Made a lot of progress with this. It's more or less functional . Aside from a database full of stat changing magic.
I don't know where to go next. A G.F. ability window maybe? Idk. It's tempting to want to recreate every detail of FF8's menus.

It's hard to develop the rest of the systems to work with RPG Maker. Like, I guess to unlock the Stat Junction slots I could have the G.F. learn HP-J, for example, as an "Equipment Type".

Update.
I kept adding the bells and whistles to it.

So Pjcr contracted Covid-19 shortly before his trip, so he was placed in quarantine and has recently gone back home to recover. On the upside, he did get some files through to me while in quarantine.

Mad E. Lin
In case you're confused, yes- this is a character that does not even really have much part to play until Disk 3. Despite this, it was one of the first work orders in PJCR's work orders sheet, and so after prioritizing what was asked to be prioritized, Mad E. Lin was the first to come along.

This was by design, because having even some of Mad E. Lin's assets (5/8 at time of writing) meant i could begin development on the first of the projects I intend to make in Pixel Game Maker MV. Flight would serve as the basis and test run for the engine and allow to me test its capabilities before moving onto more ambitious projects like Crowfeast and Seraphim. Fyori and all other characters that have a major role in that story already exist to some degree in pjcr's work, even vanilla Fyori before she attained her bolder outfit to suit that more bold and later psychotic personality.

Xiiie has said she would be back by the 29th but I've yet to hear from her since that correspondence. I have my fingers crossed that she's simply had her hands full dealing with the aftermath of the extended duration away from home. She already has gone through Covid and so at this point is immune to the virus, she also suffered through the worst strain of it.

As for me, i'm enjoying an extended break after i implemented all but one of the Mad E. Lin portraits I received. I really need to get back into gamedev before long though.

Sooo... I haven't posted aught of it yet. But I might have started making a new game because I'm presently at a stage where I'm just waiting on resources for Fantasia.

So, with that, may i introduce you to:

Flight
As the name suggests, it's a game with a large emphasis on flying. It transitions between a sort of multi-layered world map where you can descend to lower levels where harder and harder challenges will appear. Then during all the bullet hell sequences, you're flying too.

Into Combat!
I'm using Galv's Map projectiles as the basis of this game's combat, which is working very well. It's WASD movement and mouse aim and mouse-click for shooting. it's very modern-day controls and it's so nice to have mouse support for this game.

Did all the battle stuff seen in this video in the span of today. let's see what I achieve tomorrow~!

I've been spoiled by the post limits that other sites have. I just type until I hit the 2000~4000 character limit.
But then I come here and start typing...and I keep typing....and then 3 hours later and I'm looking at a wall of text that I really shouldn't post.
So I delete half of it and condense my thoughts. But then the sun comes up and I'm forced to close the browser and crawl, hissing, back into the shadows without saying anything.

It don't matter. Nothing matters.

Ah, the dank fog of Nihility~

Oh, as for me I uh... I mighta just finished one of the coolest things I've done in a while.
Spent the whole day on the introduction and tutorial level. This is the tutorial boss essentially.

Exploring the exciting new frontier of AI image generation.


Image models aside. I would be excited to see someone make a proper map generator for Rpg Maker. Some more sophisticated tile placement rules.

The whole fun is crafting a world your very own, not let programs do all the fun stuff for you!

Now yes, I am known to use a character generator to fill in for placeholders, cause i don't enjoy pixel art, but I usually do end up paying someone to make it, I even tried to pay you but alas, you wouldn't let me! xD

But I guess if you don't like making maps n stuff a map generator might be cool. Samplemaps already exist though and while they aren't great, they can serve as a good basis or fount of inspiration.

I'm so-so about maps, I love doing it when I'm inspired, but sometimes I'm just "eh".

In Flight comparing the first dungeon where you find Mad to the tree hollow dungeon shows a very good example, the first is me just making a map to make do, the second is me having an absolute blast with it.

Speaking of Flight, I didn't like those weird towers protruding through holes in the ground in the castle, so I opted to place some scenic indoor gardens instead.


Oh yeah, I made an Anime Opening for it, you can actually play this in game by choosing Cinematic from the title screen.

Saga of the Starchaser
If you ever wanted to know my backstory in comical storytelling fashion, well, here it is!

