Since I’ve just spent a bit of time painstakingly stitching together the various screens that make up the maps for one of my as-yet unrevealed game’s “worlds”, I thought I’d take the opportunity to tease said game a little by sharing said stitch.
Here we go, then:
This isn’t the complete map as yet, though most of the south to southeasterly portions are now done. There’s a fair bit to do in the north and the west of the map, and then I can finally start making some events to go on it. And building dungeons! Fun times ahead.
I decided early on to make the game non-scrolling and instead move screen to screen in a somewhat old-school fashion. This has proven to mostly be beneficial to my overall efforts of putting things together, because it means I can tackle it in small chunks rather than being overwhelmed by the prospect of creating an interesting scrolling map. It’s also been a challenge, however, to ensure that the player can’t wander off the side of one screen and find themselves on the next embedded in a wall. Fortunately, the very act of stitching the map above together has helped me to spot any such glaring errors and fix them easily.
To design this map, I did a simple old-school adventure game-style map on paper first, using a square for each screen or “room” and lines to indicate connections between rooms. Then I numbered each of the boxes, since RPG Maker numbers the maps you create, and the plugin I’m using for automatic transitions when you walk off the side of a screen is dependent on these numbers, before finally tackling it a bit at a time. In order to finish this “world” I’ll need to get up to map number 125; as of the stitch above, I’ve reached 84, so things are flowing along quite nicely so far.
I had a rough concept in mind for the overall map when I started, though it’s evolved a bit as I’ve been putting it together. I’m trying to give things a vaguely realistic scale rather than the skewed, exaggerated scale seen in RPGs with a “world map” screen; to put it another way, it’s more a Zelda approach to an overworld than a Final Fantasy, though the gameplay uses a separate turn-based battle screen rather than Zelda’s action RPG-esque combat.
As I’ve mentioned a couple of times, this is just one of several worlds players will visit in the game. Each world is going to have a slightly different style of play about it: this one has the aforementioned Zelda-style overworld with discrete dungeons to complete; another is going to be a Resident Evil-inspired haunted mansion kind of affair with plenty of puzzles; a third will be a more linear sci-fi world; a fourth will place emphasis on character interactions and narrative rather than combat; and the final world, which you’ll only be able to enter once the previous four have been completed… well, that’s a secret!
As a great man once said, please look forward to it.
Playing with RPG Maker MV as I am at the moment, I’m reminded of quite how much I enjoy building worlds. I don’t have the skill or technical knowledge to be able to do so using 3D modelling tools (or even level editors for 3D games) but I’ve always felt I can put together some interesting 2D maps for RPGs.
There are two main approaches you can take when building a world for a game. You can take the “realistic” approach and attempt to build it to something approaching a believable scale, or you can take the “gamey” approach and try to build something that works well in the context of a game.
In actual fact, I tend to find that the best approach is somewhere between the two. A certain degree of game design is necessary when building a world in order to prevent it feeling like an unfocused mess — many modern open-world games fail miserably at this — while at the same time if your world design is completely divorced from reality your players will constantly be aware that they are playing a game rather than immersing themselves in your fictional world.
This isn’t always a bad thing, of course. Some people very much prefer exploring something that has been crafted to be fun, interesting to explore and well-paced. Others, meanwhile, like to wander off the path at every opportunity and see what’s in that cave, over that hill, behind that locked door. And some of the most satisfying gaming experiences I’ve had have come in environments very obviously designed to defy all real-world logic (not to mention architectural principles and, well, physics) — Metroidvania-style titles particularly spring to mind in this regard.
Since the game I’m playing around with at the moment is a kind of grand experiment of sorts, I’m going to play around with a variety of different approaches. The concept of the game sees the party travelling to several different “worlds”, so each of them are going to be structured differently. One of them will be a condensed fantasy RPG-style world, with the distinction between “overworld” and “dungeons”. Another will be one big dungeon — probably a haunted mansion or something along those lines. Besides those, I’d like to do something interesting with a sci-fi/cyberpunk feel, and either something completely abstract or very much grounded in reality. Or perhaps both.
Unlike past projects, where I’ve sort of “winged it” as I’ve gone along, this time around I’m actually taking a bit of time to plan things out to a certain degree. I imagine there will still be an element of winging it as I play around and think of new things I’d like to do, but at the very least I intend to plan out the basic structure and/or map of each of these “worlds” and how the player will interact with them. Then it will be interesting to see how much of a challenge it is to implement each of them using the RPG Maker MV toolset.
