What are you working on? (Game Making Thread)

[BizarreMonkey]

I've dropped any plans to support MZ. Mind you, it was never really my wont to do such, as it was essentially a 'yessss~!!... more resources!' grab for me... which amounted to easily the best parts of the rtp, battlebacks, parallaxes and the title images.

I was planning to make Menagerie: Malcontent Zeal in it, as given away by the subtitle,... and i may still, the backend for MV is incredibly well tuned and very smartly put together, says a coding friend of mine.

Menagerie isn't an incredibly high-end performance requiring game though, the minigames are outlandishly simple compared toe the faire of PFC and Fantasia, and while the game will definitely look a lot nicer due to the fact it will use pjcr's portraits and Xiie's sprites and will therefore get the sharp contrasted look of intelligence: multi-verse and Fantasia, it's not like there'll be a bunch of parralels running, even for some of the arcadian bossfights that consist of 'press fire to shoot gun and also dodge bullets ez pz'.

Easily the closest thing to an intense PFC/Fantasia level boss fight in the game is Impetuous Sussuration, and I never saw it lag.

Been thinking about future stuff a lot while i procrastinate and burn out hard. Been playing a bunch of WoW and genshin Impact (which I'm loving) and neglecting my twitter and feeling very bad about it!

But ah~ I have been so very productive this last couple of months, i suppose its only natural such a burst of productivity would slow down at some point.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

 

[coyotecraft]

I played around in MZ some more. I figured out the problem with my Manalink plugin. I wanted to be able to use MP recovery items but have the effects go to the other character they're linked too. The trick was that, MZ won't let you use an item if there are no valid effects. You can't use MP items on a character that doesn't technically have MP. So I rewrote that bit, and now it works more or less like I wanted it to.

 

[coyotecraft]

So it's relatively easy to load data from another RM project so long as you know the path/url. I hadn't actually tried it until recently.
I transferred from my project to a map in a Japanese Sample Game, and also a map online in a github repository.
Beautiful.
It seems my save file editor / playtester tools & diagnostics experiments in MV from last summer were really shortsighted.

I need to shift gears and go back to making graphics.

 

[coyotecraft]

I home alone for a week. No one to distract me. I'm even going as far as to block certain websites that might tempt me into join some deep discussion.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Have fun being home alone. I hope you get some stuff done.

Here's one of the things I worked on today. Portrait for the sprite I posted up there.

 

[coyotecraft]

My college art instructor used to say something like "art needs 2 people. One person to hold the brush and a second person to swing a mallet to hit the first person over the head when they're fussing over details."

This thing I was doing for Bizmonkey could have been done sooner. It's just an update for Perseverance, I believe. Doing my best to imitate the rest of the game's artstyle. But what I'm really fussing with is the graphic design of the stone tablet. Well, that, and a special effect to have the engravings react to the flame somehow.
It doesn't actually need a special effect, that's my own initiative.
So when I say it's more or less done it means I finish it if someone hits me over the head with a mallet.
I don't know what I'm doing; so I just have to try everything. Experiment with different material to what's the most effective visuals to communicate.

I guess this doubles for my own fan game. Since it basically pivots on this scene and I planned working it into a promotion.

 

[BizarreMonkey]

My college art instructor used to say something like "art needs 2 people. One person to hold the brush and a second person to swing a mallet to hit the first person over the head when they're fussing over details."

This thing I was doing for Bizmonkey could have been done sooner. It's just an update for Perseverance, I believe. Doing my best to imitate the rest of the game's artstyle. But what I'm really fussing with is the graphic design of the stone tablet. Well, that, and a special effect to have the engravings react to the flame somehow.
It doesn't actually need a special effect, that's my own initiative.
So when I say it's more or less done it means I finish it if someone hits me over the head with a mallet.
I don't know what I'm doing; so I just have to try everything. Experiment with different material to what's the most effective visuals to communicate.

I guess this doubles for my own fan game. Since it basically pivots on this scene and I planned working it into a promotion.

Not gonna lie first thing i thought of when you had that idea for the reaction was 'is that gonna be what makes this piece take two-times as long as it should?"

