You need to get a job as a game reviewer.

This weekend I'm going to have someone play test everything we have so far. That's 11 scenarios worth of game... no battle, items, equiptments, ect.... just story, dungeon crawling (and puzzles within said dungeons). It will be a blind run as they haven't has any previous experience with the game other than just knowing SK and I are working on it.

Hopefully this will give me an honest, real-world example of what people will thing of the story before we release.

How did it go?

Horrible. There were game breaking glitches that I had somehow missed. Like SK wanted to change a place from a custom area to a pre-made... but forgot to make events to lead back into the worldmap, which traps you there. Then there was the very first introductory dungeon which actually had random encounters (like back in 2005). But I tweaked the characters stats (probably sometime within this year) and now they are way to weak to be able to make it through.

After that, I was like... you know, give me a week or two to make some changes and we'll give it another shot. Luckly said tester was more than willing to agree.

I've ended up needing to buy more memory cards. I only have 1 good one right now, so to play a real game test and not test play, I need to make a trip to my computer for every card. And when you find issues like that you end up making twice as many trips... so I've ordered more memory cards to reduce the time it takes to load the cards from the computer and then to the playstation.

The impressions from the person testing were good for what was played. I'm going to ask if it's already if I ask saaid person to write up a little review for you guys once we finally get it tested up to scenario 11.

I'm putting the finishing touched on what SK has for me in Scenario 12. I'll be sending it back to him sometime later this week. That said, I'll probably start working on another video update.

My question is, though... what would you like to see? If there's anything you are curious about, I'll go get some parts of it to include with the next video update.

14 cards of scenerio data - gah! i am hoping my game doesnt come close to that or ill die of old age before i finish.

id very much like to see what a 12 card game looks like - i hope it doesnt look like a package of broken eggs (write that one down for later).

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Okay guys... second video update is here.

I cover some issues with the intro sceanrio (as per a thread about the demo), and show you two optional area's that will be closed off as of scenario 12. So be sure to hit those up before then when the final game is released.

i cant view it. it goes into a party poker ad the second i click on the button. upload it to youtube, its a better viewer experience.

Wow, you don't sound ANYTHING like what I expected! It's going to be weird reading your posts in your actual voice instead of my imagined voice.

The game looks real good. Also I think you did an excellent job on the quality, content, and commentary in the video. These Mag RPGM1 videos (yours and others) do impress me more than I had expected for RPGM1.

What did you mean by custom menu. Why do you call it a menu?

Also, how long it take to create the title screen. That is one of those anime maker painted images, right?

That piano mini-game is crazy. Must have took hours to make.

Interesting video. Yay, real update? Kinda makes me want to make an update of my own, but I think anything new I can show right now would be too spoilerific. But it's nice to see what you two have been up to, at least.

I guess you are talking about the piano mini-game. And the reason is because to make it, it was quite similar to the custom menu for changing party members from the first video update a page ago. (Consisting of an invisible party turning on and off switches to navigate.)

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0baj2zObEO0



Actually the only thing that utilized anime maker on the main menu screen was the T for teen logo on the left. And I only uploaded it in anime maker... I actually edited it in MS paint and uploaded it with RPGC. If you are talking about the big SOE letters, all that was is a bunch of Object 36's (pretty much just tiles) and spelled out the letters.

@ Karr - I'm still not sure why you can't see it... apparently everyone else can. Not sure what's stopping you. I wanted to upload to youtube, but they gave me the finger because it was a minute or two longer than 10 minutes... so screw them.

WOW! I need to learn to do that kind of stuff with this maker. Give me 8 or so years and I may be there.

Keep up the work! This game is going to be awesome.

@lantis: i dled ei and got the vid to work. i like your funny commentary throughout the preview.

What's RPGC?

its a tool that lets you take photo files from your computer and convert them into sprite format and vis versa.

Glad to see you're making progress. ^^
Also, Chrono Trigger influences? Just slight? =P

@ Bo - http://www.rpgmmag.com/utilities.php RPGC is there. Karr pretty much said it.

@ Gnasher - SHHHHHHHHH! *looks around suspiciously*

Actually I had to come up with a completely new form of transportation outside of RPG Maker 1's tansport spell... the reason is because of game plus mode. If someone starts a new game with an old game's save... the transport spell would still remember all the locations. There's no way to unlearn them. So that would cause game breaking bugs in a hurry. I find that this method was the next best thing... and I was able to get it to work well with the storyline. In fact, I like it MUCH more than the transport spell... which doesn't have any kind of animation. It's just a fade in fade out thing if I remember correctly.

Oh and btw, I think I've missunderstood you, Bo on your first question about the Title Screen. I was getting Title screen and Main Menu mixed up.

The title screen was actually influenced allot from Radical Dreamers. Though I did ALLOT to change it up. Though again, I used photoshop and MSpaint and converted it with RPGC.

Hey, I got a question about your party changing event. First I must say it's amazing. Second I was wonder how you did it. How did you make hitting the left arrow move to the next character and hitting up be done?

I don't know too much about the software so this could be a dumb question. Is there a way to assign buttons different commands? The only other way I can think it would be done is making an invisible charcter trapped between events. If you move left it triggers event and the arrow to switch over the next characters head. Each time you do that it would trigger a switch to change where it goes. The bottom event would have to be set to check so when you hit X on a character it is triggered.

I'm just curious. Sorry if this has been discussed somewhere else.