I'm looking forward to the conclusion.

Actually, he did, but...

[In mocking Zelda CD-i tone:] I won!


Let's Play "Presto's Broken Dream" Ep7 - Enter the Dracoon

Thundros is defeated. And I'd make a reference to a certain movie where a villain and his dog are frozen and broken, then thawed and merged together, if I had any idea what movie I'm thinking of.

Okay... that ending was absolutely epic. And Thutmose, your voice acting was actually pretty awesome. I'm completely astounded at the degree of effort you put into this. So... did you like pre-recording everything before doing any kind of uploading, or did you like just doing one at a time before proceeding.

Thanks. ^_^

Dray sent me a list of things to say a couple weeks back. I recorded them and sent them off along with several photos of myself. I really didn't have any idea what he was going to do with it all, but I think it turned out pretty awesome.

I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. When I did the same gag in the first episode, I felt it was awkward and out of place. Amazing what some extra acting and a soundtrack can do to improve on it. Though, the first time I played back my "young Presto" dub, I couldn't stop laughing for a good one or two minutes.

I had to do almost the whole skit with just the audio before I could move on to the imagery, so there were no visual clues I could use. And I had to take the battle them and edit it short; didn't want it to just abruptly end mid-tune. Speaking of visuals, though, there were a few subtle sight gags at the start of the skit. You notice them all?

Also, as mentioned at the end of the interview, my camera's busted, so I couldn't record it from scratch. I had to take clips from the The Spiteful Dead interview and dub over them. It turned out better than expected, as there are several points where the motions and lips sync into what I'm saying. Granted, that was by luck rather than effort.

Actually, what I mean is do you prefer to play a whole game and have the LP complete before you upload it (Spiteful Dead)? Or did you like how you uploaded a video before making the next (Presto's Broken Dream).

Having the entire LP complete before airing makes things easier, as all I'd have to worry about is remember to upload each LPisode. But doing recording and airing one or two at a time allows me to react to anything the game creator mentions, like if something I missed needed pointed out. Which I prefer, I dunno. I sorta failed to keep ahead of the editing with The Spiteful Dead, or else there wouldn't have been so many delays with it.

I rather wanted to keep this a secret from you until I actually released it, Miss 2. But I'm bad at keeping trivial secrets.


Let's Play a Demo: "Sword of Vengeance" - First Half

It's filler time! And what better way to provide filler than to play a demo? Today, we find out why it doesn't pay to be a barmaid.



Interested in the game you see? Just click [HERE] to download it.

Honestly, I really have a hard time watching any LP were someone voice acts the entire game. It's not you, it's just the idea in general. Everyone knows how to read, you know?

Blame the Spiteful Dead LP for me wanting to read the dialogue out loud. All those lengthy cutscenes where I remained majorly silent... might as well not have even been an LP.

It's arguable that reading the dialog isn't any better than staying silent. LP's are for the commentary, not so much for voice acting.

Glad you enjoyed the demo. I just hit a point with the story where I couldn't figure out what to do with it.

I know how that is. I can't progress on Slayers' Reign for the same reason. Maybe someday an idea or two might come to us.

It's too bad this game's been cancelled. This would've been MUCH better than Untamed Madness.


Let's Play a Demo: "Sword of Vengeance" - Second Half

Our heroine has been captured by the Seekers, and must now escape their fortress. But when the Avengers show up and make things worse, she can only wonder: Who she can trust?



Interested in the game you see? Just click [HERE] to download it.

Okay, you have to tell me about how you made that animation in Anime Maker.

Creating the animation in Anime Maker wasn't easy. First off, it was necessary to save often. Because apparently the PS1 wasn't made to remember so much at once, and occasionally rewinding would result in the timings going off. But this seemed to only be an issue when I did a bunch of stuff without saving (namely after I loaded and animated that fourth character).

I had to edit some animations: the squirrel ducking and sighing, the first fox reaching for the squirrel and getting pushed into the ground, and the last fox needed to duck and cover when the squirrel jumped on it. I also had to change the foxes' HP level from 5 to 1 (max is 99, in case you're curious), and made sure that they played a different "death" animation depending on what direction they were facing. I should've double-checked the animations. The fox's tails were cut off in their jumping animation, and I only thought to fix their left-jump. I might fix it for a later demo LP.

After fixing up the sprite animations, I loaded up the demo, chose the background, and chose the music (of which Anime Maker doesn't give many choices). Load the squirrel sprite offscreen, have him run and jump onto the log. Rewind. Load the first fox offscreen, chase after the squirrel, and jump a couple times, rewind and repeat with the other two foxes. Rewind. Play up to the point where the foxes start jumping at the squirrel, choose to re-edit the squirrel's animations from that point, and have the squrrel duck, and then sigh. Rewind, and so on and so forth.

It was a very step-by-step process. It was especially tricky getting the jumps right with the foxes. Their hitboxes were fairly large, so I couldn't have them leaping too close to each other, or else they'd land on each other and knock each other out. And having that squirrel land on their heads without hitting multiple heads at once took multiple tries. I had wanted the squirrel to bounce off that last fox straight onto the ladder, but it took so many tries to even get that far, I settled for landing at the bottom of the ladder.

Anime Maker is very much lacking in key tags. It'll remember the key points where animations are done, but there's no visual display to show when the timings occur, which is a shame, because I would've liked to have shifted the timings a little. You have to be especially careful, as hitting a character that's in its animation will throw it off, which is why doing each movement phase step-by-step was so necessary.

It does at least help that Anime Maker provides a timer so you can at least get a general idea when things happen. It also helps that the timer allows you to skip to the start, speed up/rewind super-fast, and go forward/rewind frame by frame. And that last one is what I used to create the text, as I wanted the text to change at specific frames. Anime Maker doesn't have typewriter text; instead, the whole text box is displayed at once. So in order to get the typewriter effect, I had to create an entirely new text box with one additional letter each time:
L
LE
LET
LET'
LET'S
etc.

FYI, demos play at 30 frames per second.

That's pretty much the gist of it. I had wanted to record the entire process, but it's a good thing I didn't. This took a few hours to make, overall. Discovering that I had to re-start from scratch because I did four characters without saving and the timings messed up didn't help. (At that point I didn't take chances, and saved after every change.)

Though it's not super-powerful, Anime Maker's demo feature is pretty good for what it is: a special extra created specifically for creating animations in a time when programs such as Adobe Flash weren't widely available. Sometime I'd like to make a video on how it's used. It wouldn't necessarily be a let's play, so much as a demonstrational video.

Let's Play a Demo: "Terrin's Hunt" - First Half

How do you create a monster-catching game on RPG Maker 1? orius has an idea.



Interested in the game you see? Just click [HERE] to download it.

Let's Play a Demo: "Terrin's Hunt" - Second Half

Draygone figures out the inner workings of this game, kicks tail in the arena, and kills an ELF.



Interested in the game you see? Just click [HERE] to download it.
(RPG Maker for PS1 required.)

It's on the Mag now:

http://www.rpgmmag.com/game_display.php?id=220