A fairly quick one tonight as I’m suddenly very tired, but I’ll make it a “Pete’s RPG Maker Game Teaser” post just to make up for it, or something.
I thought I’d talk a little about lighting effects, because they make a huge difference to the overall look and feel of a game (or part of a game’s setting) and can add a lot to the overall personality of something you’re making.
More than anything, lighting effects can be a huge contributing factor in ensuring your game doesn’t look like “just another RPG Maker game”, which is by far the most common criticism of games made with RPG Maker. Hey, you provide people with tools, they’re gonna use them, sometimes lazily.
Anyway. Yes. So far as I’m concerned, the best ways to make your game not look like “just another RPG Maker game” without actually replacing the built-in graphics is a combination of fiddling with lighting effects (and screen tints to go with them) and tweaking the user interface so it’s no longer recognisable as the default RPG Maker battle system. (Of course, there’s nothing wrong with just using the default bits and bobs while you’re learning, but once you start feeling ambitious, it’s a good idea to try and put your own personal stamp on the project, and the easiest way to do that is through careful selection of audio-visual assets.)
So here are a few comparison screenshots of a map in the RPG Maker editor, which doesn’t show lighting, and in the game itself (which also features elements of the UI).
Here’s how a security computer room looks in the editor. (The checkerboard background means there’s nothing there. If you set up a parallax background, it will appear where the checkerboard is; otherwise if will simply render as black in the game.)
And here it is in game, using a lighting plugin for adjustable, colour-able light radiuses wherever you like on your maps. Makes some really nice atmospheric effects.
Here’s a house (currently with no door, because I haven’t made the inside yet) in the editor:
And here it is in game, the simple addition of a transparent “sunbeams” overlay image giving it a bit more life:
Here’s the edge of a swamp in the editor:
And here it is in game, featuring a moving “mist” overlay image, plus a change to the screen tint that gives it a slight purple hue as well as desaturating the colours a bit:
Finally, here’s part of a forest labyrinth in the editor:
And here’s the dramatically different presentation in game, featuring an adjusted screen tint and a tiled overlay to simulate the leaf canopy blocking out sunlight:
I know to all the jaded pros out there it probably still looks like “just another RPG Maker game”, but given that I’m mainly using this project to experiment with the software and see how easy it is to put a complete experience together, I’m happy with the twists on the standard look and feel I’ve got going on so far.
Turns out the simple act of explicitly acknowledging the fact I’m aware of this issue with my own attention span has helped me to do something about it.
In the times when I’ve been working on my RPG Maker MV project, I’ve been considerably more productive than I have been in the past, with far less staring into space and far more in the way of map-making. The current map count for the project now stands at 72, which means I’m well over halfway to assembling the first of the five “worlds” in the game, which is also likely to be the most complex and largest, and so a good idea to get out of the way first. (I know I’m well over halfway because I’ve mapped out what I want the final overall map to look like on paper, and numbered each of the individual “rooms”.)
I’ve also found this awareness to be very helpful when doing actual work rather than just pissing around with RPG Maker. I’ve finally had some freelance work start flowing in again, and I’ve been managing to sit down and concentrate on it enough to get it done efficiently and in plenty of time to submit for the deadline without having to do a last-minute rush on everything. (Even when I did a last-minute rush, I always got stuff in on time, mind you; it was just rather more stressful than it really needed to be.)
Whether this new way of thinking will stick around — and, for that matter, if it’s anything to do with the new anti-anxiety drugs I’m on, which have just about stopped making me feel perpetually stoned now, thankfully — remains to be seen, but I’m going to take full advantage of it while it’s here, and maybe even get a creative project or two actually finished. That’d be something, eh?
Incidentally, I’m not quite ready to reveal the full extent of my RPG Maker MV project as yet, since its very nature is something I’d like to keep as a bit of a surprise for some of my friends. Over the coming weeks as things start to come together, though, you can expect a few teasers of what I’ve been up to. I will, however, say up front that I’ve mostly been using RPG Maker MV’s stock art resources with it (albeit with some lovely lighting effects courtesy of a wonderful plugin), because that always seems to be something that people whinge about with RPG Maker projects, even those just done for “fun” like this one. I am hoping, however, that the story, the writing, the characters and the humour in it will more than make up for my own lack of artistic talent and consequent reliance on provided art resources.
