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.

1177: Dev Diary 2

Progress has been continuing on the RPG Maker game I’m working on (which is called One Year Later if you missed the slightly spoilerish post a while back). I’m very pleased with how things are going, because I’ve pretty much figured out How It All Works and am picking up speed with actually making things happen.

Here’s the gist of things. All of this will be common knowledge to the player before they start playing if they read the accompanying “manual” or help file or website or whatever I put out alongside it, so these aren’t really spoilers. I will keep specific plot details that aren’t immediately apparent under wraps for now, however — I’d like people to explore this game’s story with “beginner’s mind”, after all!

The game is set one year after the conclusion of a typical JRPG, when our plucky band of heroes drawn together by fate successfully defeated the demonic overlord T’Bon and restored peace to the land. At the end of their adventure, they had one last meal together in a pub they’d grown fond of, and agreed to meet back up again exactly one year later. The game begins on that day.

There are six main characters in the story.

Amarysse “Ami” Jerhynsson is the game’s main character. She’s a 30-year old woman from the farming village of Wishford, the destruction of which set her on her path to adventure when she was rescued from the wreckage by a wandering mercenary. She became the de facto leader of the group thanks to her level-headedness and rationality, despite the fact she never saw herself as particularly remarkable. Since her adventure, she’s spent the last year helping the citizens of Wishford rebuild their town, and has been taking after her parents by tending the farm beside her house, much to the pleasure of Wishford’s citizens.

Daren “Dax” Zael is the mercenary who rescued Ami from the wreckage of Wishford. No-one knows exactly how old he is, but he appears to be of a similar age or slightly older than Ami in appearance. As soon as he opens his mouth, however, his immature sense of humour and crudeness generally makes people think a little differently about his otherwise seemingly noble bearing. He was a strong fighter and was always the first into battle to protect his friends from harm.

Feena Denimore is a priestess of the Order, the organised religion that worships the divine entity known only as “The Goddess”. She is skilled in divine magic and is a beloved priestess, but when she lets her hair down outside of her holy duties, she’s cheeky, spunky and flirtatious, and more than capable of drinking someone like Dax under the table.

Hiro Nagase is a teenage boy who spent his formative years learning to fight with a sword under the tutelage of his father. These skills were put to the test shortly after the party came across him in his seemingly-abandoned family home — his parents had been killed by T’Bon’s forces, and Hiro decided to tag along with the party in an attempt to get revenge. He likes to make out he is braver than he is, gets easily embarrassed and frequently says stupid things without thinking them through first.

Lily Cole is a teenage girl who came from the small fishing village of Bannford. She once had the strange ability to summon “Guardians” — supernatural creatures thought to be nothing but a myth — and eventually used this skill to seal away T’Bon once and for all. Since the final battle, she lost her powers and is now nothing but a normal, rather cheerful and optimistic teenage girl — traits she somehow managed to retain even in the party’s darkest hours.

Zero is a powerful, knowledgeable mage whose real name is unknown. The party rescued him from torture at the hand of one of T’Bon’s lieutenants, and he adopted the name “Zero” as a mark of spite against those who had abused him — an attempt to reclaim the word and give it positive connotations. Zero is typically stony-faced, contemplative and quiet, but occasionally displays a dry, dark sense of humour.

—

The game begins with Amarysse leaving home and heading for the capital, then meeting up with her former comrades-in-arms. Exactly where the story goes from there depends on the choices the player makes as Amarysse — which aren’t always explicit choices from a menu. Sometimes taking a particular action (or choosing not to act) has an effect on the unfolding story and its eventual conclusion. There will be multiple endings as well as a “true ending” that is only accessible once certain conditions have been met. Discovering the “true ending” will require that the player make use of the New Game+ feature to carry over certain data from one playthrough to the next when they see one of the conclusions.

Interacting with the game will largely be like a regular top-down sprite-based JRPG. Players will control Amarysse and any party members tagging along with her as they visit various locations. The emphasis is very much on the story, so what needs to be done next in order to advance the plot will always be very obvious, though charging straight for the next story trigger without completing certain side objectives may mean you miss out on certain events — or perhaps trigger new ones later. Through the New Game+ system, the game will reward the player for experimenting and trying all the possibilities in various playthroughs.

