Saturday, July 16, 2011

New tileset, but it's not by me. Also my thoughts, straight from my thinkpan to your screen.

If you have looked at my thread within the last 4 days, or indeed the Resource WIP thread in the last two days, you will see I have been trying to make a tileset that goes nicely with my comical art style, and after just finishing the god damned basis for the ocean autotile I have to do animations for each frame as well, well you know what, I don't fucking want to...

The one tile was hard enough to line up every which way, I'm not doing it again 3 times, multiplied by the 8 different tiles in the first part of TileA, I suppose there are easier autotiles in there --water/lavafalls basically--, but I was extremely tired after just doing one autotile, doing another 23 for TileA1 and another 8 for both TileA2 and TileA3 would take too much time and probably drive me insane in the process.

So I'm going to get a tileset that doesn't so boldly clash with my bright and colorful art style. Instead of the RTP that is desaturated by 30% before you can say the word JPEG, that tileset is awful.

I know some people have said Mack tiles stole the RTP's thunder, but I don't care, and likely the RTP is the worst tileset in existence, Super Mario had better graphics design than this, mind you, Enterbrain... or Enterbrainless more coherently speaking, is actually a Magazine Printing Franchise, and RPG Maker just happens to be a thing they make off to the side, so I suppose that excuses some of the bad ideas they implemented for VX, but some of it can not be forgiven.

The screen resolution is one of those things. 544x416 is a terrible screen resolution, one that didn't even exist, or wouldn't have existed until we let magazine companies make toys, toys which they should have probably figured were there best seller by now, the RPG Maker community is probably one of the biggest communities I've had the pleasure of being in, most of them friendly unlike the angry nerdraging bastards that are the World of Warcraft community.

Most people are nice enough to help you with something if you are clear on what you want, and I always know what I want, probably my two best friends are from the RPG Maker Community, and I have many other people who are mutual friends, I won't mention names here because I don't want them to look at me funny when I join the IRC next (yes, we have those). To be honest I only have one friend from my 6 years of WoW I truly trust, but that is likely because she doesn't play WoW much at all, but thats simply the only place we can talk.

Now I was talking about something ealier, the tilesets, and I decided not to make one because of effort and possibility of brain trauma. So instead, I am using the only tilesets that are as colourful and bright as my game:

The Night'Walker tiles, congratulations Night'Walker, you're in the credits. It's a pity I couldn't find where you put the snowy ones everyones talking about. Thankfully my friend has an incredibly silly habit of grabbing every resource he sees and not noting the creator, funnily enough I was searching for Mack Tiles for a good half hour until I realised Mack's Tiles are drab compared to these, the ones he gave me, the ones he thinks are Mack Tiles and are Actually Night'Walkers, further supported by the fact that Mack doesn't make snow tiles for some reason. These are unbelievably colourful and bright compared to the drab and saturated RTP, the beaches or sandbanks are incredible (the ones by Night'Walker, I mean) and makes the world look less square, a common syndrome in VX games that use the RTP.

And since you all won't shut up about it, I'm going to reveal the basic plot (twists not included), behind Menagerie, a game you have so far only seen the 4 main characters, a title screen, and side character of (if you are incredibly observant of my work, that is), it's still using the RTP at the moment, might change to Night'Walker later, we'll see. So here the plot summary goes:

The First four characters will be introuced seperately, in a homestuck sort of fashion (Shhh, you'll see), and have a short section each until they are brought together by the side character (and very important to the plot), Tac, a Galaxion who was exiled for failing a mission, the Galaxions are a race who enjoy Universal Conquest, and start training at a very young age, they are led by a ruling council of 2 'Directors' that according to Tac, got to Director status through Blatant succession, suggesting they murdered and dethroned the previous two, and their race has suffered because of it. Tac explains that there next invasion will be of Azuron, (the home planet of 3 of the main characters.) Tac explained that the current directors can be taken care of more easily than the previous two, as they are clumsy and dumbfounded. And sends the four heroes on a mission to protect Azuron before it is annihilated, she reveals many major 'plot points', especially about Fyori, one in particular is that Fyori is assigned the mission of designing the spacecraft capable of taking down the Exodus. Tac assigns Spooky, the fourth party member and the genetic son of Tac to help Fyori in this task. This is as far as I have gotten as far as game events go, but the story continues:

Once the spacecraft has been created, the four party members need to find the Dimensional Teleporter, once they do, they will travel through it to a massive Lab housing the last known universal Duplicator, they need to put the spacecraft they have created in it, and make many more, so they can repel the Galaxion Exodus, and hopefully destroy their flagship, the Imperial, and the two Sinister Director's with it.

