1180: Dev Diary 3

I’m pleased to report that work on my game is continuing apace and even seems to be accelerating somewhat. This is very pleasing, as making progress is hugely motivating. Every time I add a new bit and it works properly, it feels good. Okay, I’m not doing anything massively complicated, unlike some of the badass scripters out there (some of whose work I’ve incorporated into this project for simple improvements to RPG Maker’s basic functionality) but I am making something that’s more than a completely linear path to the finish line. (To be fair, that can be challenging enough, depending on what you’re doing!)

Anyway, I thought I’d share two more WOLD EXCULSIVE!! screenshots with you to give you a sneak peek at what’s going on so far.

Look at it being all night-time and stuff! Night-time effects are easy to create in RPG Maker thanks to the convenient screen-tinting command — this even incorporates various presets for times of day and weather conditions if you don’t trust yourself to tweak the sliders.

If you’ll recall my previous post where I shared a couple of images, you may recognise this as the other end of “The Strip,” a road in the capital city where a lot of the game’s business unfolds. In this shot, we see the complete party following Amarysse following an evening of debauchery in the Tail of the Dog on the right, and two creepy mages wandering around outside their mysterious guild tower. The one on the left is called Bill. He has sweaty armpits.

Here’s the “topic” system I talked about last time I wrote about the game. Ami and Dax here are having a late-night chat about various bits and pieces, and Ami’s decided to ask Dax about some specific things she’s got on her mind rather than just general chitchat. This “Ask” system won’t be available for every conversation because that will just slow things down unnecessarily, but in situations where Ami is free to wander around and chew the fat with her companions — most commonly before everyone goes to bed — it will provide the opportunity to pick everyone’s brains on various subjects and potentially gather some further information. The end of each day in the game will also provide the opportunity for Ami to reflect on the things weighing on her mind, and there will be events throughout where Ami will have to use the topics she’s gathered to convince people of things or prove something. I’m taking strong cues from Ace Attorney and Lifesigns here.

Implementing this system was actually surprisingly easy without any need for delving into complicated scripting. Instead what I’ve done is I’ve replaced the staple RPG “Key Items” menu with a “Topics” menu, and simply added topic key items to Ami’s inventory as they come up in discussions. The actual “Ask about…” functionality is a straightforward event call in RPG Maker that prompts the player to select one of their key items (or topics in this case). This event call stores the value of the item the player selected in a variable, which you can then check to see what was picked. All you need to do then is add some “conditional branches” to check if the item picked was [x], [y] or [z] and then display the appropriate exchanges between the characters — and just to cover all bases, add a generic event handler if the player picks something about which the character doesn’t have anything in particular to say.

If that all sounds like gibberish, don’t worry. It’s actually just a series of simple, logical statements, though. If you were telling a person to handle what I’ve just described, it would go something like this:

Let the player pick one of the topics, and remember what it is. Was the topic they picked about “Feena’s Worries”? If so, then play back the conversation on that subject; after that, forget the topic they picked and give them the opportunity to pick another one. Was the topic they picked about “Hiro X Lily?” If so, then play back the conversation on that subject; after that, forget the topic they picked and give them the opportunity to pick another one. Was the topic they picked something else? If so, then play back a generic conversation; after that, forget the topic they picked and give them the opportunity to pick another one.

Clearer? No? Well, never mind. I know what I’m doing, and that’s the important thing.

Anyway, it’s 1:30am and I must resist the urge to tinker and fiddle around with things (IN THE GAME) and go to bed. There’ll be plenty of time for tinkering and fiddling over the weekend, particularly as I’m not friends with my PS2 any more — it scratched the bejesus out of my Ar Tonelico 2 disc to such a degree that the ending videos don’t work at all any more. I’ve had to order a new copy (thankfully not that expensive) and I’ve also ordered an old-school PS2 fat (also thankfully not that expensive — the two items cost the same as a single new copy of Bioshock Infinite, which is quite amusing to me), as this scratching problem is apparently a known issue with PS2 Slims of a certain age. What that does mean is no Ar Tonelico 2 for a few days until those replacements arrive, so plenty of time to work on my own game. Or possibly just bum around with something else. Or start Ar Tonelico 3.