Header

Finally! I’ve been writing quest descriptions all day and they are finally done! So I can tell you that there are 149 “tasks” in Lilly and Sasha. Some are long, some are short and there are other things that don’t have associated tasks.

Doing jobs like this is very boring but it does feel like I’m getting a lot done. When I’m designing puzzles for example, I might come up with something good or I might just end up with nothing. At least with boring jobs you always get a sense of accomplishment.

It feels good to be working on these kind of jobs because it means the game isn’t too far from completion. On the other hand this is when you start to get a little nervous about the release. Will people love it? Will they hate it? Will they say that we just made an easy game to get good reviews? We’ll probably get a bit of each.

Here’s a tip for anybody using RPG Maker VX.

Removing shadows without extra work

Shadows can cause a lot of problems when you’re trying to make interesting maps. There are a few scripts that just remove all auto shadows so you can put them where you want them. I found that to be far too inefficient to be useful so I wrote a quick script to be able to remove only the shadows I didn’t need.

My helper tiles

I dedicate the bottom two rows of my TileE to helper tiles. I started doing this in with the bottom row in Dawn’s Light but in Lilly and Sasha I’m using two rows. When the game is released I clear the bottom two rows of TileE so all of my sneaky solutions are hidden from view.

From top left you have black and white which are above character and good for hiding things. The star is the shadow remover. The Red lines are one way blockers so you can have a tile that you can enter from the left but not from the right. I didn’t think I would need bottom ones but now I wish I had them. I’ll probably add them for our next game.

The bottom row is the most useful. The green and red are to enable or disable walking on any square. The other colors are mostly for puzzles but help with other things too. Each color represents a certain ground type that I can check from events. More on those later, this blog is about the shadow remover.

What is the point

Each tile has an id that you can check from a script. This is how these tiles become useful. Here’s the ids of my helper tiles.

So you can see that the shadow remover is id 1010. Knowing that I can check if the tile 1010 is used anywhere on the map and if it is, remove the shadow in that spot. So here’s the script.

This script does break grass so you can’t use it to remove those pesky under grass shadows. It’s also takes up the second tile so you can’t put a chair on the same tile but we just use events if we really need something at the same place.

The age of efficiency

The shadow remover is just a simple thing but it makes my life easier. Well Andrew’s life really since he does most of the maps. =)

It’s hard to keep coming up with a new blog every day but I don’t care! I’m doing it! Plus it helps with our google ranking. =)

So for today’s exciting blog I’m going to tell you what I’m doing. I’m just starting work for the day which is usually when I write blogs. Mostly because it’s easier than working on the game. But on the plus side, after I finish I’ve already done something so it’s easier to transition into work.

Each night before I stop working I write a list of jobs for the next day. If I start the day without a list I get a lot less done than if I have a nice list. I’ve also noticed a link between the prettyness of the list and how much I get done.

So here’s my list for today:

Put real data in the menus

If you’ve seen the menu screens you may have noticed the placeholder text. Now I get to go through each menu and put in the final text. I also need to use real party data so when you open the party menu it will show your real party members and their hp and so on.

Finish last menu screens

There’s a few menu screens that still need some work. The biggest ones are the equip screen and the party swapping screen. The equip screen has been put off because I couldn’t decide on a layout. The party swapping has been delayed because it needs to work with keyboard or mouse but I’ve figured it out now.

Skill and state data

The battle system is pretty close to finished. There’s nothing big left to do, mostly just small fixes and improvements. So now I need to fill in all the data for skills and states. We still have a couple of special moves and team moves to figure out so I’ll probably make Andrew help me with that later.

So I should probably get started now

Now that I have my list of jobs for the day I have no reason to not get started but don’t worry, I’ll think of something! If I do get all of these jobs done I’ll be quite pleased but it’s more likely that I’ll hit a roadblock and spend ages on one small thing. But at least that small thing will end up being awesome!

Armor Slots

Each character in Lilly and Sasha will have 6 slots to equip items.

Weapon – Gives strength and dexterity

Armor – Gives defense and agility

Charm – Gives spirit and luck

Trinket – Something interesting

Quick Rune – Changes your quick move

Strong Rune – Changes your strong move

Stats

So as you can see we have 6 stats spread over 3 slots. Here’s what the stats do:

Strength – Damage increase, all damage is the same now

Dexterity – Increases your chance of getting a critical hit. The difference is that there are now various levels of critical hits. So you might get a 20% bonus or a 50% bonus depending on your dexterity.

Defense – Same as ever, reduces damage taken

Agility – Changes turn order which is much more important now than in Dawn’s Light

Spirit – Changes stamina and health regen rates, increases team power gain rate. (I might rename this one)

Luck – More chance for trinkets and runes that have a chance to do something. Get more money and xp from quests and more chance to get items.

What’s Stamina

In another attempt to streamline battles, we’re removing mana. Mana is pretty annoying, if you want to use your best moves and end battles quickly you’ll run out of mana and have to use potions. On the other hand if you have no limits on what moves you can use why would you ever use quick move? You wouldn’t. That’s why we have stamina.

Stamina is only used in battle. You will start each battle with full stamina no matter what you ended the last battle with. Each move will use a different amount of stamina and you gain stamina back after each turn. Quick move uses only a little bit of stamina so you will get more back than you use.

But I’m not even tired

If you use up all of your stamina you will be ‘exhausted’ and miss one turn. You will gain stamina back on that turn which means you’ll be ready to go again. Even if you only have 1 stamina left you’ll be able to use a move that costs 30 stamina. I think it makes for a more interesting decision. If you can finish the enemy off in one strong hit it won’t matter that you’ll become exhausted.

