In the second video are those custom doors on the castle? I've been wanting to ask you that for a while.

I haven't used a custom door anywhere, so even though I'm not sure what door you are talking about, it's probably part of a preset.

What I'm talking about is at 1:30. It might just be a pre-set that I've never noticed.

those doors you speak of are one of the premade maps and its a castle on a floating rock/island. you can be creative and get around that limitation but you cant open the door so be aware of that. most people wont come across it because when viewing the map you dont initially see it and it looks like another generic grass and castle base map.


id be interested in seeing a video update of some of the past stuff. believe it or not, its these types of videos that keep me pushing forward on my game. it sets my creative juices flowing, it encourages me to think that maybe someone out there cares enough to play my game, and it gives me a morality boost for no apparent reason.

as for the text...

i know precisely the pitfalls of endless text. less is better, integration is best, and interesting is cardinal. the longest game ive played is the spiteful dead and by the end i found that i was glossing over the text. the key here is to keep the player interested. this is done well by having supper fun parts spread through the game so that the player expects that there is another fun part coming and he just needs to tough out the boring bits. the best scenario is of course taking the fat wads of endless text and animating the scene. use flashbacks, add effects, have movement, change music, add sound - anything and everything to break up the monotony of different shaped lines. of course having less text is also good. make your words concise, make them poignant. by all means have the melodrama needed to flesh out characters and story, but do it in a way where your not using redundant words or going over ideas that the player has heard before or would be expected to know.

text does eat ungodly amounts of space. because of this i have to eliminate backtracking so the player doesnt have to load new data every time a scene ends. you may wish to break up the game and have it load two data bits to conserve memory. perhaps by breaking the data after each word you could use one card per world at the end phase of your game if space forces your game into unreasonable amounts of card changes? this can complicate your game a bit and is still annoying.

overall i must say im very pleased by what i see. i really do need to see these massive epic games to keep pushing on mine. i dont know what ill do when every other game is finished and im the only one left working on mine but who knows? your fortunate to have a second captain on your ship, that way you have another head for ideas and someone else to take some of the work too. this as you already know can be a double edged sword as you rely on them to finish their section or even become resistant when you need to make a necessary change. keep pushing, i cant way to play it!

Sorry about how long it's been, but I pretty much cover everything there is to talk about in this one. Feel free to comment.

I think we are finally going to be able to get the ball rolling again. I'm rather happy.

Also, here's the imaged I used for the illustration of the magic system:



Also, let me know what you guys think of a possible demo.

Great. Get back to work, you SLACKER!

Personally, I'd love to play any new demos. If nothing else, it helps confirm to me that the project is still underway, and since the last demo ended on a bit of a cliffhanger, I'm eager to see more.

How about: Lightning comes from the air (therefor is of the air) and Fire burns the air?

I have to say, I prefer video updates to posts with just text. I may be lazy but I actually pay attention and I don't skip over anything, and I absorbed and retained the content. Keep em coming.

But fire can not exist without air.

Also, I'm glad you like them. I like doing them as well... even though I'm really bad about saying "ummm", "uhhh", "you know", and many others at a horrible rate. Probably won't be doing another one till I actually have some real work done on the game. Last 2 vids had litterally no game content.

Well, I thought I'd go ahead and make a normal post update. There really isn't anything really to constitute a video, so here it is:

We've finally finished off Scenario 13 and have no begun work on Scenario 14. We are getting really really close to the end of the game. Outside of optional side-quests and such, there are only a single town and 5 dungeons (4 minor before the final) and all the text within. While it sounds like we are THIS close, we really do have a good deal of work ahead of us. Instead of setting a date (because I can never seem to meet those) I'll set a number of scenario cards. And it looks like it'll be 17. I think it'll take both 14 and 15 to set up for the file leg of the game... which will be 16. Though I kind of expect the end of the game to push on to a 17th card... at least, that's what I think.

Anyways, I've been putting a LOT of hours of work in on the past scenarios. I've begun bug hunting... and I've found a good few of them. I was actually going to hold off on this till we begun playtesting, but I really want to do work, I guess there's no reason not to, really. So a good chunk of the game is already being combed up and down for anything that looks amiss. I found some issues with that piano mini-game... which exsists on 3 different scenario cards. So I had to make the same change three times. Fun fun stuff. I expect a lot of this to happen later down the road, but whatever I can take of now, I don't have to do later. I may even be able to set our percentage meter to 75 soon. Yay.