My game development history isn't nearly as inspirational.

I've been part of so many abandoned projects it's not even funny. Happened again recently. I offer to help someone. We talk like twice on discord. I made 1 battler and a handful of sketches, and just when I started feeling feeling guilty I wasn't committing myself to doing more - they cancel the project. But at least they let me know right away.

There's a "long" jam I'm not all that interested in submitting to. I had my fun making the FF8 junction menu for it, but the rest is just writing practice. I've still got a week or 2 to extend the story past the 1 town 1 dungeon I've made for it.

I had this whole thing I was writing up about using AI art for projects. I was all
But then Dall-e 3 came out and made me reevaluate everything. Everything feels like a waste of time. But the only thing I would have done instead was play video games.

AI is at best a crutch. I've seen your skill enough to know you don't need it.

I definitely recommend you make a game on your own. Relying on other people comes with caveats and as a bonus, it will teach you the kind of crap involved in developing and releasing a game.

If you aren't feeling it, you aren't feeling it. My dev history only seems so inspirational because I lucked out by finding an IMMENSE passion for game design that also is practically bottomless.

Game design is a multi-faceted monstrosity that requires loads upon laods of tradeskills, with more being added the more ambitious your game is.

I mean just look at all the positions I take in the credits and I barely do any art and do zero of the music or sound.

The only exception to that is I'm the voice of Pep, Kara, Rolly, M.F. Lazarus and presently Xali (probably will get an actual VA in release). There might be a couple others.

It is not a field for everyone. Even with where I am now, it has taken me 25 years to build myself up to that level.

Don't give up on your dreams, but don't be afraid to question what your actual dreams are. Maybe game-dev isn't in the cards? maybe what you like is the visual side of things? My advice is do what you want to do most, even if the notion is ridiculous. I have always made the games I want to make, and that has ensured I've been able to see them through to the end.

In personal news, I have been productive!
So despite having a severely terrible cold I still manage and did a bunch of rewriting to flavor text I wasn't happy with. So here is that.
This thumbnail definitely does not foreshadow nothing!

And here's a couple more examples, these are only a small sample of the huge amount of modifications, they aren't even the funniest.
I also went and fixed the skedaddle animation for Sacreblu to not ever extend beyond the borders of the battle arena, which uh... took some good (40 minutes) time to fix something that shouldn't have been there in Demo 3's release at all, woops! No way to really show this in action so just trust me, it works now. (In my build not in demo 3's release.)

I also added some conversations on the Starship between Svana and various other characters after retrieving her from Byteopia.

OH GOD HER PLACEHOLDER PORTRAIT IS SO BAD GOD DAMN IT.

Right, which reminds me, I have something to confess.

I LIED TO YOU!

Because Pjcr accidentally lied to me because he has a cat emoji in place of a brain.

Proof:

might be *slightly* doctored!

But the good news is one among the babylon whores is back.

Yeah that's right, in this completely undoctored log we see Xiie is back, and unlike 3d women, this 2d whore of babylon comes bearing love and also gifts.

More are on the way, but suffice to say, Xiie is back. Not sure if I'll use these as Coyote's kinda blows them out of the fucking park.

So remember when I said?

Remi from the recent past. said:

"This thumbnail definitely does not foreshadow nothing!"

Click to expand...

Well, it turns out, that foreshadowed that I LIED again. Kind of.

Pjcr won't be making his trip until next month, but he did get me some files.

So now, we have all the Mad E. Lin portraits. These are the final three I was missing.

Hey folks, it's ya girl, Touhou-syndrome! Back with another crazy update. Today i took a look at my maps and declared god an amateur because he didn't invent oxygen in SPACE.

So we delve once more into my dubious dives into developing a whacko too-big-for-its-boots game.

But this will be nothing like last time! (That was not painful enough!) Lucky for all of us I will not this time be driving down your necks how much I fiendishly enjoy building an open world which is definitely not me secretly coping because this game has become a monster I can barely control anymore.-no see there's not much to report on that until I can start working on Demo 3 and I can't yet because...
Uuugghhh

So you might remember when one of the times Xiie was gonna get me files a transport workers strike whacked them and so that didn't come about.

Weh-heh-heh-hell... That mighta happened to Pjcr and so in about a week or two he should be able to send them.