The plan is for stamina to get rid of the annoyance of mana but at the same time remove boring strategies like using one move over and over because it does the most damage. Will it work? That remains to be seen.

Next time I’ll talk about the visuals of the battle system.

Making a good turn based battle system is pretty tricky. A lot of games resort to having 100 moves that are pretty much the same except one does more damage to ants and one does more damage to trees but that’s not something I want to make.

So what we have made is something quite different. I said a while back in the blog that I wanted to streamline the battle system and this is how I plan to do that.

This is the move select menu. The reason it has this shape is so you can reach any move with just one key press. So instead of pressing down three times you just press right. The options are quick attack, heavy attack, special, use item and use a team move. You won’t choose skill and then choose a move any more.

Quick, Strong and Special! That’s it?

So you may worry that there’s only 3 moves you can use but there’s more to it than that. Your quick and strong moves can be changed by using runes. You’ll have slots in your equip menu to place these. So instead of choosing from 11 different moves in battle you’ll set up your moves before battle. It also means you can set up synergies between your characters to work off of each others moves.

Runes will do things like add splash damage to your attack or heal you for part of the damage done. I’m trying to make a lot of them so you’ll really get to build your own strategy and not just use the one I designed.

Special Attacks

So now you might think that all characters will be the same except for the runes they use. That’s not true at all. Each character will have different stats which make some runes better than others. Each character also has a unique special move which is always more than just a damage attack

Team Moves

Then you’ll have your team moves. There’s a party meter that builds up each time you do attacks. When it fills up you’ll be able to use a team move. This means selecting another character to team up with to do a more powerful attack. Each combination of 2 characters will have a unique team move.

Trinkets

The final thing affecting your moves will be trinkets. We had these in Dawn’s Light but now we can do a lot more with them. You’ll just have to wait and see what they are.

Fingers crossed

Hopefully all of this will work as well as it does it my mind. Most of the battle system is done but I’d need to play with it for a while to try out all of this stuff. We’re also having difficulty settings this time so if you just want quick easy fights you can have them.

Next time I’ll talk about stats and armor.

Like the menu system, the battle system is something that I always wanted to change while making Dawn’s Light. The Dawn’s Light battle was made up of a few different parts made by different people. Then I made many changes to make the battle system more interesting.

But it got too wild!

Things like the combos, the threat system and some of the trinkets wouldn’t have been possible without the changes I made. The problem was that I had to work around other people’s code which was not very fun. The built in RPG maker code was the worst. I just found it very awkward and I wished I could just do things my way.

Of course being a self taught programmer, my code is probably pretty awful to other people but it’s my code and it makes sense to me. When I started coding the battle system I quickly came to realize that even though the battle system was my code, there were many other bits and pieces that I needed that were not my code, so I changed them too.

Too much code

I ended up changing so much code that the only default code we’re using is the mapping and basic graphic and audio systems. It was probably not a smart move because it made Lilly and Sasha take longer to develop but at least we’ve got it for our future games. Although I’ll probably just write a new battle system for those because I have so many things I want to try.

I’m gonna break the chains!

For this battle system I wanted to break free of the chains that held us back on Dawn’s Light. Our new battle system has no such limits. It’s very different from Dawn’s Light and all other similar games for that matter. So it’s a bit of a risk. The goal is to make a battle system that is more streamlined for those who don’t like battles and more interesting for those who do.

Coming up next: I’ll say a little bit about the skills we’re going to have in the game.

So here’s our new series. It’s called Lilly and Sasha. The two main characters are also called Lilly and Sasha so that was a lucky coincidence.

After Dawn’s Light we thought about doing a sequel but we really didn’t leave ourselves anywhere to go. We’ve designed Lilly and Sasha to be a multi part series with a longer story to last 3 games.

The first game is probably called Curse of the Immortals. Lilly and Sasha: Curse of the Immortals is a pretty long name but you know…

Our focus for this series is overall game polish. So we want a more interesting story, better dungeon design, better and more varied puzzles, new menus, new battles and a new text system.

The new battle system is a little bit of an experiment so hopefully it will end up being a lot of fun.

This is Enoch, an apprentice of sorts.

I’m working on the battle system now so you’ll probably see some blogs about that shortly. It’s another thing that I’ve made from scratch especially for this game. It ended up being more work that I expected but I’ve come to expect that.

Hi guys,

We’ve decided to step it up a notch and add copious amounts of sound effects to Project Viper. This all started not too long ago, when I stumbled across a nice website with nice sound effects. I decided that Project Viper could definitely benefit from these  sound effects and I immediately set about coding them deep into the game’s internal database structure.

They are now interwoven so intricately and so deep into the game’s infrastructure that I couldn’t remove them without causing severe damage to pretty much everything else. Suffice to say they are here to stay.

Now there’s a fine line between sound effects that add to the experience, and sound effects that just cheapen the experience and ruin the atmosphere. I feel that we crossed that line long ago, and what we are left with is an infinitely looping chain of sound effects that crossed the threshold of excessive many moons ago.

While some of you may find this somewhat disconcerting, I feel that you will certainly not be disappointed. The sound effects can involve anything from the sound of somebody landing on dirt, all the way to a screaming maniac.

When all is said and done, I know I will not regret with this decision. If nothing else, Project Viper will certainly be memorable. What do you guys think?

P.S. Blog post is in no way indicative of the final product and should not be taken literally.

Here’s a teaser for our title picture. It’s really awesome and I’m allowed to say that because I didn’t make it.