Amarysse collects “topics” as discussions unfold between her, the party members and other incidental characters. Topics have three levels — at “bronze” level, they’re something Amarysse is curious about; at “silver” level, they’re something she’s found something out about and wants to know more; at “gold” level, they’re a truth she’s discovered beyond any doubt. Advancing the plot will sometimes require Amarysse to use the topics she has collected to trigger various events or discussions between characters. At other times, she will have the opportunity to relax a little by herself and contemplate some of the things that are weighing on her mind. Sometimes, whether or not Amarysse has knowledge of a particular topic will have a significant impact on whether or not she can resolve a critical situation.

Currently, I have a plot outline in my mind. I know how the whole thing is going to end, and I know a few snippets of things that are going to happen along the way. I just have to work out the specifics, which I’ve found tend to flow quite naturally once I start actually composing scenes. I’m very much looking forward to exploring these characters through writing, and I hope some of you will take the opportunity to explore them through playing the game when it’s finished. At present, I have no idea when that will be, but I will, of course, keep you posted!

1168: Dev Diary

I’ve been working a bit on my game over the weekend. And just to prove I’m not just all talk, I present to you two world exclusive screenshots.

oneyearlater — “The Strip”, the main shopping street in the capital city of Acathlata. That’s the department store Don Lewis on the left, and on the right is the Green Boar Inn. Further to the right out of shot are the Fighters’ and Mages’ Guilds and the pub The Tail of the Dog.

oneyearlater2 — Protagonist Amarysse (left) and her erstwhile companion Feena (right) shoot the breeze in The Tail of the Dog.

“Boy,” you’re probably thinking. “That sure looks like an RPG Maker game.” And, of course, you’d be absolutely right. The relatively generic appearance and use of stock assets is deliberate for several reasons, though: firstly, it allows me to concentrate on what I feel is the important part of the game, which is the writing and overall structure, and secondly, if you read my vaguely spoilerish post from a few days ago you’ll doubtless be familiar with why I’ve chosen to stick with the “default” aesthetic for the moment.

What these screenshots perhaps don’t clearly show is that I’ve built a little on the stock assets with some additional material from the RPG Maker community and beyond. The portraits you see in the second image, for example, were created by RPG Maker community members Archeia and Scinaya, who took the time to make some “emote” variations on the stock characters’ portraits. This means that I no longer have to have characters smiling even while they were being angry or upset, which was a little disconcerting.

What you really can’t tell from the screenshots is the fact that I’ve found some great royalty-free music to use for the game’s soundtrack. While I would absolutely love to compose the entire score to the whole game, again that’s something that would distract from the important part of things, which is actually writing and implementing the game’s story and structure. I’m not ruling out the possibility of composing a custom soundtrack in the near future, but for now I’m very happy with the high-quality stuff I’m presently using, as it suits the atmosphere I’m going for quite nicely.

Insofar as the story and scripting is going, it’s going slowly but well. I’m almost finished with the interactive introductory sequence, which is probably one of the more complicated parts of the game, as it will branch off into more linear “paths” shortly after all that concludes. I’ve been taking care to incorporate hooks for my intended game structure, which will help encourage people to replay with variations on scenes and alternative ways for events to unfold according to the player’s past actions and decisions. I’ve implemented these in such a way as to make them hopefully seem pretty “seamless” when playing the game for the first time, but those with a keen eye playing through again will notice the places where it diverges slightly. I believe doing this sort of thing is quite important, as no-one really wants to read through the exact same material several times just to see the whole game. Plus there are other rewards and incentives in place to explore all your available options, too, but I’ll refrain from discussing that side of things too much for now.

Perhaps most importantly, I’ve figured out my ending, or more accurately, my “true ending”. Again, no spoilers for now, but the structure of the game will be such that you’ll need to play through all the “normal” paths and meet a couple of other conditions (which I’m debating whether or not I should make explicit) in order to see the definitive conclusion to the game’s narrative. I can see how the ending will unfold in my mind’s eye, and it’s a good ‘un — in my humble opinion, anyway. I actively want to get the story to that point, to bring the characters to that finale. I’m half-tempted to make the finale events now while they’re fresh in my mind then go back and fill in the middle part of the game, in fact. But we’ll see.