There’s also going to be some great music in it; some of it stock RPG Maker tracks (RPG Maker MV’s provided music is seriously way too good not to include at least some of it!) and some provided by members of the RPG Maker community. If I’m feeling particularly adventurous, I might even compose some of my own work for it, but let’s take things one step at a time, shall we…?
I don’t tend to suffer from creative block in the traditional sense: there’s never any shortage of interesting ideas rattling around inside my head (particularly while I adjust to my new anti-anxiety medication and consequently am wandering around in a perpetually stoned haze) — it’s just actually pushing forward and making them tangible in some form that I sometimes struggle with.
I’ll explain using RPG Maker as an example, but this applies to all manner of creative pursuits: music composition, writing, drawing and anything else I feel I might be able to turn my hand to on a particular day.
I’ll sit down to spend some time with RPG Maker, with something in mind that I want to achieve. In the case of my current project, I’ve even gone so far as to hand-draw some grid-based maps for the worlds in the game — pretty much essential for the structure I have in mind for at least two of the worlds players will be exploring, due to their open-ish nature. In other words, I have a clearly defined long-term goal to achieve: presently, it’s assembling all the necessary screen-size maps and ensuring all transitions are in place for the world of “Lucidia”, which is one of the four locales players will be exploring in the course of my game. I decided to assemble all the exterior maps before I even start thinking about putting obstacles, game structure, dungeons and events in place. Sensible, I think.
Anyway. When I sit down to do some mapping, I might put together a complete, nice looking map, then stare at it for a good ten minutes or so while I think about what the next screen will look like. Then I might playtest my game, even though I’ve already playtested it lots of times already, just to get the satisfaction of wandering back and forth between the new screen and existing screens. Then I’ll probably stare at it for a good few minutes, and only when I can break through this barrier of daydreaming what comes next will I actually produce the next map.
Having an awareness of this is somewhat infuriating, because it means it takes several times longer to achieve the things I want to do than it really “should” if I focus and knuckle down to it. That said, since becoming particularly aware of this trait over the last few days — I’ve always had a vague awareness of it, but over the last few days I’ve been noticing it particularly keenly for some reason — I’ve noticed my overall productivity on the project has increased quite a bit. I’ve so far assembled nearly a third of the overall map for Lucidia — a total of 53 separate screens so far, including the linear “prologue” chapter — and am feeling a lot more confident than I normally do with a creative project of this type that I might actually finish it, or at least the part I’m currently working on, at some point.
To put it another way, my own personal type of creative block is not for a want of inspiration; rather, it’s a matter of being overloaded with too much inspiration at once, and wanting to do everything all at the same time, eventually ending up doing nothing at all other than staring into space thinking “well, this should probably go like this…”
In this sense, this blog has proven to be an invaluable tool to help train myself in that I can normally churn out a whole post in one go without stopping or getting distracted in the middle. Normally. There may be a brief period of apparent brain-death while I decide on a particular topic for the day’s post, but generally speaking once I get going on a post, it flows pretty freely until I reach the end of it.
And here’s the end of it right now. I’m going to go and make some maps now. Honest.
I touched on this the other day, but it bears mentioning again, I think: the community surrounding the RPG Maker series of software packages is one of the most interesting, diverse and helpful communities I’ve had the pleasure of coming across in all of gaming.
Gaming communities can be a variable bunch. Communities that surround online multiplayer games tend to err somewhat on the side of aggressively arguing that their opinions are the “right” ones and that everyone else is wrong — sometimes even putting players at loggerheads with the developers. Retro-gaming communities are keen to celebrate old games but have an often unspoken code of honour about not sharing pirated versions of software — even though this is sadly the only means of getting to play some older or rarer titles these days. And the Steam forums are just… well, no. Nothing good comes of sticking your head in there.
The RPG Maker community, though, they’re some of the most cooperative people I’ve seen ever. Sure, there’s an element of the usual supercilious “Search is your friend!” obnoxiousness on the forums when someone asks a question that might have been answered before six years ago, but this is true for pretty much any Internet community out there, and the help and support the community generally offers for the program is second to none.