Other than that, I've made quite the overhaul on the offline website. I'm no pro at HTML, but I think it'll pass. It seems to still have issues with IE (go figure) but it runs just fine in Firefox. haven't viewed it in any other browsers yet... Also, I've updated the Arc Arath Media thread. It's no longer 56k warning thanks to the lovely spoiler tags... well, until you click on a section, but whatever. I've added some more stuff to it too, if you are bored enough.

That's about all I have, so I'm going to go back to my bug searching...

lol @ we're not dead pic choice.

i really wana play this game/ the demo.

as for demos being crappy. the whole point of a demo is for us to gauge if this game is something we would be interested in - the feel more then anything. of course its impossible to showcase the whole game or what it will be about ect. but its great to wet our teeth.

cant wait till this game gets out. it will set a high bar for mine. ive been working feverishly to get mine out but im gona have to push harder after seeing your gargantuan efforts.

Just because it is abnormally large doesn't mean it's good. I don't plan on building up false hopes. I just hope you like what SK and I have done...

Little update. Nothing too big, at least as far as creation goes, but it is good news.

Last night SK and I set in stone the last bit of the game. We know exactly what we are going to do for the rest of the game. There's only 1 town left and the final dungeons (and whatever optional stuff we are going to do). That'll probably knock up the percentage near 75%... but seeing as this isn't going very quickly, I've decided to just fore-go the progression bar in the sig. If we make a massive amount of progress, I might as well just make a video update and post it. So yeah. I'll just throw my old sick back up in there and that'll be that.

Also, I did a little trimming around the studio and deleted a few threads that don't contribute to the studio or information about the game, its self.

Anyways, the light at the end of the tunnel is getting brighter.

by the time i get to the end of the tunnel it will be god there and not soe. get that damn game out already.

lol, if I try to push SK any faster he'll just stop working out of spite. I'm going to have to be happy with the pace we've got.

So, it's been a while... and I don't really have much to show for it. But I have been messing around with RPG Maker never the less. I put up a pretty crappy demo for custom menus involving the majority of the sound options within RPG Maker.... but I have been doing some Arc Arath work. I've went back and detailed a few custom sprites we are using, specially the final boss one. Also, I've almost completely overhauled the offline site. At least in the data pane. Kajak gave me some constructive criticism, and now I believe it's looking much better. Also, I got some ascii art itch going, so I fixed up the walkthrough a bit. It used to have just one world... but seeing as the game involves two, I went in and added a second one and tried to detail them a bit better. Here's what I've got:



That's how it'll look in browser. If you just open it up in notepad... it looks much more squished. And it's REALLY kind of hard to compensate for that while you are making it.

But anyways... SK is getting a good bit of work done. He offered to hand it back over to me the other day, but it was only mid-way through a rather lengthy scene. But I would feel better being able to work and finish off the entire scene instead of having to stop in the middle and not finish it for a good while. Hopefully, I'll have enough content that's video worthy in a while.

I just turned over a good deal of info back over to SK. Actually, that screenshot of the walkthrough a post above this one? Scratch that, I changed it again. I used a few different characters in the two world pictures and changed the large 'Secret of Everyone' text to say "Arc Arath" instead.

I went though and playtested everything we had real quick and fixed a few details on a number of cards. I then went over the dialog for the next part and made the appropriate scene.

If you've actually been keeping up with this project, then you know that we are litterally re-making my first botched attempt at RPG Maker 1. And it's about as different as Final Fantasy 3 is to Final Fantasy 3 DS. I bring this up because we are now at a part in the game were I need to re-make a puzzle. In the original game, we went to a cave. In the cave was a pendant. For unexplained reasons (yay plot convieniance) the screen blacks out, and you see only yourself. You can now move in one of for directions to try and guess exactly where the pendant is. If you are wrong, you are booted out of the dungeon to try again.

I don't much care for this, and wanted to do it much better. So I did.