So far as writing the rest of it goes, I have a vague idea of how each path is going to go, but not the specifics as yet. I have a firm idea of who all these characters “are” in my mind, though, which will make it easier to write scenes with them as I progress onwards. I like the characters, too, which is important, and the introductory scenes I’ve created so far hopefully help to establish their personalities and other character traits. The challenge from here is, of course, ensuring they remain believable and consistent as the rest of the story progresses, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

Anyway. In summary, things are going slowly but well. I’m enjoying myself. And hopefully at some point in the next fifteen years I’ll have something more to show those of you who are interested.

1160: Spoilers Ahead

After writing yesterday’s post and doing a little more work on it today, I’ve decided that I would actually quite like to talk about my RPG Maker project a little more rather than being unnecessarily vague and obtuse about it. Those of you reading who like the concept might be able to give me some motivation to continue with it in the long-term, then, which is probably going to be a valuable thing if (when, more likely) this initial burst of enthusiasm runs out.

However, I am also conscious that discussing some things about this project may constitute spoilers of various descriptions, so I am going to add a “read more” tag to this post so those who would like the finished product to remain a complete surprise can avoid it if they desire.

So, without further ado, click the link to continue reading if you want to… otherwise, I’ll see you tomorrow!

Continue reading “1160: Spoilers Ahead” →

1136: Thoughts on RPG Maker

I read this piece by Robert Boyd of Zeboyd Games earlier. Now, I normally agree with Mr. Werezompire on a lot of things, but I take issue with a few things he says about RPG Maker in this article, which was posted shortly after the latest version RPG Maker VX Ace hit the Steam store a while back.

Boyd is quite right to note that this is the first time a piece of software such as RPG Maker has hit a mainstream digital download storefront for PC — past iterations of the software were sold directly by the publisher via a rather cumbersome e-commerce solution, so to get it on Steam is a big step forward in both accessibility and visibility. Boyd is also right to note that lowering the barrier of entry to creating games through tools such as RPG Maker also encourages everyone to want to have a go — and that this can result in a glut of “incomplete, buggy, generic, or downright awful games”. (It also results in people who are otherwise unable to get their heads around programming becoming empowered to realise their own digital dreams and creativity.)

What I take a certain degree of umbrage to is his assertion that it is a “general RPG maker” and thus ill-suited to producing anything more than the most generic JRPG possible. While it is true that the default art assets and music provided with the game are aimed at people who want to get a fairly generic JRPG up and running quickly, the very nature of the software is that it is completely customisable depending on how much “individuality” you want to give your project. You can have something fairly convincing up and running in a matter of minutes using the default assets… but with a bit of time and artistic talent (or at least creativity), you can completely revamp the default “look” to anything you please. Not only that, but by using its built-in Ruby-based scripting language, you can completely overhaul the way the game works — battle system, menus, method of moving around the game world, anything can be modified or added if you know what you’re doing. And even if you don’t, there’s a lively and active community out there that has put together plenty of free scripts for anyone to make use of.

This isn’t “trying to modify RPG Maker to do things it wasn’t really intended to do,” as Boyd asserts. This is, in fact, using RPG Maker in the manner in which it was intended for power users — and it also aptly demonstrates one of the most admirable things about the application: the fact that it is simple and accessible enough for beginners to use, yet powerful and flexible enough for more advanced users to take complete control of. You only have to look at examples like To The Moon and Cherry Tree High Comedy Club, both of which were created in RPG Maker XP (two versions previous to the current edition) to see what is possible — and to be fair to Boyd, he does at least mention these titles in his post.

Boyd makes some fair points in the article, but what I don’t like much is the underlying tone that “if you’re using RPG Maker rather than programming it yourself, you’re doing it wrong.” While it is undoubtedly more satisfying to program your own engine from scratch and see a complete game come together from literally nothing, not everyone has the time, ability and/or C#-speaking friends to be able to do that. Plus if there’s a perfectly good tool already out there to realise what you want to do… why shouldn’t you use it?

#oneaday Day 794: Brilliant Game Idea, No Technical Talent? No Problem!

I’ve mentioned a number of times on this ‘ere blog that I don’t really have the knack of programming. I can sort of do it if I have plenty of reference material to hand or if I’m following a tutorial, but it’s the sort of thing that if I don’t do it regularly, it just all falls out of my head and makes a mess on the carpet.

Despite not being able to program, however, that hasn’t stopped me from wanting to make my own games at times, and I know at least a few of you reading might be interested in how to go about doing that for yourself. So I thought I’d gather a bit of information regarding game maker packages that I’ve used in the past (or at least heard of) in the hope that you might find something that tickles your fancy.