So far, the game’s introduction has a single, linear “dungeon” to introduce the player to the basic concepts. After that, I intend to allow them to choose how they progress through the initial phases of the game — though I also intend to put in some systems to ensure some jumping back and forth between the different worlds and their corresponding styles is in order. Should keep things interesting. We’ll see, I guess.
I love RPG Maker. I’ve loved it long before I first used it and was extremely jealous of the American PS1 owners who got to use it on console, and I was thrilled when I first discovered the legendary unofficial localisation of RPG Maker 2000 by Don Miguel. The game I made with moral support from my friends at university, The Adventures of Dave Thunder, was shaping up to be a lot of silly fun — albeit probably far too full of in-jokes to be appreciated by anyone outside my circle of friends — but it was unfortunately lost when my computer at the time suffered a catastrophic system failure. I’ve never quite forgiven myself for not backing it up.
But I’ve maintained an interest in RPG Maker ever since, and have fiddled around with numerous incarnations over the years. Most recently, I snagged a copy of RPG Maker MV, the latest version, in the recent Steam sale, and I’ve been having a play with it. It seems like a lot of fun so far, and a good evolution even from VX Ace, the previous edition.
The basic toolset is almost identical. There’s a simple tile-based map editor for you to draw your various locations using tilesets — either those included or those you create yourself in an external art program. On top of that is the Event system, which allows you to place objects and triggers on your map and, constructing pseudo-code through a menu-driven interface, make them do all manner of different things, ranging from being a random NPC wandering around spouting bollocks to a lengthy cutscene event that changes depending on your previous actions in the game.
The basic Event system is very powerful and flexible, but for the last few versions of RPG Maker it’s also been supported by the ability to use scripting — actual coding — alongside the pseudo-code created in the Event editor. Previously, RPG Maker used a variation on Ruby for its scripting language; in MV, it’s made the change to straight JavaScript, arguably a much more widespread (and easier to learn?) language.
What’s particularly nice about MV’s scripting support is that it’s organised in a completely different way to previous incarnations. Instead of having a huge, daunting Script Editor window where it’s possible to completely break your whole game with just one little typo, RPG Maker MV works by using JavaScript plugins. Drop these in the appropriate subfolder of your project, activate them within RPG Maker, configure them as appropriate, then off you go.
It’s a simple change, but a very effective one. The fact that each plugin is treated as its own module with its own settings means that plugin creators can create a simple list of parameters that less code-savvy RPG makers can tweak and change without having to even look at any JavaScript whatsoever. Many plugins also have “friendly”, easily readable Plugin Commands to trigger various functionality, too — no more “this.enemyType(math.random(floor.bollocks));” or whatever, although you still can perform direct script calls if you so desire.
Best of all, the localisers Degica have embraced the most active members of the RPG Maker community over the years and brought them on board to help out with making RPG Maker MV an excellent package. Legendary RPG Maker scripter Yanfly, for example, has produced a huge number of plugins for MV already, and other well-known contributors to the community such as Archeia have played an important and active role in making RPG Maker MV what looks like the definitive version of RPG Maker… until the next one comes out, of course.
I’m just farting around with it at the moment with no real grand plan in mind; I’m putting together a relatively straightforward game using mostly standard assets as a means of getting my “eye” back in as well as learning MV’s new features. It’s not going to be anything amazing or revolutionary — going by previous experience, it probably won’t be finished, either — but it’s providing something fun to do when I want to keep my mind occupied.
I’ve been thinking about interface design today. I told myself that I wouldn’t faff around with the default RPG Maker bits and bobs too much so as not to hold up actually writing the story, but in practice it’s so simple to tweak this stuff that I couldn’t help myself. In doing so, I’ve immediately made a difference to the game that makes it look a little less like a half-arsed default RPG Maker project and has a bit more individuality, despite still largely using stock assets.
As a reminder, here’s a typical shot of how it looked before:
And here’s how a different moment in the game looks as of today:
Not a huge difference, I know, but the astute among you will notice two things: firstly, the colour of the text box has changed to a deep navy blue rather than the default gradient fill, and the main game screen now has a Persona 3-style “clock” in the upper-right corner of the screen, indicating what time of day it is. Presently, this only shows the time of day, but I’m toying with it showing what day it is, too — my hesitation on this note is that which day it is is only relevant for part of the game rather than the whole thing.
Earlier today, the “clock” was much bigger and looked a bit like this:
I actually kind of liked it at the larger size, but it was overlapping the portraits of characters who appeared on the right-hand side of the screen a bit too much for my liking, so I reduced it a bit.