That said i'm not on a tight schedule so I don't mind waiting, but I am happy to take what you have and just deal with the tablet myself, as not only have I drawn an absolute shit ton of heldathian spellcircles by now, I'm in love with drawing diabolic symbols that can tend to look like something anywhere from kanji, ancient egyptian heiroglyphs and gaelic runes.

But if you wanna go nuts I'm fine with that too. You've done a good job of replicating Xiie's art style. I thought it was just a repost of his portraits at the first glance.

If you're asking me to bash you over the head with a mallet for needless fussing then lmao I guess i can provide a suitable cartoonish scenario.

I was actually thinking about the PFC update today. Mostly my being angy at the smol resolution, and thinking 'hmm, no one has anything lower than 1080p these days i could make it a game that just scales to 2.00 size. Ofcourse if i did this i'd want it to not be anti-aliased because that always looks crappy.

But enough about that as I have some news to report~!

Remi-chan
Got my dev spirit back and finished this beauty!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlPAhEsfepk
Music is placeholder, I don't have the rights to that track it was just used as a syncing metronome. I'll either get Jake to composer one huge thing or make a string-along of pre-existing tracks. Next part i have to do is a one minute animated cinematic but i can always just leave that for the time and continue with the main story.

Pjcr
He hasn't gotten me everything this week yet, but he has gotten me all of the Tac Talismina Portraits, for those who played Menagerie: Remastered or even the not-nearly-as-good original, Tac is a character you probably know fairly well.

Her outfit has largely changed due to an awesome fan art I got from Amysaurus121 and so I made that her canon outfit in post-menagerie games. For Menagerie: Malicious Zeal or Menagerie: Maritime Vendetta (depending on if I use MV or MZ for it) she will likely be retroactively updated like she is planned to be in Intelligence: Multi-Verse.

That's about it. Obviously I've been doing other stuff. Mostly working on some little optional events and giving characters more dialogue options here and there. But I've also been on a burn out the past couple weeks and only got my spirit back a few days ago so I haven't got as much done as I may have otherwise.

 

[coyotecraft]

More like, 5 times longer than it should. I didn't want to make excuses, but I accidently saved over the layer file that I was working in about 2 weeks ago. But that version didn't resemble Xiie's style nearly as much as this one does. So it was good I started over.

Nice work with those trees. You really have a way with cinematics. That's why I want to make a rig to compliment your visual storytelling. It's funny that you brought up the game's resolution, because I knew that'd be something you'd consider doing. So I was also contemplating how to set up the rig to be universal. I'd use script lines to make sure an image that's suppose to be in the middle of the screen will always be in the middle of the screen. It's annoy you can't enter something like (x = graphics.width/2) directly into the 'show picture' command to insure the image will always be centered.
Then it would be less painful to converter or make changes.

 

[coyotecraft]

Material studies

 

[BizarreMonkey]

More like, 5 times longer than it should. I didn't want to make excuses, but I accidently saved over the layer file that I was working in about 2 weeks ago. But that version didn't resemble Xiie's style nearly as much as this one does. So it was good I started over.

Nice work with those trees. You really have a way with cinematics. That's why I want to make a rig to compliment your visual storytelling. It's funny that you brought up the game's resolution, because I knew that'd be something you'd consider doing. So I was also contemplating how to set up the rig to be universal. I'd use script lines to make sure an image that's suppose to be in the middle of the screen will always be in the middle of the screen. It's annoy you can't enter something like (x = graphics.width/2) directly into the 'show picture' command to insure the image will always be centered.
Then it would be less painful to converter or make changes.

I won't be upscaling the resolution of PFC, it's too stringent and built upon the principles of 640x480. The game was heavily designed with the limitation in mind. i was referring to just making the play window larger, essentially, the game would only be artifically enlarged via a scale factor of 2. I'm certain a plugin if not the outright baseline engine has the ability to do this.

I have certainly tried in the past but due to how much of an insane hassle it would be to upscale all the maps to widescreen and the alternatives just ensure there's a crapton of empty space, the idea was scrapped altogether.

This was the closest I got but it was going to be just, too much work (960x512) it did give me enough room to have the HUD, radio and Bosshud in all the same visible place, radio in the middle, bosshud on the far right, but the issue came when resizing the parallax maps, the altnerative was to entirely redraw them or expand on them somehow and I just ended up not doing it.