The pendant, this time, has a bit of storyline behind it. And for the sake of keeping this post as short as possible... it contains malevolent powers. This time, when you enter the dungeon, there are two floors. You enter on the upper one. The upper floor is riddled with holes. There is also a staircase at the far end. If you go down it, you can see 6 different pedistals. One of which will have the pendant on it. You can't reach it from down here. As to which pedistal it's on, I wouldn't even know... it's random. All the other pedistals have a bed of spikes on them. So back on the first floor, you have to fall into the right hole. If you fall in the wrong one, you will either land on the ground bellow, or on a pedistal of spikes. Also, landing in a wrong hole will make the pendant randomly move again. But you can always see where it is from the bottom floor.

The problem with this is that it's actually rather easy to solve, even if you don't pay attention where the pendant is. But it sure took a LOT of effort getting it running propperly. Not only did it require a good bit of switch work, but all the animation work too. I didn't just use move locations when you stepped on a hole... actually it went a little like this:

Step on hole:

Gather party members
Party display: Dissapear
falling sound effect
turn on switch depending if it was the right hole, wrong hole leading to spikes, or a hole that led to just the ground. If it wasn't the right hole, have a two way choice with 50% that leads to two 3 way choices at 33% turning on randomly one of the 6 possible switches to make the pendant move)
Wait half a second, lest having the party dissapear wouldn't really look like they actually 'fell' in the hole.
Move location (and actually, move location three spaces over the area you want the party to land).

Intro event on the bottom floor:
Party display: default
Party status: Paralize
take over to an event that was determined by which switch was on from the previous event.

Right hole:
Move party down three spaces (because they are paralized, they won't step when they fall).
Cure party of paralize
Get item, and all that jazz
turn off switch that causes intro even to take off.

Wrong hole:
Move party down three spaces (because they are paralized, they won't step when they fall).
Cure party of paralize
flash screen
painful sound effect
deduce hp for landing on spikes.
turn off switch that causes intro even to take off.

Hole that leads to nothing:
Move party down three spaces (because they are paralized, they won't step when they fall).
Cure party of paralize
turn off switch that causes intro even to take off.

And then there's the actual pedistals you land on and how you step off of them but not back on. It took a little work, but I think it feels rather genuine now. I'm actually leaving out a lot of other work that it took to get this working the way I wanted such as cleaning up the puzzle so it doesn't do anything glitchy if you mess with it AFTER getting the pendant, and the move location events from the upper floor needed a good bit of pages of work too.

And when it's all said an done, it can be solved in less than a minute. I'm glad I got this working the way I wanted and I think it works out great... but it seems like a lot of effort for not much of anything. And actually, that's what a LOT of making this game feels like (like the custom menu for changing party members). But I really don't want to do anything without doing it propperly. Even if it means the end result isn't all that extravigant or provide a good sum of game time.

I'm not really even sure what I'm trying to say. I just hope you guys like it. =/

You summed it up just perfectly. It takes a lot of time to make these games and make them work properly, but as soon as you blink, it's over in a heartbeat. Oh, the woes of being a game maker.

Anything random in RPG Maker 1 always makes me nervous, because the percentages never seem to work right.

I am still looking forward to this, even if I b*tch about how long you're taking.

Good. Gobli had a similar puzzle in its final dungeon, and it annoyed the heck out of me.

@ 1ce - The percentages work just fine. Though the only problem I would run into is that I copied and pasted some pages for similar events. If you step on a wrong hole leading to a platform, it ranomly changes to on of the 6 other platforms. What if it ended up being the one you picked? You'd land on the item and still take damage as if it were the spikes... and not be able to pick it up. So instead of deleting that percentage bracket above, I just changed the switch that corillates with the platform you are falling towards to the next one. But this means there's a thrid chance for it to move to one location out of the remaing 5. But I found that with this percentage set, the pendant ALMOST moves in predictable pattern.

But again, I don't think anyone is going to be losing so badly at this puzzle to actually need to do it that many times to even notice.

@ Dray - Really? I guess I may have not finished that game then. But I distinctly remember fighting your cat friend for who was going to be the final boss.

Also, you'd thing the creator's of the software we use would do something a bit more complex then that.