~Endium

|██████████|SANITY
|██████████|ENERGY
Status: Gah MELTING

█ I suppose I'll just cut right to the chase, a few months ago I decided to take up RPG Maker and make a game using that. I didn't really feel like revealing that's what I decided to do with my time cause I didn't really feel like getting people's hopes up about such a thing, and then ultimately it leading nowhere. I'll detail my particular journey with that experience further down in this journal, but what I did manage to put together over the... 3-4 months? What I put together is essentially a proof of concept and is relatively bare bones. It's nothing too extensive since I was spending a lot of time learning how to code inside of it.

I have no particular place to host the file, so I'm using dropbox. The file is a little over 100 MBs in size, and if you can't download it just assume my dropbox hit the daily upload limit; which means you'll have to try again at a later date. I have no clue if that will be an issue or not since I have no clue how many people will attempt to download it after I post this journal, but fair warning regardless. I'm not sure how buggy or unstable it ultimately is, but I hope it works for the most part.

You can grab the file here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/0t82k5hmg.....ct3.1.zip?dl=0

Basic info about the game itself that might need explaining since there is very little info given the user in the game's current state:
- Z moves forward into a menu/confirm.
- X moves back from a menu/cancel.
- Arrow keys for movement.
- You can increase player stats in the skills menu (You start off with 10 points, and gain 10 every level).
- The weapon equipped determines what the character's 2nd ability will be: (A cleave, heal, ranged attack, or a pull).
- The fight in the starting area isn't meant to be won, you'll have to retreat from it (It's there for me quick test edits to combat skills)
- The order of the areas in terms of difficulty is Right (garden area), Top (tech area), Left (crystal area); though the difficulties aren't that different overall.
- Quest items don't do anything, you just sell them.

I'll reiterate that this is all proof of concept, as such there isn't much variation on anything: I'll be elaborating on what plans I have later in this journal.

█ While I do intend to continue work on this game project, it's more of a passion project than something intended for making money. Which is basically me saying that I'll be going back into my previous commission journal and poking at people to see who still want a commission and all that for money to get my funds back up. Game development is still uncharted territory for me, so I don't think I'll be crowdfunding it; I know I can deliver on art, but I definitely do not know if I can deliver on a game.

█ I suppose now I'll just detail my game development journey now. To start I've always been trying to in one way or another learn how to create games, but learning how to code was always one of the biggest hurdles. Programming languages are notoriously fickle, unlike actual language where you can get away with misspelling, sentence fragments, and missing punctuation. You mess something up and the whole thing you're working on might just stop working. Worse still is when something is wrong, but everything still works properly up until it doesn't; and then you have to go hunting down the code that causes the issue, which could be something as simple as the order of how lines of code are written to something like flawed logic being used.

Much like with my art, I'm self-teaching myself when it comes to programming; so everything for me is essentially flying by the seat of my pants. Earlier in this year I decided to look more into game development tools to help with game creation, and I was leaning in the direction of RPG Maker. The motivation for it cropped up again when I went looking through some of my old files, which included some art assets that I put together for a game that I never finished. Art assets which I have yet to post or show (I probably should correct that at some point). The choice of RPG Maker got a little complicated since there's many different versions of the program, each with their own ups and downs. I eventually settled on RPG Maker MV as that one seemed to have the plugin support needed for me to pull off what I was going for.

Though what was I going for? I wanted a combat system similar to that of Darkest Dungeon, as it had a setup that allowed for these large graphical elements but required very few frames of animation. Most monsters only had 4 frames of animation: Standing, being hit, and two different kinds of attacks; and the player characters were roughly the same but had 6 different stills for attack animations. Going from a traditional JRPG styled game where you have a column of characters on the right-hand side of the screen combating monsters on the left to a row of characters fighting monsters on the left hand side proved to be a bit more complicated than I expected. It was made complicated due to me wanting to recreate the formation mechanics of Darkest Dungeon where character position determined what abilities could be used and what could be targeted. JRPGs don't really have a 1 to 1 translation of that combat engine so I spent weeks trying to replicate the system, with multiple dead ends. Most of the problems I had was ultimately due to graphical limitations: I couldn't overlap the player characters or graphical overlays and animations wouldn't display in the way I wanted. If I knew far, far more about JavaScript I probably could have figured out a more direct solution; but my ambitions were clearly far ahead of my abilities.

One of the main plugins I was interested in was the character creator one, and one of the reasons why I picked using RPG Maker MV. This was both a blessing and a curse. Initially I figured this would be a natural fit for stuff I've done in the past before, since I've done a number of flash animations that did some asset swapping to create different characters; and for the most part that held true. The problem was that how it updated character assets was somewhat restricted in fashion, I spent a fair bit of time searching and looking for ways to update character assets while in combat to no avail. Once again it's a case of ambition being ahead of my ability. I eventually settled for some less than ideal work around, with any true asset swaps happening outside of combat. This isn't something that's in the current build and something I need to hammer out whenever I put more work into the game.

In essence the biggest hurdles I've had with game development so far is related to graphical assets and how they're managed. There's a lot of different work around and tricks I've had to use to get things to look right. It's all the more trickier because the engine was designed with sprites that are in the area of 30-60 pixels high and across, and I'm using graphical assets that are in the 300x300 range. Though I'm not too worried about cleaner and more crisp graphical assets until making sure the game mechanics are more hammered out.

█ So what stuff needs to be hammered out? Basically everything. I believe most of the hard work is behind me, except for User Interface Design. That's a can of worms I have yet to open, and I dread to.

Equipment and Ability Mechanics
This is the biggest thing I intend to work on next. What I have intended is that the equipment worn determines what abilities a character has, but ATM only the 2nd ability reflects this. Certainly one of the more major things is having abilities to help shuffle party position into more ideal spots, as the only player movement option is "charge". In addition abilities to manage the STUN bar, and more abilities that interact with enemy row positions.

Ability Interactions and Resource Management
I intend to add in an "exhaustion" mechanic of sorts when a character runs out energy for attacks, as well as enemies using different attacks if their STUN bar is high. Currently neither resource bar does too much.

Character Customization
This one isn't really about programming, but more so me sitting down and creating a bunch of different character assets so people can build their own character. This one is somewhat hard to commit to since I have to be sure that what I put together in roughs will work; cause if I create more finalized assets and they don't end up working I'll have to create all new assets from scratch.

Enemy assets
Same problem roughly applies here as with the character assets, especially if I'm putting together the action frames in addition to the standing ones. Course plenty of monster types to add into the game, and their related abilities. I of course intent to add in my ants into the mix as well.

Map Assets
Currently the maps are using default graphics, and I'm unsure of how I want to move forward on that front. I think ideally I'd want to use the system Darkest Dungeon uses, showing the party moving from left to right with a map showing the actual layout of the dungeon. This would be far more compatible to my art style, but I suspect it would take me a long time to code together. Everything is still up in the air, and this is probably the last thing I'll be working on until I get a better idea how I want the player to explore or end up in combat situations.

█ Anyways! If you decide to check out the prototype I hope you have fun with it. I know there isn't that much to it, but I did want to put something together to show for the time and effort I put into learning for the past while. I can't promise anything more will come of it, cause I certainly know that projects being abandoned is not all that uncommon. Though as of this journal post I certainly do want to keep working on it, but I still need money to eat; so expect some art to show up in the near future as I do that!