last night i dusted off crystal shores and decided to move ahead with production. i was dithering around with the decision to pick it up all day and ran out of distractions to keep me away.

immediately i found two mini games that was using excessive data and squeezed them down to a much more manageable size. the unable to execute command is very useful in a single screen mini game and one i will be using a lot.

the other major fix i did was finally figuring out what i wanted to do for an extra mini game event at spiral isle. i had tried so many different game idea and none of them worked out at all. i finally settled on one and even though its nothing to write home about, its enough that i can move on.

to finish this card i have quite a bit to do:

-characters names must be picked and stats close to finalized.
-magic needs to be figured out and all spells set at their proper levels.
-first bit of haidars story has to be revamped to make his story more believable.
-xikos story is missing the entire middle chuck due to a rewrite.
-one mini game needs a story in jordons story line.
-a story event needs to be built in roshans line.
-3 soldiers final scene hasnt even been scripted yet.

once all this is done this game will be ready for release and i can start work on the 4th scen card and the 2nd system card. i have around 10k scen data left to do all this so hopefully i can make it happen.

You have it organized, at least. I really think that it's half the battle when it comes down to RM.

ive been working on this slowly already. i have a serious space issue for the remaining events so ive begun the task of going over everything and removing stuff that doesnt really work well or i just cant get into. i have to finish the important story bits first then finish off the rest else ill never finish this card.

still trying to work out some angles but i have everything mostly figured out.

ive done a little bit of work lately.

the story bit for roshans line has been finalized and im somewhat satisfied with what i have. the part i dont like is the lack of any event happening during the spring festival, which im sure players would like to experience. ive decided for space reasons to revisit this later as part of the plot mechanic rather then have it play out now. not a full cop out, but well still a cop out.

the other big work ive done is changed many names of current equipment. right now its a fat list of mismatched items and poorly made names. ive changed a considerable amount of them but gave up on organizing the list. going forward im going to have to have a plan as to the order of the equipment you will get and with names that arnt confusing as to what your getting. my healing item names still suffers from bad name choice and confusion so ill have to change that yet again. i wont use generic names for my stuff as thats boring also, so many limits.

ive also finished most of the ruined city. there is some room to add to it should i have surplus space but overall it does what i need. its not anywhere as epic as i wanted it to be and lord knows im gona end up going back to correct that before its released. this part has to be awesome on epic proportions as its what people want to see most - a post apocalyptic world.

i really havent found the time or motivation to go over my magic and give it all graphical representation and sort out who gets what and where. im having a tough time coming up with adrenaline spells (hp use) that dont suck or is just another version of something else i have. 99 hp max use is really a low limit to work with when youve projected your hp to be high for effect.

i think im just going to outright axe the mini game i had in mind for jordans bit. im not feeling inspired and id rather use the space elsewhere. some of the other stuff has been such a chore to develop that i really just want to put this out and move on to a new bit. a year is too much to be farting around at the end stages of a card.

lastly, i need to sit down and figure out what major changes swaping sys data is going to cause. if something cannot change from sys card to card then i need to add it now or risk having any one out there from having a bad save should they keep a file to play my game (has anyone even done this? feed back where are you?)

Nice. I really need to do the same with my own game...

just an update.

im still working on my game. i just have some final balancing left and a few events to complete. ive rebalanced the entire game but i may go back through it and bring down the difficulty again but for the most part its all sorted. i just want to finish this card and move forward. ive spent far too much time working on the first part of my game, so much so that im tired of it lol.

moving to a new sys card will be good for production.

been working on my game some as i finished with the other crap that got in the way. ive balanced most of the 3rd card and laid out all of the event sequences. the only thing i have left to finish is the 3 soldiers bit and i have to decide if i want to do something to one shop to spice it up (having a spend ratio to get access to better goods).