And yeah making that tree sprite from pre-existing assets was pretty fun. Originally I made them for the hecka chase event where Xali is demonstrating her power level and Koko's just gotta get the heck outta dodge.

I've readied some assets in preparation for Fantasia Scene 15: Apotropaism... i intend to begin serious work on it tomorrow.

While a two-part lipsync talking animation will play out in a close up, her eyes will be occasionally switching intermittently to gold and then to that briight pink. That's an idea of what I'll be using these kinds of things for~!

 

[Nathaniel3W]

The last few weeks' work have been leading up to this moment:

Demon lords and the Tyrant God. And I wrote a bunch of scripts for making them appear in the middle of a battle. You fight the guy who you think is the final boss, and then when he's defeated, this guy shows up. Because in all good JRPGs, you have to kill a god in the final battle.

 

[coyotecraft]

Glorious!
I was playing diablo 3 for a bit the other week, which is what those sprites remind me of. I can still hear the Templar's battle quotes.

I was revisiting my Digital/Artificial/Trojan Baby spirit battler for MV. I don't remember why I was picked the colors that I did. Red was the obvious color choice, and contrasts nicely on the Green Cyberspace background.
Although the trick is the coloring. The other spirits all have this glow around the edges. And I just haven't figured out the right combination of values.

Tonight I think I'll step away from characters and focus on backgrounds. I'm really more comfortable doing nature. But I need to practice doing buildings and what not. MZ has...nothing to support it's modern/scifi sets.

 

[coyotecraft]

Both MV and MZ Frame the battle background differently depending on the selected battle system. SV shows more of BG1 while Front view shows more of BG2.

The Backgrounds uses 1 point perspective. The line that the SV Actors align to is also angled toward the vanishing point. Of course the Actor Battler sprites don't scale with the perspective. If they did, it might look something like this

It took me a while to warm up to perspective drawing. I learned some new techniques as I was sketching. Starting out cold, all I could think of was - durrr square room, 3 walls - and it seemed like it would be a chore of interior decorating. But after a few hours the ideas started flowing and realized there's a lot of simple environmental spaces that RPG Maker isn't using. Like roof tops and towers. Battle areas that don't need a lot of clutter. Come on! Where's the jail cells and sewers? Oh, but they have ordinary bedrooms. I suppose that's useful for hentai games.

 

[coyotecraft]

The nice thing about not working in point perspective is that you can make scrolling tiled backgrounds.
Almost done with this. Just more fine tuning.

eh, the shadow gradient might be too much, too different.

 

[coyotecraft]

I'm going to be staring at this 30 second loop forever. Questioning my life choices.
I don't want to bloat the game with all these image layers. At some point it might be better to just render the scene as a webm video. But my video editing software is retarded and can't do 4:3 aspect ratios for some reason.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVu8vC7tfpY

My current plan is that as Sven turns on the lighter, Naxon's hand fires go out. Then have some symbols glow on the tablet and maybe on Naxon as well. But I'm debating if I should draw a new thing of Naxon or not. Trying to recycle his game's portrait. I can scale it up to fit the scene better. But why cut corners if I don't have to?
It's certainly possible to do less. I could ditch the clock and tower in the background, but it's creates a sense of space I think.

Looking at Perseverance's files, there's actually a leftover layer file containing Nola's portraits. That's like 2mb. Removing that basically offsets whatever I'd be adding. All the portraits have a height of 480, but they're not actually using the bottom 120px where the hud and dialogue boxes would go. I took a minute to batch process the lot of 185 images to see what cutting off this bottom section would do to the folder size. It saves 300kb. About the size of the Cityscape background I made, so maybe it's worth it.

Something else I need to remember to watch out for, GIMP, in a recent update has changed it color precision to work in a 32bit integer mode. Which saves files sizes twice as big. I thought had seriously overestimated my filesizes.

 

[BizarreMonkey]

I'm going to be staring at this 30 second loop forever. Questioning my life choices.
I don't want to bloat the game with all these image layers. At some point it might be better to just render the scene as a webm video. But my video editing software is retarded and can't do 4:3 aspect ratios for some reason.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVu8vC7tfpY

My current plan is that as Sven turns on the lighter, Naxon's hand fires go out. Then have some symbols glow on the tablet and maybe on Naxon as well. But I'm debating if I should draw a new thing of Naxon or not. Trying to recycle his game's portrait. I can scale it up to fit the scene better. But why cut corners if I don't have to?
It's certainly possible to do less. I could ditch the clock and tower in the background, but it's creates a sense of space I think.

