ive been working all week on developing the 4th card. unlike all of the other cards this one requires that i build nearly every single environment from nothing as its a futuristic setting. though i had thought this task would be very hard to do, i find that i am creatively finding solutions and i have already made a great deal of the dungeons.

as this is a new system card and i plan to use another new system card for card 5, i am sparing no expense to the dungeons here. where using 5k memory per dungeon would be unspeakable in a normal card, i am spending around 3k-5k per dungeon section. to use this much data means the maps are huge and packed with stuff.

this card is centred around the 3 soldiers from the previous cards. at the end of card 3 they find themselves on a floating man made island on the day before the fall of humanity. this place is special because its where the Go Live is being held, the party before the activation of Deus X. this is the most advanced city in the world, and its also the first to fall.

one of the largest problems with this plot arc was that it was too great a suspension of disbelief to have a time traveller end up in a new area thats very advanced and to have them cope with their surroundings and have others accept them as nothing special. to make this more palatable i have explained this though a few ways. the soldiers are from a time that isnt very far from the present day, perhaps as little as the year 2000, 100 years before this time. another is that the island is holding a festive party so a ship caring some prehistory relics are not too out of place and people will think they are just part of the entertainment. also our soldiers, if you took the gold, they gave you a scene later that tells you that they have experience with time warping so something like this is not so far out of reality as to make it unbelievable. they are awkward but are able to function with some degree to move the plot forward.

going into this card i had absolutely no clue how the plot was going to unfold. i knew that there had to be a very large scene where you saw the activation of Deus as it ties in with Xiko's plot piece in the 3rd card, but beyond that i didnt know what to do. now ive got a pseudo plot worked out.

your party arrives at the docks and checks out the festivities. they acclimatize themselves to whats going on. you meet terr who informs you that this place isnt how it appears, that there is a whole other world below the city where the misfits of society are shoved and where the poor reside. this is a city of tremendous progress but also one of exclusion. your party gets roped into a plot to sabatoge the Go Live event. however things dont go quite as planned as Deus activates. the world is plunged into chaos as technology grinds to a halt.

the themes im trying to get across is one of overindulgence, profound arrogance, and exclusion. i capture this with very large maps, large buildings with tons of details and everything bright on the surface of the city. the world underneath is the opposite; very gritty, hodgepodge of places and stuff, and clustered.

what i really do not want to do is make a ff7 knock off. i dont want this to be like avalanche, or the world below to be another midgar style underworld. i want the people below to be very much repressed from normal society yet still functioning as their own world, perhaps even thinking they are part of normal society. i want this resistance group to be fringe even within their own community of the underworld, a supported element of only the most extreme. the topside people need to be almost brainwashed into believing their privileged positions, ambivalent to the tucked away society below; like our own world is to poorer peoples. the government institutions are excessive and over the top, as is the corporations that controls them. its quite clear who is the leader with such overt displays of wealth and privilege.

i think things will become much more clear when i finish the map sets and get to creating events themselves. im really giving it a good go here for map creation. its so hard to come up with enough store ideas and to creatively use different map pieces to come up with something believable.


has anyone played my game yet? i really want to hear some feedback. its worth playing, just make sure you download the newest one in my signature.



i have a lot of sprites that i need to make, but not as many as i first thought. one of the big ones i needed was a barricade for the roadway to keep my party from wandering the entire city. i am already making an idiotic amount of places to visit and interact with, there is no point making it redundant any more then it could end up as i run out of shop ideas. this little sprite works both horizontal and vertical. the lights flash one at a time.



this little sprite here is one i put a lot of work into. i took the basic cop sprite and decided that i didnt like the hat, feeling too round and silly. i wanted a New York style police hat with the 3 points and curvatures but i found it impossible to clearly define with the pallet choice. i instead settled for a more traditional top extended brim like our own Canadian police. i also added the red arm decorations so that both arms would match.

just updating everyone on my progress so far.

admittedly since i received my deus ex human revolution game from amazon i havnt touched rpg maker. its been a few days since i beat the game and now im looking to get back into it.

ive been thinking this whole time of where this chapter is going to go and i think ive developed a framework for the card.

what ive decided is that these 3 soldiers will be the catalysts for the rest of the story. the decisions you make on this card will have major ramifications on the rest of the game! a great deal of your time on this card will be about choice, choosing the path that you want to take with these characters.

if you dont want to participate in the attack against black lotus then you dont have to. you will still experience the key elements of the attack as its integral to the plot but you will not participate in it the attack and instead experience the fall of humanity itself.

at the end of this card the 3 soldiers will be split up and be sent into various time periods. depending on what your choices were, the characters will form the heads of key organizations that you will encounter for the rest of the game.

this card will also be heavily story dependant and thus will be filled with auxiliary ways to learn about the time period, both present and past. as such the card almost certainly will be split into two scenarios, especially with the massive decisions that will change how things are now and later. if i made any battles in this it will be few and the experience will go towards characters that you have not received yet so its not wasted.

the hardest choice i have to make right now is the feel i want for this card. after playing games like deus ex ive now come to realize that deus hammers some of the very principles i want to foster in my game. yet at the same time i do not want this to be a deus like game, i want it to be very different.

i have to make sure my game stays true to my vision and to the medium. much of the game is set in medieval so i do not want the futuristic stuff to overpower everything else by a large margin.

these are the features of my future:

-society is on the edge of technological advances in cybernetics and nanotechnology.
-full scale human cyborgs never make it to the market, making xiko close to unique.
-machine technologies like the replicator are still expensive and out of reach of most families.
-machine vs humanity isnt as big an issue as humanity vs itself
-technology is powerful, but it cant create miracles. no massive changes in ideology like electric cars, nor solutions to problems like density, pollution, poor, ect.
-there is a unified world government but their is still countries that largely govern their own people and cities.
-corporations have all the power, they buy influence to change policies and warp morality for their own ends.
-the internet is an integral part of society, connecting every aspect of life.
-ritualistic habits cant be replaced by machines. augmented but not fully machine or even close to it.
-humanity likes to build and show off its creations. the island of black lotus is one such technological marvel.
-shops still exist, though the online markets make up much of the market share.


some of the other noteworthy things is the cities poor which make up the largest segment of society. though in every other city they are out in the open and readily apparent (besides in the districts of the rich), in lotus they are hidden from view in the bowls of the island. the island is a pure corporate structure and they want to project a nice image so poorness is simply swept away out of notice.

there is just so much that needs to be present in this card that its almost overwhelming. i want this to be a very good representation of a futuristic city but believable and also within the confines of rpg maker.



lastly here is a new sprite i made a few weeks ago. i really liked the green pallet i made for it but im not sure if it goes with the look i want. i completely redrew the head and helmet and had to tinker with the body as well. i used the alien/space man sprite as my starting point.