So without further ado, then, here goes.

Clickteam products: Games Factory, Multimedia Fusion

My first experience with making games that weren’t written in Atari BASIC was with Clickteam’s Klik and Play, an application for Windows that allowed you to create games without any knowledge of programming whatsoever. The program actually contained everything you might need to get creating straight away — it included basic art tools, a library of sound effects and music to use in your games as well as plenty of example sprites, background art and interface elements.

Klik and Play’s strength was in its ease of use. Handling all aspects of how a game worked was very much like a logic puzzle, or a series of “If… Then…” statements. For example “If” the player presses the fire button, “Then” the spaceship they control should shoot a missile. “If” an enemy collides with the spaceship, “Then” a fart sound should be played and the player’s lives should be reduced by one.

One great thing that Klik and Play did was provide several means to determine all the possible conditions you might want to test for in your game. You could create the statements manually if you knew in advance what was going to happen, or you could enter the “Step Through Editor”, start your game running and every time something that hadn’t happened before happened for the first time, Klik and Play would ask you what you wanted it to do. After a short while of using this tool, you started to think logically about all the possible things that might happen throughout the course of a single screen of the game you were making, and your efficiency would skyrocket. Of course, even when you know what you’re doing this is still considerably slower than a C++ wizard coding their own routines, but for those of us who always put curly braces in the wrong place, it was a godsend.

The only downside to Klik and Play was that it was fairly limited in what it could do. There weren’t many global variables to store information in, for example, making more complex games difficult to create. And file management for save games and the like was practically non-existent. You were pretty much limited to making simple arcade games — not that this was necessarily a bad thing.

Many of these issues were resolved by subsequent releases in the series. First came The Games Factory, which added more global variables, the ability to have a scrolling screen for levels that were bigger than a single screen in size, and more sophisticated event handling. This was then followed by Multimedia Fusion, which added even more high-end features designed for people who wanted to build full applications and screensavers rather than just games. Most recently, Clickteam have launched The Games Factory 2 and Multimedia Fusion 2 as two separate products (with Multimedia Fusion having a pro-level “Developer” version available) which are available from their official website. The latest versions feature the ability to export to Flash for publication on the Web, and iOS app format. Android and XNA (Xbox 360) support is reportedly on the way.

RPG Maker

I mentioned this yesterday, but it’s worth putting in this list simply because of how full-featured it is. Having gone through a number of previous iterations on both PC and consoles, Enterbrain’s role-playing game construction kit RPG Maker is now one of the most flexible but easy-to-use game making tools on the planet. It doesn’t even have to be a role-playing game that you make with it — if you’re looking to create a visual novel or top-down perspective adventure game, it’s a great solution for that, too.

RPG Maker comes with a ton of preset graphics, sounds and music for you to use in your own games allowing you to get started straight away. All you need to do is draw the maps, write the story and test it out, all of which can be done via the program’s simple interface. Meanwhile, more advanced users can easily add custom graphics, sounds, music, enemies, items, equipment and characters, and people who actually know a bit of coding can even rewrite the game engine using the program’s “RGSS” scripting language to create brand new menu and battle systems. And don’t worry if you don’t have a clue how to do that yourself but find the built-in systems to be not so good — using community-developed scripts has long been an expected part of RPG Maker development. The community is lively, helpful, full of ideas and covers a broad range of talents — so if you have a great idea for a story but have no idea how to write original music or draw custom graphics, you can probably find someone to help you out.

RPG Maker’s latest version is known as RPG Maker VX Ace and is the version to go for out of the three currently available on the official website.

Adventure Game Studio

Free tool Adventure Game Studio allows you to create point and click adventure games of the LucasArts or Sierra ilk. There’s a little bit of a learning curve involved in getting started with this one, and it doesn’t come with many sample resources to get started with, so you’ll have to draw your own graphics (or recruit a friend who knows what they’re doing).

Once you get the hang of it, though, you’ll be able to create convincing point-and-click adventures featuring plenty of dialogue (fully voiced if you have friends willing to step in for voice acting duties) and object-based puzzles. Lest you worry about the quality of a free tool, Adventure Game Studio has been used to create a number of very well-received projects, including the popular Ben There, Dan That! games.

AGS is free, unlike the previous titles on this list. Get it here.