beyond this ive worked on linking the save points to the extra features (which ive yet to finish laying out all the work for that) and i have to go through everything and make the big text groupings spell checked (little stuff ill try to catch as i move along). finally i have only to rework a bit of card 1 tutorial to make sure that what i say in them is really what is going on.

so with all that said and done ill be able to release the 3rd card in not to long. that leaves the 4th card to plan and ive got some interesting ideas for this card!

i will depart from the main arcs for this card. you will have full reign of a massive single town with outrageous amounts of places to explore. you will experience little to no battles during this card. the 3 cast members you will be using for this card are the 3 soldiers from the end of each card. by the 3rd card they have ended up in the current timeline, the day the earth stood still.

this card will chronicle the events slightly before and during the activation of Deus X, the Go Live event. this will bring the player up to speed on the technology of Deus and fill in the big question: what happened to humanity? this will be a significant chunk of the main story arc, but even by its conclusion there still will be many unanswered questions.

this card is going to be a huge challenge for me as i have to make a full futuristic world. this will mean more custom graphics, more out of the box thinking, and will act as a breather from the rest of the arcs for me.

at the end of the 3rd card xiko has a vision of the Go Live which is what card 4 is about. the rest of the party has been separated, some have fell into worm holes to unknown places. i have no way to link the characters together as of yet and im still not sure if i even want to or keep them apart until the very end. this will mark the turningpoint in the game, up until now the game has been liner in the timelines of each character, this is the point where they start getting caught up with the larger plot points.

A purely futuristic world in RM1? That sounds... painful. Good luck.

the future is a big part of my game and ive already used some futuristic stuff in my previous cards. this 4th card gives me the full freedom of the custom sprite slots that i had used up for other things so i can go further then before. the 3rd card has a fairly innovative post future town thats run down. i even have shop windows and such. you need to be creative to make a futuristic setting.

havent touched my game till today but thought i should give you a quick update on how im doing.

i was originally going to do the rest of the battle testing but i was kind of burnt out, having been playing other peoples games for a few days. i instead decided to go back over my early work and see if i could make certain characters more appealing story wise.

i managed to revamp a few scenes that had been lacking. those where ones from the very original production attempt of the game and where several years behind my writing. i am mostly satisfied with what ive now wrote. i will still have to go over the scenes to make sure they run as intended but they feel better.

ive also decided to eliminate save points in favor of having athena shrines save, heal, and flip a bonus switch. the killing of all those stupid save points saves me a ton of space and... what it cost me more space?! grumble. i managed to shrink down the first card again, gaining over 2k mem space! the second card lost space and there really isnt anything left to shrink down on that card - poop. that 2k space will go to making things more interactive, though id happily give it to the second card if i could.

i hate being in perpetual production but im getting closer to being satisfied with what ive built so i can move on. once card 3 is done then ill release the game.

card 3 is done and play tested. all i have left to do is a final game run to test the connections and perhaps finish the new intro bits (may not finish this and forgot it till next release). id like to release it in a few days if possible but may hold off till after my mexico trip, depends on timing.

You mean Crystal Shores is actually close to being finished?

no lol. just card 3 is. the game has many years to go at my present rate or if i can pick up the pace then it will be done much sooner. ive done a lot on it already.

so i started crystal shores again after a long hiatus. in the move i made, ups managed to destroy tons of my stuff and i lost two of my game memory cards. fortunately i had backed them up prior to leaving but my back ups are from march and i had done some work since then. after reviewing the card it looks like it was minor edits only and despite being behind i am able to continue without issues.

ive once again continued my playtesting. as i tested i made a list of inconsistencies with the game. at the end of card one i came up with a big list of stuff to fix. ive gone through nearly all of these fixes and despite needing another test playthrough of certain parts this card will be ready for market. once all cards are play tested and brought up to snuff for final parts i can do the last step which is to spell check the damn thing. for that i need a new word processor to check various sentences for spelling. this was a major issue for me as i know my spelling is awful and i want this to be a fully polished game. that shouldnt take more then a few days as i wont check every sentence but anything important or a large body of text.