The reason I changed the colour of the text box was because I was experimenting with some scripts that changed the behaviour of the menu. Specifically, they allowed a “wallpaper” image to be applied, so my menu screen now looks like this:
I figured I’d run with the “flat blue” colour scheme, and add a nice silhouette of Ami in the background for a bit of visual interest, and tweak the message box colour to match for consistency’s sake. The silhouette image shows up nicely in the various menu screens without being too obtrusive, as you can see from this shot of the save menu:
In fact, it shows up particularly nicely when choosing to quit or return to the title screen — a happy coincidence of the fact that selecting this option darkens the screen somewhat:
Those of you who know RPG Maker well will also notice I’ve replaced the default font with the nice, simple and clean lines of Verdana. This was primarily to match the default font used in a message box script I’m using, because it was bugging me a bit that the font in my message windows and in the rest of the interface didn’t match.
Oh, God. What is happening to me?
I jest. Fact is, today I’d reached a good natural “stopping point” in terms of composing the story, and it was as good a time as any to fiddle around with the “look” of the game a bit. I’m pleased with the effect it’s had — they’re only subtle little changes, but they’ve had a noticeable effect.
Now it’s time to stop farting about with all this and move the plot onwards. To give you an idea of how things are going, the game is structured in several parts: firstly, there’s a prologue; then there are five in-game days, during which a whole host of different things can happen according to exclusive choices the player makes in each of the morning, afternoon and evening time slots; then there are four unique “second parts” to the game, and one “true ending”. So far, I’ve completely and totally finished the prologue, and I’ve finished the morning of the first day. If you’re actually reading all the text like a normal person and not fast-forwarding it like me when I’m testing (yes, there is a fast-forward function) then there’s probably just under an hour of Stuff to Do and Read so far. After I’ve created various environments once, I can reuse them for other events, which means that development will continue to accelerate as I progress through the story.
Environments like the one seen above are quite complex, and most stuff in the game is “examinable”, so there’s a lot of flavour text in there. Now it’s done, though, if I want Ami to come back here with another character — which I probably do — I don’t have to design that map all over again. Which is nice.
Anyway. I’ll leave that there for now. Just wanted to share how things were going!
This is actually more of a “writing diary” rather than a dev diary, because I’d like to talk specifically about the way I write, and how this relates to the game I’ve been making.
I’ve never been the sort of writer who plans things out in exhaustive detail. I know, I know, this is probably woefully self-evident from the nonsensical ramblings I’ve been posting here for the last 1,187 days (and more occasionally beforehand, too) but it works for me. It got me through all of school, all of university and what has so far been a relatively lucrative career in writing professionally.
Note that I’m not saying I don’t plan things out at all. (Although some better planning would have probably avoided that awkward double negative right there.) No, instead what I tend to do is get things firmly in my mind in fairly broad terms, then “fill in the blanks” as I go along. It’s not quite writing by the seat of my pants, but it’s also not doing a detailed, bullet-pointed list of every single point I’m going to cover over the course of the complete piece. It gives me a sense of structure, but also allows me the flexibility to veer off in another direction if I want to. Those of you who have read my past month-long creative writing endeavours on this site will have likely spotted the points in the (largely improvised) narratives where I had what I thought was a great idea at the time and proceeded down that path with gay abandon, sometimes to discover I’d written myself into a corner and promptly had to dig my way out somehow. (Oh, God. I shouldn’t have said that. You’ll all be looking for those moments now.)
Anyway, how does this relate to One Year Later? Well, quite a lot, as it happens. Writing an interactive game isn’t quite the same as writing a novel. Even writing a visual novel isn’t quite the same as writing a regular novel, since you (usually) have to deal with branching plot paths and whatnot. In the case of One Year Later, there is a linear path of “story beats”, for want of a better word, but each of those has several different possible things that could happen, and within those several different possible happenings comes a series of optional things that people might not see at all. These optional things let me play with various aspects of the characters while still allowing the plot to continue moving forwards.
This is all very vague, as I’m trying not to spoil things, but let me give you a specific example to make things a bit clearer.
Who wouldn’t want to go and have breakfast with Dax here?
Early in the game, the protagonist Amarysse wakes up bright and early in the morning and goes out into the city. As she’s leaving the inn where she’s staying, she’s accosted by Dax, one of the other main characters, who invites her to go for breakfast with him. If she accepts, they go for breakfast, they have a nice chat and various tidbits of information about both Ami and Dax are revealed, after which time passes and it becomes the afternoon. If she refuses (or, more accurately, defers his invitation until she has all the information available to make a decision) then she can go out into the city streets, where she comes across Feena, another one of the main characters, who invites her to go shopping. The player can only pick one or the other during this particular “time slot” of the game; both focus on Ami and a different main character, and both have the potential to reveal some new information, but they also exclude each other.