Not by going 11 hours to a city. I opted that this idea was dumb mostly because public transport where PJ lives is like my brain, always stopping and starting- So I simply gave him enough money to get an internet plan with better upload speeds. It will be installed in two weeks, and a couple days of that has already passed.

Xiie is more or less unreachable outside of the occasional response, but as it turns out her father contracted Covid-19 and is in the ICU because this guy apparently didn't get vaccinated, though my suspicion is because he and his family is poor and not because of being something cringe like an anti-vaxxer. I mean Xiie is his kid and Xiie is still alive, and not for a lack of the world trying because Xiie lives in the Philippines which is basically Dante's Inferno but WET.

Now that I've provided the update on the artist situation I can get to things you might actually care about.

For weeks I was happy to just play video games and not do work because, I mean I finally finished Demo 3 so I basically had an excuse to relax for a bit, a well earned period of recreation because holy hell, I went harder than diamonds on releasing this thing.

HOWEVER! Because I am somewhat a DHINGUS and love to make games that don't reflect I'm using an engine designed for children to make stock-standard embarrassments to the Japanese RPG genre, I decided that this menu here is fugly and that I of course, being the not-self-proclaimed but definitely proclaimed "eventing GOD"- I am had me undergo an Ego-Remi moment and think: "I can do better!"

I will of course, not pretend if I know which is better because I am a believer in bad comedy and therefore, have no right to be making such judgements. So I will let you decide if this is a good direction to go in or if I should wear the dunce cap of "YOU DONE GOOFED, SON" and sit in the corner to eat my feastables of SHAME.

Here is how the new menu will look.

This is far from all of the images. The main areas of the menu are done, and the scrollbar up the top shows what pages you can view by pressing left and right. Only categories with multiple pages will have this. For example, it is absent for SAVES.

Of course, this is all so far for the main menu. It gets worse! See, the game I'm making this for (Fantasia) is a game where you can collect a lot of things. Just one of these is the PAMPHLETS, which are basically informational items that reveal information about characters. They are often collected by either being good at the game or exploration / optional events.

Here's the FUN part! I don't like how the items menu I have handles this, because it is clunky and bad. So my genius ass decided I should definitely make my own system for this where you can just press buttons to easily look between them.

There is a slight problem though, to make this scroll bar, will mean the monotonous chore of making an image asset for over 80 different items that can then be used to scroll along the screen, with the cursor picking the selected pamphlet to look at.

Because it is so visually focused, my goofy ass idea was to make every single one use their in game face graphic to present this information. This of course, is monotonous as fuck. But then, i also made 80+ different pamphlets to begin with so it's probably not as bad as it sounds! Here is a very work in progress preview of that.

Of course, this fails to go into the fact there's a good amount of other items, making it so in total I'll have to make about 7 of these scrollbars, some of which will be painfully long.

But don't worry about me, for my pain has only just begun!

The Optional events interface I intend to make is more ambitious in its functionality, and bonus, there's 180 of those and they aren't even all done yet!

Still! I'm the same outright dingbat who saw a program called rpgmaker and thought 'wow wouldn't it be COOL to make a bullet hell in a program designed for children to make bad jrpgs in' so I'll manage, I'm sure. Wish I could tell you this was going to be my biggest grind, but no. That award goes to the 120 optional events I did within 3 or 4 months, a good sixth of those optional events were optional boss fights which not only did I make all of them basically within 20 days at a rate of 1 per day, but I also went hard giving each boss that was above medium difficulty unique mechanics if at all possible. Did I mention all these bosses are insane bullet hell battles made with events?

So yeah, comparatively, this is pretty easy going.

While I haven't done much lately due to playing the waiting game, I have grown hungry enough to work on Disk 3 that I've done some mockups of scenes that I will be making for that version of the game.

Sacreblu Confronts Yi

The Scarlet Rager
This is based on a more narrative story version of an event that happens, while the Demon Lord Mischevia doesn't exist yet, she can travel through time, and does so here to complete a time loop. This same event will occur late in Seraphim from the perspective of Mischevia rather than as an onlooker.

Now I forgot what I was doing before. I got distracted because I noticed a General Discussion thread I made, here, back in 2019 was showing up in Google Search results. It had absolutely nothing to do with game development. Other than being an exercise in stream-of-consciousness writing; and a personal feat of writing so many words in a day. I don't know what search engines look for theses day, but I assume it took to it like flies to a dung heap because of the volume of text and pictures that was in in it.