due to me being short several memory cards im going to have to axe the data on some of the ones i have to go forward. this means that this edit process is the very last i will ever do on the first 3 cards, baring minor switch changes to access stuff at a later date. that should speed up the game considerably and prevent me from wasting more time backtracking through old coding. thank the lord all the work i did on recreating the system card from zero time survived. thats a whole week of work id of lost as i havent backed it up yet as it was the last thing i did before i left for edmonton!


now that i have some dedicated time, i was able to sit down and think some of my plot through a bit. i like everything that ive made so far and i think that card 4 being about the 3 soldiers in the day the world stopped is premature but a necessary step to take. i need to get my plot going forward so im not here another 10 years making this damn game. the player needs to know, and at least xiko needs to know what happened. also this will provide background for the next step which is time traveling of the characters.


part of the problem with my game is the level of complexity of the plot. i have several character story arcs, i have an overall world plot, several time specific plots, a time travel plot, the 3 soldier plot, time traveling group protecting the collapse of time plot, and several times where decisions you make change the story. in the need to work all of these together for an effective story i have to know what i plan next which is my biggest problem. i like creating story as i go along and have only a general idea of what i am doing next.

for the character plots i need to show their development through the course of the game. each character has serious issues that are crippling their lives. the player themselves are the mode for how well they overcome these issues. will the character grow and overcome their personal problems or will it consume them? do they fight those who wronged them, change the events that brought them to this point, or learn to overcome their problems? in real life there is no clear answer of what is right, everyone has their own definition of what is the correct path for them to walk. when the line becomes thin and the choice is between two impossible decisions which one do you pick? i want the player to decide how the plot will go, but still be confined to a set plot else the game grows out of control.

beyond the character is the overall arc of the story, which is very dark and ironically centers around the futuristic portion of the game though most of the game takes place in pretechnological societies. the central plot hovers around the destruction of human society. you are not out to save the world from destroying itself. the plot is about the growth you want to take for your characters. what you change for yourself will change what happens to the world. at the start of the game everything looks crystal clear, you have an idea of what went wrong, but as you interact with the plot you find that decisions are not so clear cut.

as the game centers around time travel and the paradox created by the end of the world i come to my biggest problem, how to tackle time travel, changes that occur, and what events lead to the initial paradox. this is where i have to decide what changes i can make that will alter the entire reality of the plot. if i make a change in 300ce you can be sure that by 2300ce there is massive change. will the destruction of a tribe result in an entire region from rising, will it result in a certain technology that was never invented? then you have the time travelers paradox where if i change a cardinal event of a characters life will it eliminate the character, will it create a duplicate, will it update and change the character?

of course then we get into other issues like if we want to halt the end of humanity then what event do we change. is the paradox created by the change we are making now (the event has already happened so does our action change reality or is it already reflected in what has happened?) so i think you are beginning to see the issues im facing here. over the years ive spent a great deal of time studying time travel theories and possibilities so i have a good working idea of what i want to do. ive had the ending and twists in my game for many years now so im not without ideas. the big problem is making sure all of this works and that what i make now will still be right when i make the last card. if im going back in time and changing things then i need to see them coming true in the world i am making now before it even happens.

the scope is quite frankly too damn big but i dont care. i am enjoying the plot and i know others will too. to create a deep plot centered around character growth and the finer points of technological destruction is something i personally enjoy and the main reason i havent finished my game sooner. i just hope i dont have 4 different cards going because of decisions that where made early in the game that changed too much of what is happening now.

im looking forward to how this will turn out just as much as you all are.

when i had said i was ready for launch i had no idea that i could still do so much. over the last few days i have pulled space out of n dimensional time. i have crunched event data down to the single data point of difference. i have made tough choices between using system data or event and i have prioritized text wording in ways even the english language is surprised to of found. this weeks work will be written in ballads and preformed for many centuries to come.