It helps that RPG Maker has always been extensible — initially just through graphics and sound in the earlier incarnations, but with more recent installments through Ruby scripts and JavaScript plugins to extend and customise the functionality of the basic engine far beyond what it was originally intended for. Many creators provide these additional bits and pieces either under a completely royalty-free license, or under some variation of Creative Commons, which allows people to use them freely so long as they credit the original creator and, in some cases, don’t fiddle around with it and pass it off as their own.
This is extraordinarily generous, and it has always amazed me quite how far people are willing to go to help out the community as a whole — though I’m pleased to see with the rise of Patreon that some of these creators are now able to make a bit of money off their creations through pledges from grateful users, something which was very hit-and-miss when going through PayPal as in the pre-Patreon days.
I know that I’m massively grateful to the RPG Maker community as a whole for providing me with all manner of excellent content to extend the functionality of the program — and helping me feel like I can make the best possible game with the resources I have, rather than having to settle for doing something within limitations. While my silly little game that I’m working on at the moment will doubtless never be anything big or exciting — as I’ve mentioned before, the very reason for its existence is mostly an in-joke that perhaps only four or five people in the world will understand — I am very happy with how it’s looking so far, and how unlike the generic, out-of-the-box RPG Maker engine it looks, just with a few simple changes to the basic mechanics and functionality.
I’m thinking I may well spend next month on MoeGamer covering RPG Maker MV, since it’s still relatively new, so watch out for that. In the meantime, I’ve got games to make!
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’ve been playing some more with RPG Maker MV today. Despite telling myself before I started fiddling around that I wasn’t going to be too ambitious, my project’s plugins folder is now full to bursting with all manner of goodies to extend the functionality of the basic engine and basically make it almost unrecognisable from its vanilla form. (This is good, because “it looks like an RPG Maker game” is considered a grave insult by some people on the Internet.)
I’m not going to share any specific details about the game I’m putting together to learn the program as, if it ever gets finished, I want it to be a nice surprise for my friends to enjoy (but hopefully a certain amount of appeal to those of you who don’t know me quite so well, also). However, I can talk a bit about some of the plugins and goodies I’ve been making use of.
An absolutely essential site for those wanting to go beyond the basic functionality of the RPG Maker MV engine is the MV Plugins Master List. It is, in theory, a central repository of links to the most popular RPG Maker MV plugins, along with snippets of information about them. This was my starting point for exploring the world of plugins.
RPG Maker veterans will be familiar with the name Yanfly, no doubt, as he’s one of the most active users of the program’s various incarnations, and has long been producing some of the most well-regarded plugins and scripts out there. His new site is absolutely rammed with fantastic plugins, all of which are well documented and easy to use. Of particular interest to many people will be his implementations of the popular ATB and CTB battle systems from the Final Fantasy series; when used in conjunction with other plugins to alter how the battle screen looks and works, it’s easier than ever to put together a really distinctive looking game with easily understandable mechanics.
Himeworks is another great resource for plugins. Not only does Tsukihime produce some excellent, again well-documented plugins, she (I think?) is also an active member of both the RPG Maker community in general and the community on her own site, offering helpful advice and accepting feedback for her plugins through the comment sections.
Aekashics has some great resources, this time mostly visual ones for use in battle or as appropriate throughout your project. Aekashics has a very distinctive style that is nice and consistent between all the different resources available, and they’re all very high quality. If you don’t want to use the default RPG Maker monsters but are as cack-handed as me when it comes to producing artwork, Aekashics’ site should be your first stop.
Here are a few other cool plugins I’ve been using:
PrettyGauges– a delightfully simple plugin that allows you to easily customise the rather amateurish-looking default HP, MP and suchlike gauges in RPG Maker MV.
TerraxLighting– a super-cool lighting system that allows you to use events as light sources on your maps. The radius and colour of the light sources can be adjusted, and they can even be made to “flicker” slightly to simulate fire or electronic screens. Using lighting makes a huge difference to how RPG Maker MV’s default visuals look.
VictorEngine– a series of useful plugins that run a similar gamut to Yanfly’s collection. Where VE wins out over Yanfly is in things like the customisation of visual elements like the battle screen status window and suchlike, whereas many of Yanfly’s plugins are more focused on new or optimised functionality.