Looking at Perseverance's files, there's actually a leftover layer file containing Nola's portraits. That's like 2mb. Removing that basically offsets whatever I'd be adding. All the portraits have a height of 480, but they're not actually using the bottom 120px where the hud and dialogue boxes would go. I took a minute to batch process the lot of 185 images to see what cutting off this bottom section would do to the folder size. It saves 300kb. About the size of the Cityscape background I made, so maybe it's worth it.

Something else I need to remember to watch out for, GIMP, in a recent update has changed it color precision to work in a 32bit integer mode. Which saves files sizes twice as big. I thought had seriously overestimated my filesizes.

The black boxes were to ensure there wasn't any distracting leaks in the displayed information down the bottom, keeping in mind that's where a HUD hangs out so removing it adds an odd ugly yellow layer behind the dialogue boxes

I do love how this looks, it's too bad i never got Xiie to do a full blown Naxon portrait but I can totally make a webm in that effect, I wasn't planning to make a movie out of this scene especially seeing as one plays not long after but it'll be forgiven if it doesn't take long.

If you hand me the demo project I can make something flashy with what work you've done. If you weren't in the credits already you definitely will be now.

As for me, I've been until today super productive, and i chose to take it easy today lest I risk insanely burning out again.

So as you know, I got that cutscene done, and I did state I'd start work on the cinematic tomorrow, i did, and got 20 seconds of it done, in fact.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsxJUCzIC-s
I didn't report as much right away, due to busyness and the day after being out at art workshop and me wanting to relax today. But here it is.

The next part will be drawing Svoli transforming from her regular clothes to her serazen outfit and the 7 wings bursting out in sequential order, each in the color of the rainbow.

So that'll be fun.

 

[coyotecraft]

Well, I had a productive week. Besides the thing I was doing for Biz, I was also working on some battle backgrounds. Nothing specific. Practicing different techniques and such. Writing notes to myself, 'cause who know when I'll be painting backgrounds again. Nothing useable so far, just materials and practice and sketch concepts.

 

[coyotecraft]

MZ has this annoying dark fuzzy edge when it blurs the screen for the menu and battle system. It's related to PIXI and has a simple remedy.
Just change Change PIXI.filters.BlurFilter() to PIXI.filters.BlurFilter(clamp=true)
in rmmz_sprites.js and rmmz_scenes.js


But I dunno. I feel like I'm the only one with eyes to see these things.

 

[BizarreMonkey]

MZ has this annoying dark fuzzy edge when it blurs the screen for the menu and battle system. It's related to PIXI and has a simple remedy.
Just change Change PIXI.filters.BlurFilter() to PIXI.filters.BlurFilter(clamp=true)
in rmmz_sprites.js and rmmz_scenes.js


But I dunno. I feel like I'm the only one with eyes to see these things.

Pretty much seems to be the running gag with the bad style design decisions that went into this maker.

I mean look at the iconset, they must either actually think this babby's first low-grade photoshop magik is attractive or are just so lazy and apathetic to the rpgmaker consumerbase that they've just made it the intentionial design.

I will say I was impressed when I looked in the launch scripts in the /dlc folder to find a bunch of really handy plugins, including some I have had trouble finding in MV... it makes me wonder if some would be backwards compatible-- like the one for picture animation... but I can't exactly check right now.

My computer decided to blue screen this morning so I'm backing up my files and intend to spend the day reformatting / transferring while I do traditional art to pass the time.

This is a bruh amount of time I could be making games or more realistically- playing Genshin impact with instead... but eh- I've been meaning to reformat for a while so this was just a good impetus to actually go ahead and do it. Lazy sundays are a better time than any.

I'm currently in safemode with networking enabled which is how i am posting here... but I have a laptop in my bedroom I can use if I really wanna do something like watch videos or even make games. Might be a good opportunity to try out Pixel Maker MV and get Crowfeast off the ground, but we'll see~!