Someone who wants to go shopping with Feena, obviously.
This, naturally, presents a challenge in later scenes, where I can’t really refer to information in scenes that the player might not have seen. However, what I can do is use the built-in game mechanics to determine whether or not Ami knows about a particular subject, and if she does, trigger some different (or additional) dialogue to if she was discovering this information for the first time. An example of this comes if Ami chose to speak to Feena earlier in the game and revealed the information that Feena is, for some reason, not as happy as she could be. In game terms, hearing this information for the first time rewards Ami with a “topic” item called “Feena’s Worries”; later, asking Feena specifically about it when given the opportunity upgrades the topic item with new information (she’s not happy with her work), allowing Ami to then automatically pick up on little things that Feena says about her work and put them in context — something that she doesn’t do if she doesn’t have any knowledge of the topic at all, or if she doesn’t know that the thing that’s making Feena antsy is her work.
It’s very interesting (and challenging!) to write this way, as it really forces me to think about the characters and how they might have interacted in the past, and how that might inform their future interactions. One Year Later is a game all about dialogue and interpersonal relationships, so it’s important to get this right. I hope I do!
This particular piece of dialogue only shows up if, indeed, Amarysse discovered Feena’s real age the previous night — an optional piece of information that some players might miss.
What this brings me on to is something I suddenly noticed very consciously earlier on while writing some optional, missable incidental dialogue between Ami and Feena: I very much get “into character” while writing.
I say I noticed this earlier; I’ve actually been conscious of it for quite some time when doing more traditional writing — it’s one reason why I enjoy writing stories from the perspective of a first-person participant narrator — but it seemed particularly pronounced earlier. I very much felt like I was “inside the heads” of both Ami and Feena as they talked to each other about, frankly, fairly mundane things — things that those racing through the game would miss, but which those who wanted a deeper understanding of these characters would appreciate as a reward for thorough exploration and investigation.
The thing to be careful of when feeling like this, of course, is getting that characterisation across to the player, who doesn’t “know” these characters in quite the same way as I do. Since while I’m writing the dialogue between these characters I’m effectively “role-playing” them, hopefully this will give the dialogue a reasonably natural-feeling flow. This is something that I won’t be able to tell for sure until someone else who doesn’t know these characters at all plays the game — which is a scary prospect, for sure!
Anyway. That’s it for today. I’ve been doing some good work on the game recently and making some good progress. There’s not enough there to proudly show off in playable form yet (though there is just under an hour of “Stuff to Do” implemented now, which feels a significant amount!) but there will be before long. In the meantime, I intend to post some occasional thoughts on the subject of its development on this ‘ere blog as I (hopefully) continue to make progress.
[Sorry I’ve been lax with the cartoons recently — been blogging late and when I’m tired so haven’t felt inclined to do many. They’ll be back soon.]
As I’ve noted a couple of times recently, I’ve been beavering away at the game I’m making with RPG Maker VX Ace and trying to do a little bit each day. It’s slow progress at the rate I’m going, but it is satisfying to see things coming together piece by piece.
One thing that always impresses me with toolsets like RPG Maker is how active the community is, and how willing they are to help each other out. There’s relatively little in the way of insular thinking, with people wanting to keep all their trade secrets to themselves — quite the opposite, in fact. No, the RPG Maker community is filled with people who create graphical, musical, audible and script…able resources for public consumption and are more than happy to share them with other aspiring developers out there in exchange for nothing more than a wee credit in the finished game.
It’s a marked contrast to the ridiculous secrecy in other parts of the games industry, which is infested with embargoes and other bullshit to control the flow of information. I think that’s quite interesting. While I get why it happens, I think it’s starting to lose its impact. I’ve mentioned before on a number of occasions how all the reviews for a particular game hitting simultaneously makes me not want to read any of them (and, more often than not, not want to play the actual game ever) but this also goes for carefully-timed announcements and the like. The trouble is that a lot of these announcements are for things that people are expecting. A new Assassin’s Creed — surprise! A new Call of Duty — HOLY SHIT. A new Grand Theft Auto screenshot — STOP THE PRESSES.
Even the mobile sector has ridiculous embargoes in place. This always strikes me as weird given the sheer volume of mobile apps and games that are released every day. Companies are lucky to get their product covered at all in most cases, and enforcing arbitrary restrictions on said coverage can only be counter-productive, surely.
But I don’t want to get on an embargo rant. I just thought the openness of the amateur development community was an interesting contrast to the OMG TOP SEKRIT nature of mainstream game development.
