I can justify this.'

But then a pride month game jam happened and given I was now not in the bad books of the rpgmaker community anymore due to just getting enough W's recently and doing enough good in the community's interests, that i was welcomed to participate, the idea of Praeda's premise came back, only with out the gratuitous scoping.

Cause yeah, this shit is now basically just a visual novel with extra steps. There'll be minigames, the rat catching thing is just the first one. The main thing is to focus on the characters, story and events that transpire rather than trying to make a Diablo clone, basic it more on vibes than on gameplay-- and that worked incredibly well!

So who wanted to know how to do dynamic music switching in RPGmaker?
With events, this turned out to be actually the most surprisingly complex system I would develop, given the way i wanted it to work, it took some real brainpower to work out how to do it smoothly. Another thing is I wanted to make this game beyond gorgeous. The mapping is easily some of my best, using the base of the maps in Zen Nekoma from Fantasia and just blowing that shit out of the park, being able to be more centred in a time prior to the Inferno crisis, so... not everything is dead or on fire (yet) and then add a night time setting and evented lighting effects and oooh~ We have some really nice looking stuff now. But since hearing me gush about it is meaningless, here's a couple videos showing it all off.

Duality of Night and Day


Yes, in the day you play as Grace, at night you play as Nankaina.

Some choice sprite work has been going on!

Because of course it did, and I'm pretty happy with how much these sprites elevate the feelings of the scenes they are in!

The Beach Episode:tm:
So funny story, the 'beach' part of this beach pride game jam was a part I missed until I'd basically gotten the majority of the story written and the first day and some of the first night was already deeply developed. So I completely somehow skipped that element of the theming until basically, I didn't-- meaning I had to course correct with only a little more than a week left. Thankfully this was also the same time I re-read the rules properly and learned I'd already done MORE than enough so far as the game's length was concerned. So I was able to switch focus to adding in the beach theming, even if it's only in one area and is basically ENTIRELY SKIPPABLE if you're not going out of your way to explore.


But, it's all I could do-- because I have about as much reading comprehension as a bat dosed on ketamine and somehow missed one of the three big words. Though at this stage, I still might win just by default, purely because at present and with only three days remaining for submissions, I'm the only person who has submitted anything for this bitch.

So go me~

And yes, I did buy the Summer Beach DLC just for this, meaning that I did at least spend 13 dollars to develop this game. Thankfully everything else seen was either made by me or made already for other entries in my game library.

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Xiie / Rune
Outside of Xeltara's ground walking sprite, all the fowlhunter stuff is done.

Common Fowlhunter and the Followers of Xeltara

And just in the nick of time for the game jam which has... some representation of these characters, and while at present the followers of Xeltara are just on screen guardswomen, the Common Fowlhunters are quite well utilized.

As usual, you can find screenshots showcasing that in the apropos thread!

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Pjcr
Continued is the silence, if this shit keeps happening I dunno what I'm gonna do.

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