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.