Ren’Py

Ren’Py is a visual novel engine designed for creating combinations of text, music, sound effects and visuals to tell a story. It’s relatively simple to use to get a basic non-interactive story up and running, and a bit of experimentation will get you putting together multi-path adventures with plenty of choices in no time. Like AGS, though, it doesn’t come with many sample resources, so you’d better get handy with a Wacom tablet and scribbling some art before you get started on putting your game together. That or, again, ask a friend.

Despite the inherent (and usually deliberate) limitations of the visual novel genre, Ren’Py is a surprisingly flexible tool. For some great examples of what’s possible with it, check out Christine Love’s three games Digital: A Love Story, Don’t Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story and Analogue: A Hate Story, all of which were created using Ren’Py (and all of which employ some fascinating storytelling techniques that are unique to the interactive medium).

Ren’Py is also free. Grab it here.

Other stuff I haven’t tried

There’s a wealth of other free and paid game making software out there, most of which I haven’t tried. Here’s a few you may want to take a look at.

Game Maker from YoYoGames is well-regarded as a flexible tool which can be used to make a wide variety of different games for the Web, standalone release or mobile release.

Stencyl is a tool designed to make it easy to create Flash, iOS and Android games without the need for coding.

GameSalad is a Mac-only product similar to Stencyl, designed for making iOS, Web and standalone games without needing to know coding.

The Game Creators carry a range of products for aspiring developers of various experience levels, ranging from those who have an idea of how to work with BASIC to those who simply want to draw a map for a first-person shooter and run around in it.

If you’ve come across any more, feel free to share in the comments for the benefit of anyone else who may be interested.

#oneaday Day 793: It Takes More Than Seven Days to Build a World

I’m making a game. This is not the first time I have said these words, nor will it be the last time, but I have a good feeling about this one. A vision. Only one past amateur development project I worked on (known as Pie-Eater’s Destiny) was ever completed (twice if you count the subsequent “Gold Edition” remake) and a third (The Adventures of Dave Thunder) was going extremely well but then unfortunately lost when an old computer died without warning. (Note to self: BACK THE FUCK UP) This one, though, feels like an idea that has legs, and I’m looking forward to bringing it to life, to mix metaphors for a moment.

No, you won’t be getting any details on what this project is just yet save for the fact that I’m using it as a means of trying out the latest version of Enterbrain’s excellent RPG Maker software, RPG Maker VX Ace. I’ve used several iterations of this package over the years and each has its own quirks and foibles. Previous version RPG Maker VX turned out to be a bit of a misstep which seemingly stripped out features rather than adding them, but from my limited experience so far, VX Ace seems to be an excellent piece of software with plenty of flexibility.

One of my favourite parts of creating a game — or indeed any story, since I typically have aspirations to create narrative-focused games, even if I never finish them — is creating the world and the characters who populate it. When building a map in RPG Maker, I’ll find myself visualising its context in the world — in the case of a village or town, I’ll think to myself “right, this person lives here, this person runs this shop, follow this path and you’ll get to…” and so on. In the case of a dungeon I’ll resist the temptation to use the random map generator and instead design a dungeon which makes some degree of contextual sense, even if it may descend into bizarreness at times. (The lava flow in the opening “wine cellar” dungeon at the beginning of The Adventures of Dave Thunder was a particular highlight, which our hero lampshaded quite nicely at the time he came across it for the first time, as I recall.)

I’ve always been this way with level construction. The earliest instance I can remember was Wolfenstein 3D, whose map editor gave me many, many hours of enjoyment and, thanks to CompuServe, even netted me $200 when ten of my levels were included in the official Apogee “Super Upgrades” expansion pack for the game. When building my selection of maze-like levels for id’s Nazi-bashing shooter, I enjoyed thinking of the “real” context for these rooms and tunnels. As such, I ended up with some memorable “setpiece” confrontations (or as close as you could get to a “setpiece” in Wolf3D’s limited engine, anyway) — the one that sticks in my mind most is the one where you’ve crept through some moss-filled corridors in search of a Nazi secret base and open a door only to discover that a briefing is apparently in progress. One of the “officer” enemies was standing at the front of the room next to a “map” texture, and the rest of the room was full of the standard trooper soldiers all facing him. (I wasn’t a monster for game balancing; I provided the player with a chaingun and plenty of ammo before sending them in to mow down this little gathering. Hey, I was a teenager. Subtlety wasn’t in my vocabulary.)