I've hidden it all away in [ x ] brackets. In some vain attempt to improve the site's S.E.O.
But who knows? Maybe I'm ruining it instead?
I don't think it was getting an abnormal amount of views compared to other threads in General Discussion. Although breaking 5k in views is strange. Meanwhile our resource gallery barely scratches 2k. But the DALL-E topic I made a few months back is already at 1k? Where are these views coming from?

Getting back in the saddle for the first time in a long time. Starting up a new project in GameMaker Studio 2.

You'll be pleased to know I haven't been entirely unproductive, though my work only recently booted up again recently! I've had a spark of desire lately to work more on the menus in preparation for the upcoming Demo 3 patch, even if at this rate it seems unlikely we'll even be done in time for 3/14.

So, here's some more of the submenus~! Tutorials is presently being worked on, and to do it I had to do some work on brochures, which was also very fun!

Tutorials


It had been requested quite a few times that when you pressed on the tutorial items a whole pamphlet like thing would come up. Well, now we have that, just in my own method. The original item_scene will basically cease to exist once these menus are implemented.

Brochures



I liked Pamphlets and originally intended to use them both for characters and lore stuff, but as time went on it became clear Pamphlets were exclusively for characters, however this simply meant that once Missions has all been placed eloquently in their own interface with items no longer being needed, that i could then make that which would go into the lore of the game and its worlds, ideas and concepts. This is where brochures comes in. Mostly these are acquired simply by doing the main story, but can be found in various side-quests as well.

In other news, I also managed to get this monstrosity I sneaked the vegas preview of last time!

The Starchaser's Season of Discovery
The second of the Starchaser series, with the third already in planning.

While not much has been done with this scene, it has been re-written a lot since its last recording, so I decided a new preview was a good idea!

OHOHOHO BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE~!

Pjcr managed to get me a couple of the many files he has to get me, so i introduce to you the Bloodletter Anathema! Or two renders of her, anyway. one pose with two phases.

Hopefully he'll have me more files soon. Currently in his region the power is going out a lot due to an upgrade that is being done, however the upside is that power should be a lot more stable once the upgrade is complete! Presently it's only the inconsistency of the power that is stopping him uploading, even with that he's managed some files.

Thinking about how to do my own spin on the Wave Function Collapse algorithm for rpg maker.

I got a rudimentary system in place to fill in blank tiles.
What I was mainly working on was a method for generating tile connection rules quickly using existing map data.
I got that out of the way, and it sorta works. But it ain't pretty.
Right now it just fills in all the blank tiles at once, in one pass. So there's a lot of bad selections. However, the real magic of the Wave Function Collapse algorithm is selecting tiles by lowest "entropy". In other words, filling-in tiles that have the fewest possibilities first. One tile at a time.
That's my next step.

I've been in bed with a cold for like 48 hours, just sleeping. Had weird dreams influenced by this Wave Function Collapse business.
I'm probably going to shelf this novelty for now. It's not smart enough to be useful.

I'm finally coming off a cold my very own. Playing it safe and staying inside and warm / cosy until the 17th.

The custom menus I showed previews of earlier have made good headway in the engine proper!
In fact, all that remains is the submenus for the database, profiles and the optional event dossier in missions.

Then once that's all done I've gotta export the currently evented system into common events. That or just use a plugin which allows me to call events from one map anywhere in the game.

The scrollbar you saw in the images above for the pamphlets and brochure listings etc. has been removed, and I've refactored the interface to utilize an infinite (potentially) choicebox window instead. I have some plugins to make this process much more manageable. This system will be utilized for all of the database submenus.


Imagine there's choices in the lined area. It works similarly to the interface of the orbital deployment beacon.

Xali's official voice actor: Skylar Artaggat, has delivered her lines! I have paid her accordingly and made this preview!
Enjoy~

I also found a voice for Xaela, who is perfect. her name is Roo Ryder.
This was an audition she sent. Her deadline isn't until May 5th, so it's not alarming she has yet to send her lines.

Pjcr has gotten me all of the Anathema, Senshi and one of the Mal Morris portraits.



And it's heavily possible a lot more will be coming soon!