i decided that my game needed one good last full playthrough in game mode to test out the game the way it was meant to be played. i am glad i made this run as it gave me a real picture of the time it takes to clear the game (5 to 6 hours so far) and disallows some cheating so i know how difficult it is to play though some sections.

i made 3 pages of notes, both sides, and corrected almost everything. though i went though the entire game with the fanatic zeal of a suicide bomber i found that i needed to make no major changes, that everything i have is exactly what i wanted it to be. anything i didnt like was extreme nitpicking and i slightly bent to that feeling and still found nothing to change.

i have one thing to say about this game: its f*cking good. in the words of the duke, after [10] f*cking years it better be. this is the game i wanted to end up with when i first started, im just disappointed this isnt an announcement that the whole game will be released. i need to finish this game so the elderly can experience this before they die.

so ive done all the editing that is possible and ive laid a damn solid foundation. i release tomorrow or the next depending on how much time i get to finish the finishing touches on card 3 and the intro set. i want to work on the new card so bad that i will fly into that after i release these cards.

i am going to need feedback on what im doing as my games been a bit dry for activity which is understandable as i havent released anything but update for a years and some now. this release will be a big boon as it greatly improves on the first two cards and adds the 3rd card which hasnt been released yet.


some of whats on the 3 cards

minigames
-card flip game
-tekken style fighting game that not as good as takes
-pokerish (10 card, nothing more complex then a house i think)
-hi low game that works with the pokerish game to increase your bet
-propositions for some fun jobs a la tactics that will reward you.
-make a fake report and earn a prize.
-several kinds of smash or avoid stuff mini games and one cannon shot avoiding thing

big features
-you can swap from the into card (bonus features) from the main character select and the end of each card. this allows you to access a party re equip section which i havent totally finished yet, a party switch place, a place to spend complete keys for great loot (like ff4 legendary weapon room?), and something else that probably wont make it into this card due to some unknowns about card 4. each card you complete will unlock a new feature for a total of 8 features to unlock. one much later one is a ff7 battle arena style game which is going to rock all night long.

-you of course can select to play any of the 4 members of the main story arc in any order you want. i will tell you now that this has massive ramifications on how your game experience is because of plot and the items you get in one playthrough. in the future i could complicate it further by having exclusive scenes depending on the order of your choice but thats for the future. the biggest problem is keeping tract of the switches. even with a switch guide its still a hellish mess.

-the magic duplicator doors that everyone likes is still outrageously rich but also balanced to not give insane items unless you sacrifice for them. the duplicator keys will not always be enough to loot every item.

-i have a cheater set for anyone who hates battles so they can play the game with instant victory battles to speed up the game. i use only one point that has a random battles so you can avoid battles if you want too. if you lose a battle there is increasing penalties but the game still reserves the right to hit you with a bad pun or some shenanigans.

-every enemy has different choices depending if you beat them or not. some enemies are well worth not defeating (loosing to them) while others offer you a great reward if you have the tenacity to beat them.

-contrary to previous thoughts the choices in my game do make an impact. its not very noticeable now and admittedly only a few times i have used major event choices but some npcs do say different things and certain scenes are different too. as the later cards come out you will see these ramification in plain sight.

-plenty of interactive events. i have lavished events on anything that looked like it would be good to add a comment on. you can find treasure in hidden places, a funny note about a stump, or learn the back history of a displaced society. your characters talk and make comments on things too so you will feel their personality.

-custom sprites like nothing you have ever seen. i have already made a crapload of sprites and the list is going to climb. when finished this game will boast the most number of custom sprites made. the next futuristic sprites i need to make are going to be stellar.

-a great and innovative map set. ive put a lot of effort into my custom maps and ive worked hard to make sure my stock maps are personalized and interactive too. ive been creative with map layers and what items are.

-the wholes things open and unlocked so you can just poke it open and take a gander at how i did it.

jesus there is so much its unreal. im not even gona tell you what i got planned.