The point is, I found myself thinking carefully about every block I put down, every object on the map. Everything had a purpose, a place, a story behind it. I enjoyed visualising that world in my mind and then bringing it to life on my computer screen. It was inordinately satisfying to be able to hoon around a world of my own creation and think this came from my BRAIN. I feel the same way every time I create a new map in RPG Maker, every time I make a track in TrackMania, every time I build something in Minecraft. And if I had any clue whatsoever how 3D level editors worked (I’ve tried and failed numerous times) I have no doubt I’d feel the same way there too.

As you may have gathered, today has been about world-building. I’ve only created a tiny, tiny piece of what will eventually become this game’s world, but already it’s bringing those old feelings back. Hopefully they’ll provide the motivation to take me through to actually finishing a game project for once.

#oneaday Day 696: Exclusive Preview!

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.

#oneaday Day 100: What a Novelty

[Side note: Day 100! Yay. This marks my 448th day of blogging every day. I’ve been half-tempted to start numbering the posts from when I originally started again, but then that will just get confusing. Perhaps I’ll put the total number at the end of each post or something. I don’t have an eventual goal number in mind—I fully intend to keep doing this until I can’t do it any more, for whatever reason. But given that I continued writing through the disastrous events of last year, it’ll take something pretty severe to stop me being here every day. Now, on to your regularly scheduled blog post.]

I can’t program. Actually, that’s a lie; I wrote a very good Treasure Hunt game in ATARI BASIC once. It used Graphics Mode 2, a custom character set, featured a randomly-generated playfield and custom sound effects. Okay, it perhaps wasn’t “very good” but it was at least a completed project. Since then, though, my programming knowledge has tailed off somewhat. It’s when everyone stopped using line numbers that it got confusing. I know ditching line numbers was actually a good thing in that you could more easily insert code where it needed to go rather than having to resort to increasingly-convoluted GOSUB/RETURN subroutines, but as soon as all these punctuation rules started to come in? Hmmm.

Perhaps it’s just that I haven’t spent enough time trying to learn one language. I spent a bit of time doing JavaScript and managed to get some fancy DHTML working, but have since forgotten it. I did some Java once, though it didn’t do much. I worked my way through the first two chapters of a C# (pronounced “C-sharp”, for anyone who had been wondering about it for as long as I had before I eventually found out) book and thought I was doing pretty well until I got to the first “independent project” type chapter and completely failed to produce the program required.

This is why I enjoy tools that allow you to express your creativity without having to know how to write a complete program. Sure, if you need to do something exciting, you can (and probably will) delve into scripting, but for the most part, the built-in tools are enough to get something up and running.

Over the years, I’ve used many different tools like this. By far my most beloved (and now outdated) is Klik & Play from Clickteam, which later became Games Factory and Multimedia Fusion. These required absolutely no programming knowledge whatsoever and simply a logical mind to figure out a series of “When this happens, make this happen” statements. Winner. And surprisingly flexible.

I’m also a big fan of the RPG Maker series, especially the later ones that do include a scripting language that allows people far cleverer than me to completely replace the game’s battle system with something cool.

Most recently, I’ve come across Novelty, which is a tool for making Japanese-style visual novels. This is a completely free application—though still in beta—and is one of the most polished pieces of free software I’ve ever seen. It’s incredibly flexible and allows for everything from barely-interactive “click to continue” visual novels that don’t require any player decisions, to more in-depth Phoenix Wright-style affairs with buttons, hotspots, branching story paths and all sorts. There’s not only a scripting language, but also an impressive markup language for creating graphical assets. There’s no need to delve into these if you don’t want to, of course, but for “power users” they’ll be a boon I’m sure.

My only trouble with tools like these is that I have trouble getting started on something. I get some grand plan in my mind and either end up getting daunted by all the preparatory work which will need to be done (gathering/creating assets, planning and whatnot) or find myself starting, getting too ambitious and bumping into an insurmountable roadblock.

Still, it’s nice to know these tools are out there for creative types. I have idle plans to experiment with making some sort of visual novel, but whether or not that will ever happen is anyone’s guess.

void blog(string bollocks)
{
     Object@ myBlog = GetObject("Blog");
     if (myBlog !is null)
     {
            myBlog.SetText(bollocks);
     }
}

See? No problem at all.

blog(“Cock! Piss! Partridge!”)

Day 448