I guess it’s largely to do with the fact that the majority of people tinkering around with stuff like RPG Maker and its ilk are amateur/bedroom developers putting stuff together in their own time rather than as their job. There are exceptions, of course, but the fact that RPG Maker is so easy to get up and running encourages people to give it a shot a lot more than the rather daunting task of learning a programming language and/or how to use an engine like Unreal Engine 3. The fact that there’s a sense of joyous discovery and entering a strange new world of wondrous creativity helps encourage a pleasing sense of camaraderie — plus the people who develop the more well-known scripts and resource banks become mini-celebrities in their own right, which must be nice for them. It’s also something they can potentially put on their CVs, I guess — saying that you’re the person behind one of the most widely-used battle system Ruby scripts for RPG Maker VX Ace may not have quite the same clout as saying you designed Unreal Engine 3, but it must count for something.
I can’t say I’ve gotten overly involved with the RPG Maker community as a whole yet since keeping up with forums always seems like a whole lot of hassle, but I’m certainly very grateful for the hard work of artists like “Archeia” and “Scinaya” and scripters like “Yanfly”, who are helping my game come together one piece at a time. If and when it ever gets finished, they’ll certainly be getting some love from me.
I love making games — the main thing that stops me from doing it more often is the fact that I can’t get my head around programming. Perhaps it’s the fact that I didn’t enjoy maths that much at school; perhaps it’s the fact I have trouble relating the abstract code to what happens on screen; perhaps I’m just too lazy to learn properly. (I’m still badass at Atari BASIC.)
Regardless of all that, though, if an app comes along and offers me the tools I need to realise my visions, even partially, I’m all over it like a rash — and I’m normally able to push the boundaries of such applications to do unconventional things a little outside of their normal “comfort zone”. Such was the case with Clickteam’s excellent Klik and Play series, and such was the case with RPG Maker 2000, which I originally came across a good few years ago and decided that the best way to learn would be to put together a game using the built-in tools and resources.
Thus, The Adventures of Dave Thunder was born. Dave Thunder was the hero of the piece, named after a guy whose name we found in a person’s lost phone at university. We were all a bit drunk at the time, so one of my flatmates decided it would be a good idea to phone Dave Thunder and tell him what an awesome name he had. He was at “The Golden Arches”. A legend was born.
But I digress. The Adventures of Dave Thunder was quite popular among my friends because it was deliberately built as a big in-joke. I’m not sure if it would have appealed to anyone outside my immediate circle of friends had it ever been finished, but it was a lot of fun to make, and I still have fond memories of Sweary Link, tired of his life as a silent protagonist and revealing that he’s a bit of a stroppy git underneath.
Sadly, The Adventures of Dave Thunder is lost to the mists of time and a failed hard drive. I’m a bit upset about this, as it had quite a lot of work put into it. Okay, I didn’t make any of the graphics or music for it, but the writing was all mine, and I found it quite funny at least. What other RPG can you play where the healer in your party is Harold Bishop from Neighbours, who became an actual bishop after his wife Madge turned into a vampire?
I digress again. I acquired a copy of RPG Maker VX a while back and just recently have something of a hankerin’ to make something new. Referring back to what I said yesterday, too, I have some ready-made characters to draw on, too, so I figured why not give them their very own game?
I’ve already started designing (well, scripting) what I want this game to be and I’m quite pleased with the direction I think it will take. I’m going to try and avoid cliche wherever possible and put together something that is amusing, entertaining and (mostly) unconventional. Sure, there’ll still be standard RPG mechanics in there — I don’t know enough about VX‘s scripting language to deviate too much from the standard engine, after all. That said, I’m using one excellent plugin to take a less-frequently seen approach to exploration, inspired by some recent titles I’ve been playing — more details on that once I have a prototype up and running. (No, it’s not a roguelike — I haven’t yet found a good script for that.)
So hopefully over the course of the next few weeks, months, years, I’ll be able to share occasional progress updates on The Official RPG of Pete’s Blog Stickmen, or whatever I end up calling it. For now, suffice to say that it is a thing that exists, and I will be using it as a Big Creative Project to do when I’m feeling bored or uninspired. The long-term intention is to put together the whole thing single-handedly with deliberately crude graphics (they’re stickmen, after all) and a soundtrack composed by me. Whether all that will actually happen will remain to be seen, but it’ll be an interesting experiment if nothing else. I’ll be concentrating on getting the game right first, then adding polish like an original soundtrack afterwards if I feel it’s worth it.
So there you are.World-first exclusive reveal and all that. BE EXCITED.