I’m having a lot of fun so far. Whatever you might think of RPG Maker-produced games, there’s no denying that the software itself is an extremely fun, creative tool that allows anyone to put together something that will make them happy. It can also be a great jumping-on point to learn coding principles, even if you’re not writing your own JavaScript plugins yourself — the Event system’s pseudo-code is a good way of thinking about how things work and how you tell a computer to do things, but is simple and straightforward enough I bet even my friend James (who, when it comes to technology, is borderline retarded, which is strange because he’s otherwise a very clever chap) could make an NPC walk around and call the player a bellend.
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.
There’s a curious phenomenon in comments sections around the land. And that phenomenon is that it is seemingly the law that someone, somewhere, must hate everything. Actually, that’s badly phrased; I don’t mean that one person hates everything — though I’m sure there are people who do — but instead I mean that whatever the thing that has been posted, there will always be at least one person who dislikes it for some reason and is inevitably the sort of person who is very vocal about their dislike of it.
This seems to happen particularly frequently in sectors that already have passionate userbases, or in which the userbases are seen as being a “subculture” and/or outside the “norm” somehow. I’m thinking specifically of the video games and anime sectors here — and before you start on me, for all the massive steps forward these media have made in terms of mainstream acceptance over the last 20-30 years they are still indelibly tarred with the “geek” brush to one degree or another.
Today, I was exploring the RPG Maker community who, by all accounts, appear to be a fairly friendly and helpful bunch for the most part, as I’ve previously mentioned. I was curiously browsing through some of the other users’ projects in progress and came across a few interesting-sounding games. One of the users noted that they had submitted their game to Steam Greenlight, the process whereby a game can end up being sold on Valve’s popular PC gaming digital download storefront if it gets enough positive votes from the community.
The game, by all accounts, sounded interesting and unconventional, and something I’d be intrigued to play. It was an “artistic” game, for want of a better word, designed as a means for the author to show what it was like living with depression. The author said upfront on the site that it was a mostly-linear, narrative-centric experience with a lot of text, and made no apologies for this fact. (For people like me, the terms “narrative-centric” and “lot of text” are selling points, not things to be ashamed of!)
Sadly, the Greenlight comments section was less than supportive for various reasons, featuring disparaging remarks for everything from it being “another depression game” (oh, sorry, there have been so many of those) to dismissing it simply because it’s an RPG Maker game. I’ve made my feelings on the latter point quite clear in the past, but they bear repeating: if a tool is available to help someone realise their artistic vision, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t use it, regardless of how many other people are also using it. And besides, some of my favourite games in recent memory have been RPG Maker titles — Corpse Party, To The Moon, Cherry Tree High Comedy Club… all of them were made in earlier versions of RPG Maker that were considerably less sophisticated than the excellent toolset that is VX Ace.
But I digress. The point is that the comments section was filled with hate for the sake of hate rather than actually constructive feedback. The fact that the game in question (Actual Sunlight, I believe it was called) was “another depression game” and an RPG Maker project had nothing to do with its quality, or its “value” to the Steam community as a whole, and yet these things were used as reasons to reject it, without even bothering to check it out.
In the anime sector, it seems that it’s fashionable to hate on whatever the biggest name show is at the time. Most recently, this has been seen with Sword Art Online, which I found to be a rollicking good time with an astonishingly spectacular soundtrack, some memorable characters and an interesting, intriguing and pleasingly mature (for the most part, anyway) storyline. It was a good show, in short; while it perhaps wasn’t the most intelligent anime you’ll ever see, it was certainly far more than a dumb, formulaic show.
Perhaps not something everyone would want to watch, no, but certainly far better than the overly-negative comments that would appear on J-List’s Facebook page any time site owner Peter Payne posted a piece of artwork relating to SAO. (Granted, J-List’s Facebook page is a place where any time a picture of a vaguely attractive anime girl is posted, one specific user will always be along within three comments of the start of the thread to helpfully inform everyone that “[he] would fuck her”, so it’s perhaps not the best place to go for objective criticism, but still; you’d expect a community of Japanophiles such as the followers of J-List’s page to be a bit more enthusiastic about the things they supposedly like!)
I honestly don’t get why this happens, and it seems to happen a lot. Why waste your time on hate when there is so much stuff out there to get you excited? Wouldn’t you rather feel happy and intrigued by something than angry or upset?