After the Directors go down with the ship, the heroes will be given another mission, a much more dangerous one, they will infiltrate Galaxion, and destroy the "Control Brain's" that basically run the Planet, the Director's are more like figureheads, even they have to follow the Control Brain's orders.

Once the Last Control Brain is Destroyed, the planet ceases functioning, doors won't work, Galaxions won't be sumarised, and all will be equal, which is exactly how Tac wants it. No leaders means no power, and no power means no greed, and no greed means no nastiness, which is what Tac hates the most, as it is how she was exiled, and how the Galaxion Empire was turned into a blatant succession game.

There will be a major focus on crafting in this game, more so than Terra(where it was simply used to obatin gear easier.), in a lot of places, you will need crafting to advance the plot. I've only just started, and its gonna be a long while before this game is seen by anyone but me.

For the people who have played Intelligence, and actually 'explored' the Necropolis, you will know that Galaxion and all who lived within was turned to stone by an incredibly powerful sorcerer, as much as I'd love to be lazy and say "Its a different game, therefore it's non-canon' I'd like to think I'm more professional than that, so here's a summary of what happens years before the time of Intelligence, and years after the time of Menagerie:

Due to the lack of a heirachy, a lot of Galaxion's would have succumbed to things that happen when fear is unpresented, like Riot, mischief and white/black magic, one foolish Galaxion would probably have found out how to cast the spell described, but never named, and didn't realise the side effect, and cast it on the whole planet to be a dick, and ended the Galaxion Chapter forever, by turning them into rocks.

Here comes the description of Galaxion in Intelligence v1.1, it will likely be an entire planet, buildings, spacecraft, Galaxions and all, that look like rocks. This may be more fascinating than it sounds however, as you can probably not imagine how intricate the design will be. I'll probably have to use parallax mapping though, FML.

I think thats all my thought's vented for today, which is what I primarily made this blog for, but didn't realise it until an hour ago.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Back to blog, and then back to dev, yeehawww.

Intelligence has been a true success, considering its only my 3rd game out with an average rating of 7/10, I'm very pleased with how it went, and despite the minor annoyances like the 1.0 spawn bodge, it has been a great lot of fun to make this game, and don't think it is going to die just yet, I have said from the start I will be releasing content patches for it, and by my glorious fuzzy ass thats how it will be!

v1.1 will host an enormous amount of features near worthy of an expansion, but jumping from v1.0 to v2.0 seems silly for a game that was released only a month ago, so it will simply be v1.1, I can't say every Content patch will be this packed full of goodies, because if I tried to out do the patch before every patch an expansion would end up taking 3 years, so lets be happy that v1.1 is going to be so mega huge. The only problem is that it is going to take time, a reviewer suggested an enormous array of ideas, most of which I liked, and will be incoorporated, for example, the game is too linear, so there will very likely be extra pockets you can go to find treasure, the simple evented waypoints system I have in place will ease this tremendously, much more end game content will be coming, Pyro will be the boss of this patch, The Ancient one of Element fire, also referred to as the firelord, exploration will be coming in this update aswell, once you finish the game you will be gifted a vortian cruiser that you can fly through space with, and visit various planets, the planets won't have much in them at first, but more will be added on later. Don't think that will stop the planets looking unique though, Vort will likely be heavily based off Modern Japan, Galaxion will be made entirely out of stone, the reasons for this some of you will know, Galaxion will also be featured in my next game(not encased in stone), if I ever get working on it again.

Hope will probably be a very primitive and dry desert place, with an egyptian feel, but a bit more steam punk since these are humans 20 years ahead of us, or 40 by the time your playing the game.

Oddworld, will likely not be on the universal map, as oddworld has 4 games already, we don't need me spoofing one.

In it's place, I will likely have Spriteopia, the home planet of the sprites and faeries very few see on earth, it will probably look rather similar to the cloud city of the same name in Terra.

For a list of planned features you can go to my thread, which you can link to from the first post.

Intelligence also got No-RTP and RTP versions today, so your friend won't have to have RPG Maker VX to play it.

Also, just throwing this out there, Autotiles are not fun to make, nobody likes them.